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Friends United Meeting |
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June 1999
The World Council of Churches Assembly
A personal leading and a vision
By Eden Grace
| In December 1998 over 5,000 Christians from around the world converged on the campus of the University of Zimbabwe for the eighth Assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC). In the vast gathering, there were |
| approximately 18 Quakers, only five of whom came as official delegates with the right to speak and vote. As one of those five, I carried with me the cares and concerns of all Friends, and especially FUM Friends. Through this article and through my attendance at some of your yearly meetings this summer, I hope to share my experience with you. |
Christians Engage Global
Issues: |
A personal leading
On a personal level, the Assembly was a powerful experience which I
am still digesting. The worship was alive with the Spirit, full of exciting
music and creative liturgy. The informal conversations over meals, in
Bible Study groups, in workshops and committee meetings, and while standing
in the tea queue led to a deep sense of the rich diversity of the body
of Christ. The unity which we seek in the ecumenical movement is surely
not "sameness"-it embraces me, a young Quaker mother and seminary
student from the U.S., along with the people I came to know best: an indigenous
Taiwanese Presbyterian doing her Ph.D. in philosophy; a young Zimbabwean
man working for the Zimbabwe Council of Churches on issues of economic
justice; a Bishop of the Coptic Orthodox Church living and pastoring in
Los Angeles; a Russian woman working with the Russian Orthodox Church
doing much-needed Christian education; the head of the Reformed Church
of America; a German Mennonite professor of theology; a woman from the
Reformed Church in Zambia who works as an accountant in a government ministry;
a Pentecostal man from Macedonia who is now organizing a Christian relief
effort for the Kosovar refugees. In all this diversity, we are united
in Christ. We are united in our common position before God, as particular
individuals with unique experiences and perspectives. We cannot see through
each other's eyes, but we can try to see each other as God sees us. If
it was nothing else, the Assembly was an opportunity to step outside my
"norm" and see that I am on someone else's margin, just as they
are on the edge of my experience, but that Christ owns us all equally
as his own.
I felt God's leading for me to go to the Assembly because I knew many FUM Friends have serious concerns about the Council, and I wanted to be able to address those from direct experience rather than media reports. I expected to find in the WCC an emphasis on social justice which is divorced from commitment to the uniqueness of Christ and the mission imperative. Certainly this is what the Christian media in the U.S. accuses the Council of. I was surprised. From the first day, with the opening speeches, I heard an integration of horizontal and vertical, of concern for the world and commitment to Christ. In part, my surprise came from my failure to really understand, before arriving there, that American and European Protestants make up a small percentage of the world's Christians, and that their agendas, liberal though they may sometimes be, do not dominate the World Council. The voices I heard most strongly were those of the Orthodox and of the African and Asian churches. These churches are not heirs to the enlightenment mentality which plagues us. They live their faith incarnationally. I felt challenged to question the false division between "liberal" social action and "evangelical" mission. The Assembly sought to incarnate the unique saving message of Christ in the context of this broken and sinful world.
One of the primary ways the Assembly makes that incarnational connection is to issue public statements on matters of concern to all the world's Christians. A public statement is just one tool in the repertoire of options for Christian engagement in the world, and it is not one which FUM has been inclined to use recently. I have personally tended to see such statements as politically ineffective, while giving a false sense of accomplishment which absolves us from taking any real action. I have a different sense of the matter now. When Christians unite and make a common statement, it does carry weight. Friends may be small, but we can bring our concerns to the ecumenical table, where a common statement can become quite powerful, both in the "secular" arena and as a teaching tool in the churches. The process of uniting with other Christians and adding our voice to the public discourse is in a real way an act of incarnation.
The future of the ecumenical movement
The Assembly was a complicated and multilayered event, with many things happening simultaneously. No two people who attended will tell the same story. My story is very much shaped by my role as a member of the Programme Guidelines Committee. This Committee was charged with evaluating the program of the WCC over the last seven years, and determining priorities for the next seven. We worked in small teams assigned to particular subject areas. In reviewing the past work, I was assigned to the mission unit. While this was interesting and gave me much information to share with Friends who question the centrality of mission in the WCC, I was most deeply impacted by my part in determining future priorities.
