2000/2001 and the Australian Churches  -  The Revd David Gill, General Secretary

The General Secretary's Report

The Revd David Gill

Recently there landed on my desk a list of ten illustrations showing how the Bible might have been different had it been written by university students. To cite a few examples:

•  forbidden fruit would certainly have been eaten, because anything is better than cafeteria food;
• the time and place where the end of the world occurs would be lecture theatres, in October;
• instead of God creating the world in six days and resting on the seventh, He would have put it off until the night before it was due and then staged an all-nighter;      and
• the reason Cain killed Abel was they were flatting together, and the dishes weren’t getting done.

That last propels us naturally into the General Secretary’s report on the NCCA. For as that student-version Cain might well have remarked to his sibling, “Brother, it was one thing to decide to set up house together. But it’s quite another trying to make the shared enterprise work!”

In 1994 thirteen churches moved into a new structure they called the National Council of Churches in Australia. It had foundations, walls, a roof, a first set of residents and not a lot else. Four years on, it is appropriate for this third National Forum to assess how things are going in our still rather new national ecumenical household.

Overall, as I see it, we have made a reasonably promising beginning.

First, the family has grown. At this meeting, to our great joy, the Lutheran Church of Australia has joined us. The Baptist Union of Australia now has its President present as an observer in meetings of the Executive and in this National Forum. Several other applications for membership are in process or in prospect. The level of interest from at least some non-member churches suggests that we may reasonably look forward to becoming an even more comprehensive body in the years immediately ahead.

Second, the family is learning to live together under one roof. As I watch the NCCA Executive in action, I see a group of very different representatives of very different churches listening to each other, learning from each other, respecting each other’s sensitivities, revelling in each other’s company and through it all growing in mutual understanding and trust. Yes, occasionally they do vote, but they try not to, for the emphasis is on trying to discern the mind of the group as a whole, and beyond it the will of God for the Council.

Third, the household has been acquiring the furniture and equipment it needs to give expression to its shared life. The working papers for this National Forum show our various commissions, networks and task groups – some of them, having been set up by the Executive at the behest of the last National Forum, reporting for the first time – coming to terms with their mandates, their agendas and the styles of work that are appropriate for a body like ours.

Fourth, we have given the key to the door to the NCCA’s Aboriginal and Islander Commission. The indigenous parts of our member churches know that, in shaping their ecumenical relationships, they are free to move into their own home if they so desire. Equally, they are most welcome to remain as part of the NCCA if that should be their choice. The decision must be theirs. Whatever that choice may turn out to be, this Council will remain deeply grateful for their continuing participation in the quest for the visible unity of Christ’s people in this land.

Fifth, we have not been so engrossed in getting the household organized that we’ve lost sight of what is happening outside the front door. The working documents report last year’s very significant joint pastoral letter that, in the face of what some have called “the politics of anger”, urged our people to remember some of the things Christian citizenship must entail. They tell of the churches’ response to the Northern Territory’s proposed euthanasia legislation, their efforts towards authentic reconciliation in this land, their remarkably concerted attempt to stand in solidarity with Australia’s indigenous people through the struggles over Wik and native title legislation. In the CWS report we hear echoes of partnerships being forged and strengthened between ourselves and churches and ecumenical bodies overseas. The Council has tried to facilitate Australian involvement in the World Council of Churches, with which we are an “associated council”. Rather more effectively, I suspect, it has worked to help our churches receive from and contribute to the Christian Conference of Asia, of which this council is a full member. On a personal note, nothing has given me more satisfaction in these years than to be caught up in helping to strengthen the not-always-very-easy relationship between the churches of Australia and Indonesia. Probably better now than at any stage in the past four decades, the improved relationship owes much to the partnership between the two ecumenical bodies concerned. 

It adds up to a reasonably promising beginning. But only a beginning.

