The Ecumenical Journey

Perhaps this text gives us clues about the way forward. Be open to the presence of Jesus with us as we walk. (Don’t be too hasty to see only his absence in the signs of the times.) Be willing to be transformed through deeper understanding of scripture, especially as it is interpreted through a frame of reference not our own. Be ready to welcome the stranger and those we think of as strange. And, of course, never stop longing for the day when we see Christ together in the breaking of bread.

The disciples, faced with a crisis, are separating themselves from their community (a typical human reaction). But Christ’s presence changes them. His resurrection is, in a sense, made concrete in the disciples who, as the passage puts it, “rise up” and return to Jerusalem where they bear witness to what they have seen–and community is restored.

This cannot be stressed too much: Christianity is inherently communal! To know Jesus is to walk in conversation with others who also know him. Such community is not once for all, it is always being recreated–which is why the ecumenical movement is an ongoing journey, never linear, full of twists and turns and setbacks. No one said this would be easy! But know this: For centuries, the parts of the church were walking away from one another. Today, we are at least seeking ways to converge. And for that, let us say with one voice, “Thanks be to God.”

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I hope this quick look at the Emmaus story has given some inspiration. Still, I suspect we can agree that it was easier to be an ecumenically-minded Christian fifty years ago than it is today! This has been underscored for me in recent weeks as I finished work on a new book, research for which included re-reading the reports from two famous ecumenical events–the seminal Conference on Church and Society, held in Geneva in 1966, and the WCC’s Fourth Assembly in Uppsala, Sweden two years later. The Geneva conference was the first major WCC meeting at which a majority of the participants came from countries outside Europe and North America, a sign of the world-changing independence struggles of that era. This was, of course, a time of tremendous social turmoil in the west as well, and so it is not surprising that Geneva ’66 was the first ecumenical conference to speak positively of the possibility of revolutionary change. And all of these themes received attention at the assembly in Uppsala.

What strikes me most forcefully, however, is the optimism of the reports from these two events, an optimism that stands in stark contrast to the mood of our own era. For example, the participants in Geneva a half century ago clearly assumed that economic development was a tide that would lift all boats in the harbor–that economic growth, instead of resulting in the obscene disparity in wealth so evident today, would truly benefit the poor. There was talk of revolution against political systems that inhibit such growth, but little sense of how entrenched economic interests actually are.

The report from Geneva ’66 also shows great faith that technological progress would contribute to human betterment. This confidence was still evident at the assembly two years later in Uppsala which spoke, for example, of “new advances in agriculture [that] hold the promise of freedom from hunger.” Both meetings show little awareness of the ambiguity of technological achievement, and no awareness of what the Club of Rome, just five years after Uppsala, would call the “limits of growth.” Nature was still regarded as a stage for the drama of human redemption, not as the threatened ecosystem we now know it to be.

Violence was seen in Geneva and Uppsala as an option, albeit of last resort, that could be used in a limited way to promote social transformation in places such as southern Africa. There was apparently little recognition, so clear to many in the present generation, that violence is inevitably co-opted, that it has a dynamic of its own and is seldom, if ever, limited to its intended purpose.

And there was great optimism at Uppsala, and throughout that decade, in the possibility of real advance toward the visible unity of the church. Church to church dialogues and locally united churches were springing up around the world–in places like India, Zambia, and Jamaica–along with dialogues like the Consultation on Church Union. The 1968 assembly, coming on the heels of Vatican II, was the first to have official Roman Catholic participation, and one Catholic speaker raised the possibility of his church joining the WCC. The report from that assembly oozes ecclesial confidence. For example, “The church is bold in speaking of itself as the sign of the coming unity of [hu]mankind”–a statement so aggressively optimistic that it sounds pretentious to our ears. Today we have a library full of theological agreements dealing with Reformation- era disputes, even as we watch churches continue to act as competitors in a predatory scramble to win new members and to fragment over new issues. And we watch as councils of churches from Indiana to India struggle to keep the doors open in the face of reduced funding and decreased church commitment. Just as Geneva and Uppsala had little sense of how entrenched economic interests are, so they did not predict how entrenched ecclesial interests would continue to be.

I do not mean to suggest that ecumenism has simply gone downhill since 1968! There have been numerous developments that all of us, I trust, regard as positive. At neither Geneva nor Uppsala did women have major leadership roles. Interfaith relations and environmental protection hardly figured in either agenda. Major ecumenical agreements on issues from sacraments to nuclear weapons, from the doctrine of justification to religious pluralism, were still to come. But the point I am trying to make has to do with a marked change in tone. “We know,” declares the Geneva report, “that God appears to have set no limits to what may be achieved by our generation, if we understand our own problems right and desire to obey in our circumstances.” Such statements truly sound like something from another century!