Churches and Ecumenism in the 21st Century
Tasmanian Council of Churches Annual Meeting, 3/5/03

Thank you for the invitation…

Greeting from NCCA, the Executive & Staff …

The church has a future - a bright, positive, and glorious future. Despite all obstacles the Christian faith is a beacon of hope, a positive statement by God about where things are going and what is about to happen. The promise of God has not failed, and Chris-tians are people of the promise. It is a great and precious gift to be a Christian, what-ever doubts, ambiguities, and paradoxes we experience.

This is not a simple or straightforward time, however, to be church. In the early '90s US Anglican priest Loren Mead wrote a book "The Once and Future Church", where he ex-plained what he called the 'paradigm shift' of the church in Western societies.

At the time what he said was a definite 'ah-ha' experience in that it gave content to the impressions of many people. The term 'paradigm shift' has become commonplace, but I think it is still useful. It gives us a handle to understand something intangible. We need it because the organised Churches, naturally and often with very good reason, are resis-tant to influences that force them to change. Despite almost becoming a cliché, the con-cept of paradigm shift is useful in understanding trends in "Churches and Ecumenism in the 21st Century".
What is the 'paradigm shift'? Very simply it is a historical change in the circumstances of the church. It's no-one's fault, and it is morally neutral, although it can have moral out-comes. The church in Western culture is leaving its mould of the last 1700 years, and being shaped in a way that has some features in common with the church of the first 3 centuries even though it is not identical.

The lectionary readings of the immediate post Easter Sundays give us an inside view of the church immediately after the resurrection of Jesus. These texts help us understand paradigm shift. Immediately after the crucifixion those who believed in Jesus were a small, marginalised and fearful group. Just before the crucifixion all his disciples had deserted him. Peter denied him. Their malaise wasn't instantly solved by the resurrec-tion. They locked the doors 'for fear of the Jews'. They grappled with questions like "Is he really alive?" When first asked this must have sounded absurd, and it still does to some ears, Faith was immediate, demanding, and dangerous. Disciples risked ridiculed ridicule, estrangement and at times, death.
It is an over-generalisation, but in essence things continued like that for another two centuries. Christianity was a faith of the margins, the underprivileged, and the down-trodden. There were exceptions, and the miraculous spread of the Word and the growth in faith was remarkable. The Spirit was alive, active, and immediate. Faith was formed, however, in the crucible of suffering, persecution, and rejection. The church became strong through its martyrs. The state was viewed at worst in opposition to the church, or at best as indifferent. There were no friends in high places - just read the Revelation of St John. God alone was the helper of Christians.

The church was God's beachhead in a hostile world, a beam of light entering a dark cosmos. It competed for adherents with many other religions and cults, many of which had natural advantages in society. Christian belief in a single God, for instance, was very dubious, especially since there was no image of this God. The cross was literally a scandal, equivalent to the electric chair. The thought of a crucified and risen Jewish Saviour for all time and the entire world was offensive to reasonable, moderate people. As is the case in modern India, conversion to Christianity could mean the loss of socie-tal privileges, including employment. It was the religion of non-citizens and slaves. If you were a Christian, the immediacy of mission hit you in the face every time you stepped over your threshold, or faced your sceptical friends and family members,
Things changed in 313 of what is now called the 'Common Era' when the Emperor Constantine was converted to Christianity. Christianity began to become the province of the rich, powerful and privileged. For the first time there were Christian rulers, a term often better observed in name than in practice. Over a period of time the borders of the church became the borders of the Empire. The Emperor was involved in, and influenced the outcomes of, the Councils of the Church, as in Nicea in 325. Although by this time the Roman Empire was fragmenting, it took a very long while to happen. It was long enough for Christianity to become firmly embedded in the shards of the Empire, espe-cially in the West, but also in large parts of the East.