First, there are still some potential members of the household who do not see the NCCA as offering a roof under which they would want to venture. This must be of concern to us, for no servant of God’s ecumenical movement can rest content while any church “which confess(es) the Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour according to the Scriptures” remains apart from the fellowship.

Let me report, in this connection, what may turn out to be a significant initiative being proposed to help the churches move beyond the constraints of their present ecumenical structures. I was one of those summoned to Geneva, just over a month ago, to sit with representatives of the WCC, regional ecumenical organizations, national councils of churches, Christian world communions, the Holy See, Pentecostal churches, the World Evangelical Fellowship and various para-ecumenical organizations like the Bible Society, to explore the idea of creating some kind of world Christian forum. What is envisaged is not an organization, with members and policies and votes and all the paraphernalia that goes with structures, so much as a network of networks, with all the possibilities that are inherent in the reaching out of various groups of Christians to one another. A proposal along these lines will be put to the forthcoming assembly of the WCC, and to the other interested parties as well. How they may respond remains to be seen. The move is worth watching, however, not only because of what may happen at world level, but also for the possibilities it may open up regionally and nationally as well. 

Second, relationships within the household must not be taken for granted. In the latest In Unity, pondering issues likely to loom large at the WCC’s forthcoming assembly, I have drawn attention to the serious difficulties that are currently threatening the participation of at least some Orthodox churches in the World Council. While there may be a crisis at world level, we can be thankful that relationships here in Australia remain generally good. Perhaps one contribution our delegates can make in Harare is the testimony, from our own experience, that it is still possible for a council of churches to be a community in which churches of both east and west find themselves at home.

However, it would be naïve to assume that a crisis elsewhere will have no impact on  relationships here. The lesson is to beware of complacency, to guard against taking one another for granted, for any relationship that is not being worked at constantly is a relationship in trouble.

Third, thus far we have made no significant ecumenical overtures to our neighbors of other faiths. This is, we know, a delicate subject for some churches, especially those with painful memories of terrible conflicts in other times and places. It needs to be approached with care. But it does need to be approached. In this exciting new mix of humanity we call Australia, history has given us possibilities that may not always be open to our brothers and sisters elsewhere to work at creating qualitatively new inter-faith relationships. As by far the largest and most secure faith community, Australia’s Christians have, I believe, both the possibility and the obligation to risk reaching out the hand of friendship towards the folks next door – be they Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish or whatever.

Fourth, our household has still not figured out how to meet the housekeeping costs. There is no greater frustration for your Executive, your committees and your staff than the constant experience of being asked to do something with nothing. You will have noted that among the National Forum’s working papers there is a fundraising proposal that spells out the nature of the problem and proposes one way of tackling it.

Fifth, and most important, it is only a beginning in terms of what we set up this household to achieve. The measure of any council of churches is not the size of its budget, the range of its programs or the amount of attention it gets for itself in the morning newspapers, but what it enables to happen in the relationships of the churches that comprise it.

And what did we set up this Council to achieve? Let me remind you of the NCCA’s Basis:

“The National Council of Churches in Australia gathers together in pilgrimage those churches and Christian communities which confess the Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour according to the Scriptures and commit themselves
 
i) to deepen their relationship with each other in order to express more visibly the unity willed by Christ for his Church, and

ii)  to work together towards the fulfilment of their mission of common witness, proclamation and service,

to the glory of the one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit”.

“To deepen their relationship …” – yes, we’ve been working on that. But we are not into promoting relationships just for the sake of relationships. The churches did not set up this Council to foster warm, fuzzy feelings. We seek the deepening of our relationships “… in order to express more visibly the unity willed by Christ for his Church”. Nothing less. With that as the goal, it must be said that the churches’ journey together as the NCCA has barely begun.

Significant forward movement on that journey will require of each of our churches a major attitudinal change.

