Slow Path to Christian Unity

THE SLOW PATH TOWARDS CHIRISTIAN UNITY

(Preached at St. Mary's, North Mymms 21/1/96 and other services)

I was born into a nominal Anglican Church family. Through the influence of my infant teachers I was brought up within the Anglican Church of St. Matthew, Ipswich where I was a choir boy, and later a server.

Every Sunday on my way to church, I would walk past a Presbyterian Church, a Baptist Chapel and a Congregational Church. On Sunday afternoons I would peer out of the front room window at the Salvation Army band as it played in the road. My doctor was a former Methodist Missionary in the Sudan. Whilst I was aware of some strange people who only ate fish on a Friday, called Roman Catholics, I never took much notice of them since they were a minority church with only one place of worship in the town.

Whilst I was aware of the existence of these other Christian traditions, I was not particularly interested in them because I was an Anglican. At best I regarded them with a certain degree of suspicion.

However, all this was to change in 1956, when I found myself involved with the founding of the Junior Ipswich Ecumenical Movement. How this came about I cannot now recall, but I strongly suspect that an attractive young lady was involved somewhere!

We met at the local Y.M.C.A.. a non-denominational body which has been instrumental in bringing churches together from different traditions over many years. We met on a monthly basis and studied the history, doctrine and practice of various Christian traditions. Slowly I began to realise that other Christians were not as strange as I had first imagined as the scales of ignorance were removed from my eyes.

Shortly after that, I started a branch of the Student Christian Movement, another non-denominational organisation,

which has been responsible for bringing together Christian students of different traditions. About 30-40 students of the Ipswich Civic College met on a weekly basis to learn from each other and apply our common Christian faith to various topical issues of the day.

For a while, I served as the youngest member of the National Executive of the SCM. This was responsible for promoting its work in the universities throughout the British Isles, commissioning authors to write books on current issues being discussed by students, and arranging national conferences which included joint worship and study. So I now found myself exposed to Christians from other traditions on a national level.

This exposure was to continue as I commenced my theological studies at Kings College, London University, where not

all the students were Anglicans. Similarly not all our lecturers were Anglicans for they included also a Presbyterian, a Congregationalist, two Methodists, a Russian Orthodox, not to mention a Jewish Rabbi.

To date, I had not been exposed to Roman Catholicism, but all this was to change when I commenced work in the city of Liverpool. Here, Anglicans were a minority, an entirely new experience for me. There was a history of much

bitterness between Protestants and Roman Catholics. The city was divided between Anti-Catholic and

Anti-Protestant. It was a negative reaction towards religion based upon ignorance, fear and suspicion which occasionally erupted into violence. I can still recall Cardinal Heenan being stoned by members of the Orange Lodge.

You can therefore imagine the shock waves my first marriage caused when the front page of the Liverpool Echo announced, above the fold of course, "Anglican curate married R.C. Nurse". We were married with a papal dispensation (though we would have got married without it), at the Anglican Church of St. Mary's, Walton, at a

ceremony which included five Anglican priests and two Roman Catholics.

Later I was to recall this incident much to the embarrassment of the Bishop of Plymouth. At the bun fight following my induction as Vicar of St. Thomas, Plymouth, the Bishop remarked how appropriate it was that the service should be taking place during the week of Prayer for Christian Unity, since the parish was one of 22 officially designated areas of ecumenical experiment by the British Council of Churches. I replied that I was strongly in favour of ecumenical experiment. In fact I had been regularly sleeping with a Roman Catholic for the past five years! Until then, everyone including the Bishop, had assumed that Anglican clergy only married fellow Anglicans.

However, the local Roman Catholic church was then not involved in the experiment though by the time I came to leave, over half the congregation present at my final Eucharist were from the Roman Catholic Church of Holy Redeemer.

Over the previous three years I had been involved with the ministry towards seafarers where the luxury of

denominationalism did not exist.

About fifteen years ago I became also involved in the establishment of the International Christian Maritime Association, which seeks to promote inter-confessional collaboration in the care of seafarers. I have in subsequent years been a representative at its international conferences held in the U.K., Greece and the Philippines. As a result of this organisation and the general momentum towards Christian unity, more than half the Anglican Missions to Seafarers stations throughout the world are now involved in a shared ministry.

