3 - 1998

Visions of Ecumenism

EKD, Common Understanding and Vision

Discussion of the EKD and WCC programmeby

by Tim Kuschnerus

"Towards a common understanding and vision (CUV) of the World Council of Churches"- this imposing title stands for a process that the World Council of Churches (WCC) already started at its 1989 Central Committee Meeting in Moscow. Its main goal is to promote an understanding on the position and goal of the ecumenical movement and the WCC. The search for a common vision reminds us that the WCC was founded in 1948 to "change the reality of existing rifts and estrangement within the church".1)

To continue this process of now 50 years a so-called study guide of the same title was sent to all WCC member churches including the EKD member churches in 1993. Having received a lot of feedback, the EKD Ecumenical Commission prepared an explicit comment on this guide.

In doing so, the Ecumenical Commission voiced its criticism on the concept of visible unity. It believed this concept would put the focus on related institutional and organisational aspects, obscuring the relationships and common ground that are often revealed in the churches’ views on life.

Also, the road towards a visible unity was often mistakenly seen as a necessarily linear process, while the term koinonia was much more helpful in this context. "This concept from the New Testament expresses that the churches are a community, because they jointly participate in the One that constitutes the faith and the existence of the church. When Christians and the churches in their faith relate to the unity pre-set by Jesus Christ and promised to us in profusion, they can expect the reality of this unity to go further than our theological assumptions could ever express."2)

The CUV process gained new impact at the Central Committee Meeting in Geneva in September 1996. In that year the extent of the WCC’s financial crisis became visible. The running budget showed a great deficit. Only less than half of all member churches pay contributions to the WCC. And it became apparent that the financial crisis only mirrors an underlying crisis of participation of the 332 WCC member churches.

The CUV process again expressly confronted the member churches with the question: How do you see this community of churches within the WCC? What does this community mean to you and what contribution do you make towards it?

Simultaneously, this CUV process was combined with reflections on the future shape of work and leadership structures of the WCC. For one thing was certain: At the General Assembly in Harare, the WCC must not only adopt its new common understanding and the associated vision but also a smaller, coherent and efficient work and leadership structures.

This message has reached the member churches. The invitation of autumn 1996 to comment on the first draft of the new CUV text met with feedback from 150 churches, church alliances and WCC-associated organisations, including the EKD and eleven of its member churches.

For this purpose the EKD Council invited Konrad Raiser, WCC Secretary General, to Bonn to find out about the CUV process and the latest situation within the WCC. And a range of German agencies, organisations, initiatives, and groups have commented on the text.

The EKD’s position
The EKD comment shared and even supported the basic contents of the CUV text. There was "extensive agreement with numerous statements of the preamble and chapters 1 to 7". In addition, the EKD emphasised that the WCC should stick to its function as stimulator and critical partner of the churches. And it went on to say that "the WCC is indispensable to make every member church realise its constraints within the boundaries of culture and nationality as mirrored by the other churches".

However, the concept of visible unity as an ecumenical goal was again criticised in the EKD comment, as was the lack of a comprehensive account of motives of the CUV process and a "self-critical analysis of the WCC’s profile and programmes over the past decades".

Within the EKD’s governing bodies the CUV process led to a an intensive reception of the WCC’s work and the complex field of ecumenism. At the meeting of the EKD Synod in Friedrichroda/Thuringia in May 1997, the then chairman of the EKD Council Bishop Dr. Klaus Engelhardt dedicated an entire chapter of his report to the topic of ecumenism under the heading "How our Father sent me - ecumenism world-wide and ecumenism at home" and commented on the CUV process.

Finally, he demanded that the question "what personal commitment the EKD and all its regional churches entered by joining the WCC" be a topic on the agenda of this Synod for the next six years. At a celebration in Bensheim to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Institute of the EKD for Inter-Confessional Research in October 1997, Engelhardt put it even more poignantly:

•"We need the WCC today and tomorrow as the expression of the churches’ quest for unity and community and as an initiator and challenger of the churches to promote unity, community and renewal.

•We need the WCC today and tomorrow as a stimulator for an ecumenical understanding and corresponding practical missions and evangelistic campaigns of its member churches.

•We need the WCC today and tomorrow as a prophetic voice and as a level of action in view of global challenges to promote justice, peace and the integrity of all creation." I would add two further points here:
•We need the WCC today and tomorrow as a global platform for an interreligious dialogue.
•We need the WCC today and tomorrow as a mouthpiece and lobby for the churches in world-wide international affairs and at corresponding conferences.

These five points create a rough framework for the future work of the WCC.
Redefinition in Harare
The WCC integrated around 150 responses and comments into the text of its basic policy statement, which was adopted by the Central Committee in September 1997 and submitted to the member churches for assessment and resolution. This text is to be adopted as the basis for its future work in Harare. The Ecumenical Commission of the EKD will address this basic policy statement again this year. Before the General Assembly in Harare a text "defining the position and expectations in view of the WCC’s future work" - as commissioned by the Council of the EKD - will be created and submitted to the Council.

The following recognition is an important result of the CUV process: The WCC has to reinforce and intensify relations with and between its member churches. The unity of the church is already given in Jesus Christ. Still, the community and our unity can only grow if trust between the churches grows, as well, if we intensify contacts, relations and talks, and if we jointly bear witness to what is at the centre of it all: Jesus Christ.

In addition, the WCC must seek to gain a higher profile in the field of social ethics than it has done so far.

The Programme to Overcome Violence and the associated campaign Peace to the City should play a central role here. For the time being, seven large cities, which have a high rate of violence but show signs enabling the creation of peace and justice have been selected for this campaign. The goal is to weave a world-wide network of initiatives to overcome violence and build a corresponding culture of non-violence. The EKD should contribute intensively to this programme.

In Harare the 33 EKD delegates will also take part in a formal recommitment ceremony at the end of the General Assembly. However, the term "recommitment" isn’t quite fitting. The commitment "we intend to stay together", which the EKD entered as a founding member of the WCC and which it affirmed in Amsterdam in 1948, has never been invalidated or withdrawn. So it’ll rather be a confirmation of the existing community achieved by the WCC than a recommitment, when the delegates in Harare say the following words:

•"We have the firm intention to stay together and will never stop growing together in unity. •We are utterly convinced that what unites us is stronger than what drives us apart. •Thus we commit once again in this, the year of our fiftieth anniversary to reinforce the WCC as a truly ecumenical community to meet the goals it was founded to achieve - to honour the holy Trinity."

The role of the EKD The EKD and the WCC must rely on each other, if they convincingly want to bear witness of the one holy Christian church in this fast-changing world. Despite all the difficulties and turbulences anticipated now on the brink of the General Assembly in Harare, this is the opportunity for a reorientation of the WCC.

Likewise the WCC must present a clear and new position regarding its topical work and programmes in Harare. And the EKD should contribute to this reorientation, as well. In view of its own structural debates and critical financial outlook it should not distance itself from this community of churches within the WCC.

On the contrary, the EKD should contribute intensively to this community and see itself as a committed part of it. And it should seek inspiration and enrichment from this community, being itself a "microcosm of the ecumenism" as Willem A. Vissen’t Hooft, WCC Secretary General, observed in 1961.

Foodnotes: 1) Towards a Common Understanding and Vision (CUV) of the World Council of Churches. A Study Guide, Geneva, December 1996. Page 3.
2) Comment of the EKD Ecumenical Commission on the study guide Towards a Common Understanding and Vision (CUV) of the World Council of Churches, p. 3f.

Tim Kuschnerus is the ecumenical officer of the EKD Church Office in Hanover.