Some weeks ago, an Orthodox friend and I were trying to fathom the reasons for the current crisis in Orthodox/WCC relations. He spoke of a degree of Orthodox disappointment with the way the ecumenical movement has developed. “When we joined the World Council,” he explained, “we thought that if we could explain the significance of the Orthodox churches, the way they have safeguarded the faith of the early Church, the other churches would gradually see what we have stood for and, step by step, move towards us. But that hasn’t happened. Indeed, some of the things other churches have done in recent years suggest they may be moving further from us, not nearer.”

I was about to ask why on earth the Orthodox should assume that ecumenism means the rest of us becoming like them. I was about to, but I didn’t, because it occurred to me that in my own church the average person in the pew probably sees ecumenism in not dissimilar terms. Scratch a typical member of the Uniting Church and you will be told “Of course the churches should be one. The UCA is committed to the ecumenical movement”. Then ask what needs to happen to move us towards that end. “Well, er” the response might be, “once the Anglicans agree bishops are an optional extra for those who like that sort of thing, when Lutherans ease up on wanting to split the fine hairs of doctrine, when Catholics agree shelve the pope, once the Quakers get themselves organized, when the Salvation Army sees the point about the sacraments, if the Orthodox would kindly enter the modern world”– when, in other words, the other churches agree to become a bit more like us – “then, voila, Christian unity will be a breeze!”

Such a mindset is not peculiar to the Orthodox or the Uniting Church. Is it not true that most of us approach ecumenism with the expectation that if we just keep on expounding the significance and self-understanding of our respective denominational traditions, then the others will eventually grasp the rightness of what my church stands for and, in consequence, change their ways? My church remains unmoved, while eagerly awaiting movement by the others. Apart from guaranteeing permanent inter-church deadlock, this attitude suggests churches that have managed to insulate themselves against the disturbing recognition that the concomitant of a genuine ecumenical commitment must be an equally genuine openness to change.

The needed attitudinal shift requires fresh initiatives within each of the NCCA’s member churches. In Rome earlier this year, I asked colleagues in the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity how they thought their 1993 “Directory for the Application of Principles and Norms on Ecumenism” had been received and what they planned as an encore.  Their response to the first question was that many national bishops conferences were still not sufficiently active in helping their clergy and people grasp the Directory’s message about the possibilities there are for ecumenical collaboration. My second question brought the entirely reasonable response that it would be helpful if other churches were to emulate the Holy See’s example and produce their own ecumenical directories, spelling out how they severally understand their commitment to ecumenism and what in consequence they severally propose to do about it.

Which brings us to the second point in the NCCA’s Basis, with its commitment “to work together towards … common witness, proclamation and service” as we try to live now in at least partial anticipation of the unity for which we yearn. The National Forum will be reflecting on this commitment at three points, at least, during this meeting: when the Faith and Unity Commission presents its very important proposals for a covenanting process between member churches, when Bishop Michael Putney leads us in considering what it means to be called to common witness, and when Christian World Service challenges us to get our act together in the sphere of Christian service and of competing denominational and ecumenical appeals.

Only a beginning, finally, in terms the task facing the Christian Church in Australia today. Throughout the affluent world, the churches are passing through a major crisis of faith, life and morale, and as we are all too painfully aware here in Australia that crisis includes us.

We must recognize the crisis. We should try to understand it. But we must try not to allow ourselves to be paralyzed by it. Australia’s churches must not become so engrossed in their institutional difficulties as to forget that our people in this land continue to yearn for light in the darkness, love in the loneliness, meaning in the madness, and we in the churches continue to be the improbable trustees of a treasure trove of faith and wisdom, of meaning and sanctity, of light and love.

In the NCCA, we have come together to help one another open anew that treasure trove of faith so that our alienated compatriots may, God willing, sense its significance afresh and respond to it anew. In this Council, we are offered a means by which the churches, together, can move towards witnessing more convincingly, towards embodying more credibly, the great mystery of the amazing grace by which we are held in life and in death.

