The NSW Ecumenical Council is a means by which its member churches seek to celebrate and to manifest their unity.
To this end, the Council:
- provides a forum in which the churches may grow together in their understanding and proclamation of the Gospel;
- provides appropriate opportunities for churches to explore theological and ecclesiological issues, and to come to a deeper understanding of each other and grow towards a richer convergence with each other;
- provides the means for considering and developing more inclusive models of community and ministry, especially reflecting on the role of women in our churches;
- provide resources designed to facilitate such theological reflection in local contexts;
- provide appropriate opportunities to explore theological and ecclesiological issues relating to other faiths. The Council also provides a range of resources to assist. These include the Proclamation for the Practice of Pulpit Exchange.
This Commission provides opportunities for the Council to reflect on issues related to the theological, biblical and historical basis of ecumenism and recommend contemporary ways in which these foundations can be used for building structures through which the churches can achieve the goal of Christian unity. An excellent example of the stimulus which can be provided is the study of a recent paper by the Revd Dr Michael Kinnamon on Conciliar Ecumenism Today, which the Theological Reflection Commission began at its meeting in November 2012.
Kinnamon first addresses the Theological Foundation of Ecumenism, and writes:
“Before talking specifically about councils, we should acknowledge the broader theological context. Three convictions seem particularly significant, and may be sufficient to stimulate our conversation.
- The Chief Actor in the ecumenical movement is the creator God, incarnate in Jesus Christ, and present through the Holy Spirit. Whenever the movement “moves,” it is not our achievement that we celebrate, but God’s grace and power for which we give thanks.
- God’s purpose (mission) is the wholeness, the shalom, of all creation; and God has called forth the church, the communion of Christ’s disciples, to be a sign, instrument, and foretaste of this divine mission. It follows that the ecumenical movement is ultimately concerned with the wholeness of the world and penultimately concerned with the wholeness of the church. (This reordering of the sequence of priorities [God-world-church, rather than God-church-world] represents a significant shift in ecumenical theology over the past forty years.)
- Unity is a key mark of the church, a characteristic that is crucial to its participation in God’s mission. The church’s unity, consistent with the first point (above), is not our achievement. In the words of the Toronto Statement, the churches which confess Jesus Christ as incarnate Lord “do not have to create their unity; it is a gift of God. But they know that it is their duty to make common cause in the search for the expression of that unity in work and life.” The task of the ecumenical movement, therefore, is to address divisions of human making in order that God’s gift of reconciled community may be visible to the world, to be the setting for the churches to become what they are, the one body of Christ, in order that together they may witness to God’s will for righteousness and peace throughout creation.
He then poses some warnings about inadvisable assumptions about ecumenical councils:
- An overemphasis on councils as “churches together” runs the risk of diminishing their potential for prophetic, pioneering witness. A council is both a fellowship of the churches and a distinctive, structured organization, both a community of the churches and an instrument of the ecumenical movement. As such, said Lukas Vischer at the 1971 consultation, a council should be “a thorn in the flesh of the churches,” prodding them to go beyond what they initially see as their agenda. But the challenge (the thorn) will likely be resisted unless the churches recognize that it comes, ultimately, from the mutual commitments they have made.
- An overemphasis on the unity agenda runs the risk of diminishing the integrative, multi-dimensional character of councils of churches. Councils, unlike church union dialogues or single-issue coalitions, are the place where all of the streams of the movement–justice, service, mission, worship, education, as well as church unity–find expression and are brought into relation with one another. To say it another way, unity is central to the agenda of councils so long as we recognise that the churches are divided not only by the traditional themes of Faith and Order (e.g., sacraments, ministry, and authority) but also by racism, violence, poverty, and such questions as to how Christians best witness to Christ in an interfaith world.
Issues such as these are considered at Commission meetings, and regular reports given to the Ecumenical Council and it’s Executive. A current project of the Commission is related to Reflective Ecumenism.