The Church: Towards a Common Vision

Part I. Toward Theological Convergence

A. Introduction: North American Contexts

My thanks to Professor Mitzi Budde for her invitation to present The Church: Towards a Common Vision (TCTCV).¹ Presenting this particular text to a Canadian and American² audience is especially important for me, because what I present here is the culmination of what I left Canada to do seven years ago. My sense of Canadian—if not North American—identity has been shaped by being out of this context in this time.

As a Canadian at the World Council of Churches (WCC), I am constantly caught off guard by assumptions from my own context that call me to step back, to be mindful of the diverse ecumenical contexts from which we all come, and to name some ways that our particular region might be ahead of other parts of the world and have something to share,³ as well as other ways in which we might lag behind and have something to receive.⁴

Both Canada and the United States have their particular histories of living ecumenically, going back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Great Awakenings are an American phenomenon. The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, with its clear distinction between church and state, cannot be reduced to Enlightenment ideology. It was an American way of dealing with the colonial experience of divided churches by ensuring that no one church is “established,” leaving the others as disadvantaged “dissenters.”⁵ In Canada, the granting of religious liberties to Roman Catholics in the 1770’s⁶ was not recognized in Great Britain for another seventy years.

This is not the place to rehearse the background of North American ecumenical contexts. I would simply like to underscore that our histories and our particular ecumenical struggles and achievements are different from the European experience of living with a divided Christianity, and they are distinct from other colonial and post-colonial experiences of Christian disunity, not to mention Middle Eastern, Slavic, and other contexts, which are even more diverse. The experiences of estranged churches in North America are different, depending on which side of the border one lives, and they differ in various regions of both countries.

B. Introduction to Faith and Order

Before I begin any presentation on the work of Faith and Order, I have found it worthwhile to explain the very language of “faith and order,” which can easily be misunderstood, especially in English-speaking contexts, particularly in North America, and even among the most ecumenically minded. I note that the Canadian Council of Churches’ Faith and Order Commission became the “Faith and Witness Commission.” The words “Director of Faith and Order” and “Commission on Faith and Order” for many people conjure up visions of theology police. At the end of 2007, when I left Saint Paul University, a pontifical university, a colleague asked me in all seriousness whether I was going to be the “new Cardinal Ratzinger of the WCC”! Faith and Order is something entirely different. It is not the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for the WCC; our Roman Catholic equivalent and major partner is the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.

Since the goal of the ecumenical movement is to recover the visible unity of Christ’s one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, there needs to be a space to discuss the issues that divided Christians and keep us apart. That is what Faith and Order has provided for over eighty years: a forum to dialogue about divisive issues of the “faith” and the “ordering” of the churches. By “faith” I mean doctrine: what we believe about God, the Trinity, the person of Jesus Christ, the Bible, salvation, the sacraments, ministries, or the nature of the church. By “order” I mean the structure of the church. How are churches ordered or organized? Is it the local congregation served by its minister of word and sacrament? Or, is it a diocese with a bishop? What is the relationship between and among the...