Could there possibly be a more significant, more exciting enterprise on which to have embarked together? Four years down the track, it deserves our renewed commitment.

Archbishop John Bathersby

My Brothers and Sisters in Christ

I am honoured to be able to address you for the first time as President of the National Council of Churches in Australia.  When I was elected President in July 1997 I was deeply conscious of both the privilege and the responsibility.  Privilege, because of the great joy in being able to play a role, no matter how small, in the universal movement of God’s Spirit towards unity;  responsibility, lest I waste the opportunity of leadership and be found wanting in this important stewardship.

I have no doubt that the establishment of the National Council of Churches in Australia in 1994 was a most important step in the Christian history of this nation.  I am also aware of the importance of an occasion like this Forum, which is not only an opportunity to discuss Christian business but, as David Gill has said, also an opportunity to develop Christian Relationships, which in the long run may be the most important thing we do with these next four days.

I am doubly blessed myself, first of all in being appointed in the footsteps of Archbishop Baliozian, the founding President, who as a person of deep faith, immense wisdom, and profound holiness established his leadership upon a foundation of prayer that has been my inspiration and guide.  I am also blessed in that I had the assistance of David Gill whose faith, ecumenical experience, great intelligence, and wonderful organizing ability has made my presidency the fun job the Cardinal promised it would be, when I allowed my name to be submitted in 1997.  I am also delighted by the honour of being President as we enter a new millennium, which I believe will be a time of special graces for all Christians.

Those of us who are old enough to remember the painful separations of the past, know just how far Australian Christians have travelled in the last fifty years.  Recently in Brisbane, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the World Council of Churches, a young Anglican priest said that although he is not old enough to remember the stone throwing, real and metaphorical, of the past, nevertheless he is aware of his debt to the ecumenical movement in that the two most powerful influences in his life on the road to ordination were a Uniting Church lecturer from Trinity College on the one hand, and a Catholic spiritual director from Banyo Seminary on the other.  He understands just how impoverished his life and faith would have been without these people.  So do we all.

The ecumenical movement is good for a number of reasons, not the least of which is our own selfish desire to grow in faith.  We cannot afford to neglect the wisdom and insights gained by our respective traditions in separation, lest we preach an impoverished Christ to others.

As we enter a new millennium we can no longer afford the diminishment we have suffered in the past because of our separation, nor can we afford to preach a divided Christ to Australians who under the weight of our secular society are seeking spiritual answers to life, more urgently than ever. Therefore structured opportunities such as this Forum are needed more than ever today, as we work for God’s Kingdom, as are opportunities for dialogue and co-operation at all levels.  Ultimately, however, I still believe that the most direct pathway to unity may be found on our knees before God, asking God’s Holy Spirit to lead us ever closer to Christ, and ultimately to each other.  With prayer we may even be able to see those things that we are still doing to each other that may be equally as devastating and destructive as the stone throwing of the past.  But can I mention some signs of hope.

1. This afternoon David Gill and I spent some hours with the Youth Network, listening to them and hearing their passion for ecumenism [we also found ourselves doing push ups on the floor which is not to be recommended for sixty year olds].

 In the Archdiocese of Brisbane I have made Ecumenism one of the priorities of the Archdiocese.  As part of our Pastoral Planning I receive a Pastoral Area Report at “Wynberg” at least once a month.  In my recent comments on a report I pointed out that it was short on ecumenical emphasis.  Afterwards, one of those present said to me:   “Archbishop, don’t be too concerned about Ecumenism in the future because our children are much more open to that possibility than we ever were, and they will make it happen much more effectively than we could imagine”.  There is a new generation arising that is just as committed to truth as we ever were, and yet who have the distinct advantage of not being burdened by the hurts, real or imaginary of the past, nor by some of the stereotypes and caricatures of other Christians that weigh us down.  They will do great things for us if we allow them to and if they can afford to wait for us to catch up with them.

