History of the World Christian Movement by Dale T. Irvin, Scott W. Sunquist, and: Faith and Order in the U.S.A.: A Brief History of Studies and Relationships by William A. Norgren (review)

Norgren provides a remarkably short and informative booklet on the origins and development of Faith and Order in North America (F&O, U.S.A.) by the first executive director of the National Council of Churches’ Commission on Faith and Order, and not found in The Faith and Order Commission Handbook (National Council of the Churches of Christ U.S.A., 2005). In three chapters, he registers the accomplishments and trajectories of F&O, U.S.A., with the corresponding world-level initiatives of the World Council of Churches (WCC) as its backdrop. He locates historic and mainline Protestant churches’ growth toward ecumenism, union, and mutual recognition between churches in American and Europe. Though I did not expect a carefully accounted progress of ecumenicity in Congregationalist ecclesial communions such as Quakers, Brethren, Mennonites, Evangelicals, Pentecostals, Holiness, and Adventist churches in periods when these groups have not yet appeared on ecumenical radar screens, I was pleasantly surprised that the book discusses nondenominational Protestant agencies, the Roman Catholic Church’s ecumenical contributions, and Orthodox ecumenical participation. It did, as I anticipated, review some of the Faith and Order (both WCC and National levels) and WCC’s milestone-efforts in combating racism, ethnic discrimination, and sociopolitical tyrannies, even as this ecumenical body engages theological loci, spirituality, gender, sexuality, bioethics, justice, peacekeeping, ecology, religious pluralism, and Muslim-Christian and Jewish-Christian relations. The appendix on a 1969 finding of the National Faith and Order Colloquium on “Salvation and Life” conceptions between communions remains helpful as ecumenical officers build on recent decades of development, including Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry (WCC, 1982), The Church (WCC, 2013), convergences on justification between communions, and From Conflict to Communion (LWF-PCPCU, 2013).

The Irvin and Sunquist volume is a sequel to a groundbreaking history (Orbis, 2001; 8th repr., 2007). Together, both volumes differ from the multi-authored A World History of Christianity edited by Adrian Hastings (Eerdmans, 1999). Irvin, president and professor at New York Theological Seminary, and Sunquist, dean for intercultural studies at Fuller Theological Seminary, are ordained ministers in American Baptist Churches U.S.A. and Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) respectively. The text contains six chapters in Part I’s major transformations in 1454–1600, seven chapters in Part II’s global religious and secular encounters of the seventeenth century, and six chapters in Part III’s independence, liberation, and awakenings of the eighteenth century. Here is finally a volume on global Christian history, covering Africa, America (North America, the Caribbean, and South America), Asia (Eastern Asia, South Asia), and Europe, which engages topics of church reforms and renewal (Catholics, Protestants, Congregationalists), and denominationalism, empire, enlightenment, and politics in the period 1454–1800. The authors acknowledge that their undertakings could not be possible without support from innumerable local and international colleagues they have consulted for over a decade.