It might be hard for us to see the remnants of the conversion of a Roman Emperor 1700 years ago in our world today, but it should not surprise us. Several of our calendar months are still named after Emperors! In some ways the disintegration of that Empire is still with us - for instance, in the historic split between the Eastern and Western Christendom. The term Christendom itself tells us that the church inherited the Con-stantinian paradigm of Christianity as the dominant, if not only, religion in society, and that the boundaries of the state equal the boundaries of the church.

This paradigm was in strong evidence, for instance, during the 16th century Reforma-tion in Western Europe. "Cuius regio, eius religio" - which roughly translated means: Who the ruler is, his is the religion. So, for instance, when the King of Sweden became Lutheran, Sweden also became Lutheran. You see this in the English Reformation and the bitterness between Protestants and Catholics typified in the battle for the English throne among Edward, Elizabeth and Mary. This was only possible in the assumed un-derstanding that the State and church, if not identical, at least went hand in glove.

For its part the Church began to assume it lived in a benign society that supported its faith and moral principles. The task of the church was to see to the moral welfare of so-ciety and keep evil out of it. Ecclesiastical power sat in courts of rulers and houses of parliament, and at various times directly adopted the mantle of temporal power. That is, the church controlled the state. This is a long way from the experience of those first dis-ciples. Mission was no longer at the front door, but overseas, often in another region or continent. Societies were arranged around the parish, and everyone who lived within the physical boundaries of the parish was 'of' that parish. Early Europeans in Australia still thought that way, and town-planning subdivisions of the 19th century still used the terminology. I am not sure whether it is still in use.
When did all this change? It began to change some time ago, and was already chang-ing at the time Europeans arrived here. Some of the roots of that change might lie in the Enlightenment that accompanied the Renaissance. Some of them might lie in the in-creasing global awareness of other religions, other cultures, and new ways of thinking. The European empires of the last few hundred years brought back to their centres many of the concepts and methods of those they ruled. We should not be surprised that things have changed. We all feel a sea change in Western culture. It may seem to be the most dominant global culture at this time, but it has not arrived there without, in itself, being changed.

Despite certain fears and misgivings, we can argue that many, if not most, of the pro-gressive changes have been for the better. In terms of church, however, it can look as though we are, quite literally, living in the past.
Have we come to terms, for instance, with the reality that the church is no longer at the centre of power? How will we get used to the church being marginalised in the ethical and moral debates of our era? Will we protest this, or will we learn to accept it as even, possibly, an advantage? The recent war in Iraq clearly indicated, for instance, that per-haps the majority of Catholics in the United States did not follow the Vatican line op-posing the war, and articles in the American press indicated that the views of bishops had little influence over their people. This might be a manifestation of the massive trou-bles racking that Church in the US, but it is more likely to be would part of an ongoing global trend. The church is just not the moral authority it used to be.
In Australia, the general population has always been sceptical of the church and its authority. Beneath the bravado and cynicism of our national code, however, there was a grudging respect. That too, now seems to be eroded. We don't like to hear it, but people have an image of a church engaged in ineffectual philanthropy and religious musings that can be ignored with little or no peril to their soul, social standing, employment, or aspirations. Again this is a sweeping generalisation, but 20 years of parish ministry have convinced me this is often the case.

Australians think that most of the time they don't need the church, whatever argument we might put up to hotly deny it. The paradigm has shifted, and as one of the first West-ern liberal democracies that seems to be truly secular in its intent and application, we need to take notice. What is the church, and how will it respond in this situation?

If you move through our congregations on a Sunday morning, you might be forgiven for thinking that nothing has changed. Yes, we have made what we think of as major ad-justments to the issues of relevance, contemporary language and music, and fiddling, so some extent, with our theology and even being sacrificial over issues of social justice and equity. But our efforts and struggles, profound though they seem from inside the church, do not seem to impress those on the outside. Society has little sympathy for the church. Compounding this our buildings, which to us are pleasant punctuations in the utilitarian architecture of recent years, look like relics of the past, which even in their day were copied from another time and another place. So-called "successful" urban Churches are using a much more industrial style of building. Our means of attracting people still says 'come to our place for our worship and other activities'. We are deeply concerned, if not absolutely panicked, by our finances, and we are not sure how to dig ourselves out of the hole we seem to be in. Is our problem that we are still working within a Constantinian 'Christendom' paradigm, as if the world is, or should, be ours, and we aren't quite sure what to do when it isn't?