Now you are probably wondering why I have shared this story of my life with you. There are two reasons. Firstly, all Christian churches are currently observing the Annual Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Secondly, it reveals something of the pattern of the church's growth towards Christian unity. A growth which involves various levels of contact. There are the personal, local, national and international levels with all the complexity and diversity which that must involve.

At the personal level, I think it is fair to say we are no longer indifferent to the existence of other Christian traditions. They matter. The former barriers have gradually been removed by exposure to other Christian traditions, though the inherent Anglo Saxon suspicion of the Roman Catholic church, still often persists. We now accept the validity of other people's Christian experience and have come to see that the Christian church is much greater than that of our own

particular tradition though the Roman Catholic Church has yet to change.

Also at the local level, we have recognised the desirability of having some form of organisational structure whereby Christians from other traditions are enabled to come together for worship, service and witness. For many years these were called "Council of Churches" but a few years ago they were renamed "Churches Together" in order to be able to include the Roman Catholic Church which had previously been only an observer.

Also on the local level the former exploratory "areas of ecumenical experiment" have been superseded by the more permanent "Local Ecumenical Projects" commonly known as LEPs, particularly in new housing areas. In these, the congregations of more than one tradition share a common building.

Yet, despite these tremendous advances towards Christian unity on the personal and local level, I know that many people feet that the ecumenical movement appears to have run out of steam. But this is to forget that the search for Christian unity must also be pursued at the national and international level, if the Christian church is not finish up more divided than it is at present. The increasing goodwill needs to be expressed through some structural organisation.

This work is, regrettably, less visible to the person in the pew, and slower than that on the personal and local level, because of its complexity and diversity. Whilst one seeks unity on a national level, one must also be aware of the international consequences for member churches elsewhere. This was experienced particularly by the Church of South India over fifty years ago when various traditions came together to form a single church.

Similarly, the easy relationships often established through bilateral conversations on a national level and international level can often be stretched when it comes to multilateral conversations involving more than just one other Christian tradition.

Today, more than thirty different churches in the British Isles are engaged in some form of conversation in the search for unity. Whilst this awakening of a wider constituency is to be welcomed, it has also slowed down the process in

order to enable newcomers to catch up with those who have been involved in ecumenical movement for some time.

However, the major cause of the ship of ecumenism slowing down in recent times has been to allow a significant new passenger to come on board. I refer of course to the Roman Catholic church.

Following upon the Second Vatican Council in the early sixties, there has been a gradual change of attitude within the Roman Catholic church towards those of other churches, Whereas they previously perceived the unity in terms of an enlarged Roman Catholic church, and some still do today, in much the same way as the Orthodox churches still do, they are now beginning to recognise the validity of the experience of others within the body of Christ.

As a result, the Roman Catholic church has now become a participating member at the local level at the Churches Together which probably accounts for their current enthusiasm.

On the international level, the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches have been involved in a variety of theological discussions and have produced three ARCIC reports on Baptism, the Eucharist and Ministry. In these, both churches have been forced to go back to the roots of Christianity and scripture, tradition and experience only to discover that they share much more than they first imagined. This theological convergence is to be welcomed, but it all takes a lot of time.

As a result of the Roman Catholic Church's participation in recent times, the whole shape of the ecumenical movement is being slowly changed. It is no longer a predominantly Protestant movement of the spirit. It now represents the whole of Christendom - not just the Orthodox and Protestant churches - but also the Roman Catholic Church.

So the good news is that the prayer does actually work, albeit not as fast as some would like. Our Lord's prayer on the eve of his betrayal that the church should be one, which is echoed in the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, is slowly becoming a reality. Although in recent years the movement of the spirit has been slowed down in order to be able to take other churches on board, and especially the Roman Catholic church, nevertheless more churches than ever are now actually involved in the search for the unity of Christ's church which is his body here on earth today.

I therefore have high hopes for the unity of Christendom. There can be no going back. We can only go forward. The pace may well be slow - after all it took the World Council of Churches sixty years to produce an agreed statement on Baptism, the Eucharist and Ministry. Slowly but surely the face of Christendom is being changed as Christians of

different traditions continue to pray for the unity which is not our will, but that of God. We are gradually allowing ourselves to be moulded like the clay in the potter's hand, into that oneness for which Christ first prayed on the night that he was betrayed.