Panel Presentation on The Church : Towards a Common Vision

Abstract

The Church: Towards a Common Vision (TCTCV) (1) is the result of a very long process of study conducted by the World Council of Churches (WCC) and its Commission on Faith and Order. Two primary and several other important documents lie in its background. The first is Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry, completed and sent to the churches for comment and reception in 1982. (2) It was an exciting convergence document that made a substantive contribution to the mutual recognition given especially to baptism by many churches around the world. While the sections on eucharist and even more so on ministry were more problematic than was baptism, they also pointed to new possibilities that were embraced by many denominations, especially within the Protestant world. The second document that helped to set the stage for the study of the church was the Faith and Order report, Towards Koinonia in Faith, Life, and Witness: A Discussion Paper, which was prepared for the Fifth World Conference on Faith and Order in Santiago de Campostela, Spain, in 1993. (3) It brought together the latest thinking on koinonia that was found in two other studies that had recently been completed by Faith and Order: Church and World: The Unity of the Church and the Renewal of Human Community, (4) and Confessing the One Faith: An Ecumenical Explication of the Apostolic Faith as It Is Confessed in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (381). (5) The Fifth World Conference on Faith and Order was called, in particular, so that the churches might take stock of all that had been achieved to date through ecumenical dialogue. It was a way to mine the previous thirty years of work done by Faith and Order, as well as the growing number of bilateral dialogues. Also, it came just over three years after the massive changes that came with the overthrow of so many Communist governments in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the movement of many Western preachers, revivalists, evangelists, and mission agencies into these regions that were previously unreachable by Western Christians. This conference, then, was intended to take stock of where the churches stood and, further, to point to future directions for the WCC and especially for the work of Faith and Order. (6) In such a context, it should come as no surprise to realize that topics such as koinonia, renewal, evangelism, proselytism, religious freedom, interreligious dialogue, and moral and ethical issues (including care for the environment) would all surface at this Fifth World Conference. While delegates were divided into four groups, it quickly became clear that one of the important issues facing Faith and Order and recognized by all four groups was that ecclesiology was a subject much in need of study in such a way as to take into consideration all the Faith and Order studies that had led to the current discussion on koinonia. As a result, the Fifth World Conference did just that. (7) The Conference noted that the Commission on Faith and Order had completed sufficient study on issues that might have relevance to a new study of the church. Its work could be used as one possible resource, but others would be drawn from other aspects of the work of the WCC and from various bilateral agreements that were beginning to emerge on the issue of ecclesiology. It was believed that the experiences of the united and uniting churches in various parts of the world might open up new ways of thinking about the church, to say nothing of what might be learned from the various churches emerging around the globe in regions that were relatively new to Christianity, namely, the global South. The hope was that an ecclesiological statement that recognized both unity and diversity in this gift from God might be a useful tool for demonstrating the essential unity of all Christians everywhere. (8) A committee was established, and the work began. What resulted was The Nature and Purpose of the Church, completed in 1998. …