The new paradigm suggests that the parish or congregation, intact though it may seem from the inside, is once again surrounded by an ambiguous world that is a mixture of hostility, indifference, and conditional support. The clergy and laity of are once again missionaries in their own land, regularly crossing between church and world, and called to give daily account of their faith and their allegiance to the Church. Their participation in Church life can bring stigma and disadvantage. These may not be as severe as in some other regions of the world, but it can be to your economic disadvantage to go to worship on a Sunday when shops are open and many businesses are still operating. The erosion of the traditional 'weekend' of Christendom has made our religious practice more difficult, as our Muslim neighbours who attend prayers on Fridays already know. Religious practice, while not actively discouraged in Australia, is rarely encouraged.

So Australian churches of the 21st century are facing, in terms of their social and politi-cal presence, a great sense of disenfranchisement and some alienation from the culture they once thought was theirs. My own feeling, probably with some bias, was that the world and the culture never was, and never should have been, the property of the churches, and that the drive for the church to control its external world subverted its truly gospel character. That subject, however, should wait for another day.

This is a time for us to recognise something that has already been there in the shadows for a long time. I will tell you the anecdote of my own church, The Lutheran Church of Australia. It is a national church that is entirely Australian. It owes no allegiance to a mother church anywhere else in the world, even though many Australians still mistak-enly identify it as German, or in some cases Scandinavian. It has been here as a Synod since 1838, and for most, if not all, of that time, it has been on the fringes, unable or unwilling to play in the societal stakes that other churches were embroiled in. Austra-lians viewed it as an ethnic enclave isolated by language and culture at a time when such enclaves were unacceptable. Even though it was European based, it was too ex-otic to join mainstream Anglo culture. Today that sense of difference is celebrated in places like the Barossa Valley and sections of the wine industry, but it was not always like that. Third and fourth generation Australian Lutheran pastors were interned in WWI, town names were changed, and churches were burnt down. Even during WWII stones were thrown at school buses and more recent arrivals were again interned. Despite this, the toehold of the Lutherans in Australia has been maintained, and they have not expe-rienced loss of influence in wider society because they never really had any.

There is a strong sense in which the dislocation of the Australian churches from the centre of mainstream culture is no shock to Australian Lutherans, although they are not quite so phlegmatic about the loss of their youth and families to the pervading secular culture. There is also a sense in which the churches were not quite so much in the bosom of society as people often assume they were. Australia has always had a love/hate relationship with its Churches, and I imagine this is felt here in Tasmania. I have visited convict era churches like St Georges in Hobart where I think you can still see the solitary confinement boxes for the convicts. In Sydney town the Revd Samuel Marsden was the Anglican priest, but he was also the local magistrate. "Save their souls on Sunday and flog them on Wednesday", is something like what used to be said.

These impressions of the church might be old hat to many of you, but I am stating them because I do not hear or see them being consistently and seriously taken into account in the debates about the ongoing life of the Churches. The new situation does not have to be a disaster. It may not be a disaster at all, except in a narrow sense. If God is still in the church, if it is the presence of Christ in the world, and if the Word still speaks, then maybe it can be no other way. We have just come through Lent into Easter, and yet there seems to be a lot in the way we Christians think, speak and act which denies that Easter ever happened, and that the church will somehow triumphantly go from strength to strength. This is not the history of the church, and it is not the history of faith. In our search for victory we often, both unintentionally and intentionally, discard the cross of Jesus that says the church will ever only be truly effective and blessed from the mar-gins. It lives in the lives of the oppressed and discarded, those who understand what it is to be lost and to be found. Powerful parables, such as the tale of the Waiting Father, or Prodigal Son, in Luke 15, go to some length to bring this message home, a message we are so quick to forget.