I was assigned to the stream entitled "Moving Together,"
a phrase which meant nothing to me before I got to Harare. I was told
that this topic encompassed relationships with national councils of churches,
regional ecumenical organizations, Christian world communions, non-member
churches, and allied organizations, as well as new ecumenical methodologies
and forms of cooperation. Sounded dry to me. But what I discovered was
that, in my opinion, the real significance of the Assembly as a turning
point in the modern ecumenical movement was embodied in the "Moving
Together" stream. The WCC, and the ecumenical movement as a whole,
is indeed in the midst of a paradigm shift (as clichéd as that
phrase has become). The first Assembly of the WCC in 1948 marked the fulfillment
of the desire to unite in one central organization the various global
ecumenical initiatives which had emerged in the first half of the century.
Separate organizations devoted to issues of doctrine, of ethics, of mission,
and of Christian education were integrated into a single institution over
the first 20 years of the Council's life.
In 50 years, much has changed in the world and in the churches, and the old model of the WCC as the center of the hub or top of the pyramid simply isn't viable anymore. A document entitled "Toward a Common Understanding and Vision of the World Council of Churches" was developed in the last few years which articulates the changing world, the changing church, and the need for change in the WCC. Much of this change has to do with the way the Council sees itself, the nature of its relationships, and the way it does its work, rather than the content of the work as such. Thus it fell into the "Moving Together" stream.
Over the days of the Assembly, as I struggled with these difficult ideas, I came to feel a great sense of ownership over a new vision of the WCC. In reflecting on it afterwards, I've been using a metaphor from the computer world: "distributed architecture." The World Wide Web is the best example of distributed architecture. The Web is not a physical entity which you can point to and say "there it is." The Web only exists as the matrix of relationships between discreet entities, none of which are themselves the Web. Each entity offers its own unique content as a contribution to the whole. No one agency or organization collects the individual contributions and redistributes them according to a centralized decision-making authority.
Likewise, the ecumenical movement is the accumulation of relationships, the building of a matrix which is not identified with any one point in the matrix. Even the WCC is just a participant in the ecumenical movement, as are the Christian World Communions (e.g., Friends World Committee for Consultation) or other ecumenical allies such as the World Evangelical Fellowship. The "movement" is in the relationships, not the institutions. Each participant in the movement discerns the contribution they can make on behalf of the whole, for the sake of Christ's saving message in the world.
It strikes me that this is a very Trinitarian model. If God in God's self is a matrix of relationships between distinct persons, then a certain priority must be given to human models which stress relationships over hierarchy. It seems also that this is a model which is quite congenial to Friends. We, too, have stressed that Christ's presence is known in the gathered meeting, in the matrix of persons worshipping together. Indeed, "church" is that event of gathering and knowing, rather than an institution, building or hierarchical leadership structure. Friends should be able to understand and affirm this new paradigm of the ecumenical movement better than some other churches, and might be able to step forward in leading the way.
I was very surprised to find myself nominated to the new Central Committee of the World Council of Churches. No one on the Nominating Committee knew me personally, so I can only imagine that my fortunate demographics-female, lay and youth-made me a good choice from a statistical point of view. On the other hand, my spiritual life and ministry are rooted in the experience of God opening unexpected doors. I chose to step through this one, and so now I will serve as the only Friend on the Central Committee through the next Assembly (approximately seven years).
This gives me a unique opportunity to deepen my understanding of the ecumenical movement at this turning point, as well as to represent Friends to the best of my ability. With God's grace, I hope to bring forward the gifts which Quakers hold in trust for the whole church. At this time, some of the things I hope we might offer include: our deep commitment to peace, justice and reconciliation, in light of the new Peace Decade; our experience of unity with the will of God in our business meetings, as there is a great dissatisfaction with the parliamentary procedures of the Council; our deep testimony of the wholeness of Christian life, including witness, service, prayer and proclamation, as the ecumenical movement is threatened with a splintering of agendas; and our experience of the unity of the gathered meeting, as the churches together continue to seek models of visible unity in response to the prayer of Christ that we be one in order that the world may believe.
Eden Grace, Beacon Hill Meeting, New England Yearly Meeting (pictured here with Rev. Dian Kessler, exectutive director of the Massachusetts Council of Churches), is a member of the FUM General Board. She is a student at Episcopal Divinity School, is secretary of the Massachusetts Council of Churches, and has just been elected to serve on the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches.
Copyright (c) 1999 Friends United Meeting