2. A second sign of hope is that we are moving towards the year of Great Jubilee 2000.  One of the great thrills of my life, God willing, is that I will be alive in that year. But what an incredible time it could be for Christians if only we can make people aware of its significance and its opportunity for making a fresh start. Not many people have yet begun to realise the marvel of being alive at this turning point of the millennium.  I believe it could well be a time of incredible grace for all as barriers between individuals, nations, and Churches come tumbling down.  I do believe in miracles and am optimistic enough to believe that great things will happen at that time.  Both Konrad Raiser and Pope John Paul II understand the opportunity happening but that Christians need to structure opportunities for genuine repentance before that time – an honest acknowledgement of evils perpetrated against one another in the past.  Do we have enough faith, courage, honesty, and determination to do that?  I believe we have.

Finally just a few reflections about the NCCA

[i] In the first place we need to clarify not only for ourselves but for all Christians the goal of Ecumenism.  Despite much clarification in today’s marvellous papers and in the workshop there is still much confusion among people in the Churches.  People want to know what the World Council of Churches means when it talks about the “goal of visible unity” as it did in its 5th assembly in 1975.
 They want to know what the Pope means when he talks about “full visible unity”.

 They want to know what Konrad Raiser means when he talks of “a conciliar and dialogical understanding of Church unity that has emerged over decades of ecumenical discussion”.

I was delighted by the discussion that was taking place today in the wake of the excellent papers presented.  It can only help us achieve this greater clarity about what we are seeking.

[ii]  In the second place there is a need for the member churches to own the NCCA.  This certainly means rejoicing in membership, but it also means adequately funding this new body so that it can do the job it was meant to do.  At the present time many of the committees seem to exist on the funding they can attract from member Churches, depending on what is seen as the relevance or not of their activity.  David Gill has talked frequently about his frustration with this whole area of finance.  Perhaps at some time in the future it needs to become a major agenda item for an NCCA Forum.  The Council’s present attempts to raise funds may solve some of these problems.  It remains to be seen.

[iii]  In the third place I still don’t believe we pray enough for the unity of all Christians.  Like Martha we are busy about many things – dialogues, networks, inter Church co-operation.  But do we see ecumenism as an urgent part of the total evangelization of the world that we all seek when we pray:  “Lord may your kingdom come, may your will be done”.

In his recent Encyclical “Ut Unum Sint”  John Paul II asked Christians to respond about the role of Papacy, and his particular exercise of that role.  A great number of responses have been written and that is marvellous.

But he also asked for all Christians to pray for his conversion to Christ.  It was a remarkable request and I would like to quote his words:  “the Bishop of Rome himself most fervently makes his own Christ’s prayer for that conversion which is indispensable for ‘Peter’ to be able to serve his brethren.  I earnestly invite the faithful of the Catholic Church and all Christians to share in this prayer.  May all join me in praying for this conversion!”  [p.8]

The invitation was issued in 1995, but I wonder how many Christians have even thought about that invitation with as much energy as they responded to the earlier invitation on Papacy.  Who knows what might happen if the Pope’s request for prayer were taken seriously?

So thank you all very much for the honour of the Presidency.  I look forward to spending these days with you in the Forum.  Please support me with your prayers.

Associate Professor Michael Horsburgh

When I was first asked to give this address, the topic was described to me as ‘an overview of the justice issues facing the Australian churches’. The temptation presented by such a topic is to prepare a list of issues and examine them one by one. I am determined to resist that temptation. In the first place I will almost inevitably get the list wrong. According to some of you I will have omitted a significant issue or included an less significant one. According to others I will have evaluated one or other of them wrongly. Even if I say that the order of the list does not signify importance, some of you will not believe me. I have no intention of negotiating that minefield.