The church is not dead any more than Christ is dead - and the nature of the resurrec-tion still raises ongoing debate after all these years. Sometimes what we call the church might not be quite the same thing as what God calls the church. Where does the church truly exist today? Is it there in Anglicanism, Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Calvinism - or some other human group or movement?

That, perhaps, is the quest of the Churches through the ecumenical movement. Ecu-menism, however you label it or structure it, is vital for the ongoing relevance of the church. Our future is together, not apart. We have a duty, and a responsibility, to do everything we can to express the unity the church has in Christ, and to sing our praises as one people with one God. Before God we cannot walk away from one other, we can-not withdraw into forms that mimic the old joke about walls in heaven that don't let you see that the others are there.

We have no future apart from the future we have with each other. Current trends should drive that home to us. We need to be reminded of our common future as, in the name of institutional survival and the preservation of many precious achievements, we are tempted to pull up the drawbridge and use our resources to keep individual denomi-nations, parishes, and congregations, in existence. It is intriguing how often the question of survival comes down to the question of finance. This is the very question that divided Judas from the other disciples long ago in Jerusalem, and finally led him to despar. What is going on here? Denominational leaders complain of money being retained in regional Synods and Districts. Synod and District leaders complain of money being re-tained in congregations. Congregations run stewardship that despite the most sincere best attempts to widen the concept of stewardship, in my experience usually become campaigns to increase the level of personal offerings. On a sea of change there is comfort in familiar things, familiar structures, and the money to pay for them.

Is this all too melodramatic? Have I overstated the case? Do we forget that the survival of the institution is not the same as the survival of the church, and that to be church we must be together as one?

The Ecumenical movement is not Councils or other ecumenical organisations, but the churches working and moving together. Ecumenism does not create unity, because God in Christ gives us unity - through the church. The Churches are the ecumenical movement. Experience demonstrates, however, that without structures like Councils of Churches, individual Churches do not move together, but apart. Although we would like to think that Christians operate spontaneously out of good will and a common under-standing, it seems we need structure to empower us to fulfil our intentions. And until the churches are one in that sense, it seems they will need something to keep reminding them of it. None of us, I think, want to return to the separations and misunderstandings of the past.

In the difficult scenario of churches today the Ecumenical movement, and Ecumenical Councils such as TCC and NCCA can sometimes be wrongly treated as luxuries we can ill afford. I believe the opposite is the case. We need them more than ever. Yet they are regarded as being at the 'end of the food chain', relying for their volunteers and their in-come on denominational structures that are already under such pressure.

For their part, ecumenical councils need to be relevant to the churches, because they are nothing but the combined presence of the churches. An ecumenical council does not have any life apart from the Churches. Just like Churches, there is a temptation for the ecumenical movement to move into having its own, independent life. People who are frustrated with the lack of movement in their Churches may adopt the ecumenical movement as being more amenable to the kind of church they would like to have. It is wrong for the ecumenical movement to remove people who have energy to bring about healthy reform from their churches. That energy should be used for the Churches - we all need it. Ecumenical councils must work with and for the Churches that form them. They are worth having; they are useful tools to help us learn what it is to be church to-gether. We would be much poorer without them.

This talk has been headed 'Ecumenical Impressions', and that is all that it is. It is not a developed thesis or a carefully detailed analysis. Impressions are all it is. Some of those impressions will see to be well founded, and others might seem far-fetched. You can sort that out for yourselves. I will finish by saying that this is a time of soul searching, a cross roads that is being encountered in Christian Churches and Ecumenical Councils across the world. The paradigm has shifted, and it is taking time for us to see the new landscape. How that process goes will to some extent be up to our courage to let go of old forms and embrace new ones, however hesitantly, and, as the saying goes, "Let go, and let God."

John Henderson
Sydney
1 May 2003