In any case, knowing and doing justice involves more than constructing a list of candidates for the worst problems that we now encounter. Actually, the list is probably fairly static over time. In preparation for this paper I took down from my shelves a volume entitled Australian Social Issues of the 70’s (*1), published in 1972, the year in which I began to teach at the University of Sydney. After a foreword by E G Whitlarn, then about to become Prime Minister, the book discussed the issues of health, education, drugs, immigration, Aborigines, women, the environment and poverty. The topics of youth and rural Australia are missing from this list, but it sounds remarkably like one that I might construct today. What will vary is not the list itself but the context in which it appears.

Such a list, however accurate and agreed upon, falls short of assisting us to act. Knowing and doing justice are dependent on much more than recognising which are the relevant issues. It is for this reason that I have not adopted as a title the topic I was invited to address. This address is not only about how we evaluate our situation, but also about who we are and why we might act.

I also speculated at the first how this address might fit in with the national election we all knew was coming. I wondered what difference it would make if I were to speak either before or after an election. As it has turned out I speak while the voting is going
on. This has effectively prevented my address from receiving any press coverage whatsoever. But it has, at least, protected me and, I might say, you, from any accusation of political interference by the church.

The millennium

I want first to say something about the concept of the millennium. There is no particular reason to think that the date affects social justice issues in any way.  Nevertheless, such a date provides us with an opportunity in a context where evaluations seem appropriate.

My electronic search of the text of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible brought up only four passages in which the words ‘a thousand years’ appear. Three of those passages talk about how time is perceived by God (*2). The most easily recognised of the three is Psalm 90:4:

For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, or like a watch in the night (*3).

There is a similar verse in 2 Peter (*4).   A verse in Ecclesiastes suggests the futility of long life since a similar fate awaits both the short and long lived (*5).   There is, I suggest, a need to take these verses seriously. The concept that everything can be remedied by judicious and well designed policy is not only distinctly modern, it is manifestly false. In theological terms it is the heresy of Pelagianism, the view that our salvation is in our own hands (*6).  Our capacities are undoubtedly well behind our imaginations when it comes to successful policy. Justice in any perfect sense awaits not our desires or actions but God’s time. As the realist author of Ecclesiastes put it:

I said in my heart, God will judge the righteous and the wicked, for he has appointed a time for every matter, and for every work (*7)

This scepticism is not simply a transfer to God of a responsibility that is properly ours, neither is it a form of fatalism. If it is true that ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge’ (*8), it is because ‘we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part’(*9).   Just as we quite properly criticise our Christian forebears because of their blindness about such issues as slavery, our descendants will also marvel at our blindness and lack of understanding. They will also marvel at our unwillingness to tackle even those things about which we had some understanding.

The final reference to a thousand years is, of course, the one that has alerted Christians to the significance of this time period and created specific cults and sects that have dwelt upon it. It is the passage in the book Revelation that refers to the thousand year rule of Christ on earth (*10).   However this passage might be interpreted, it stands as yet another testimony to the power of God to judge and order the world (*11).   It is, like the others I have already mentioned, a warning against the pride that afflicts our political life, encouraging both politicians and citizens alike to pretend to capacities that they do not have, to make promises that they know they cannot keep and to demand performances that are not possible.

You might think that this is a poor beginning to an address that is supposed to concentrate on beneficial social change in the interests of justice. I may seem to be saying that there is little that we can do. I assure you that I have not vacated the field by what I have said. On the contrary, a clear sighted approach to either knowing or doing justice will not be helped by anything other than an appropriate humility in the face of both the justice that God demands of us and the size of the task that confronts us. The search for justice is not helped by any form of utopianism.

How can we know what is just?

I want first to ask how we might know what is just and what is not. It may seem that the answer to this question is self evident. Yet there are many disputes about justice. Just outcomes are by no means clear. Competing interests, the inevitability that there will be winners and losers, should alert us to this. Since there is probably no situation in which all the interests and desires of diverse groups and individuals can be equally satisfied, disputes about justice are to be expected rather than not.

Indeed, it might be argued that Christianity itself is ambivalent about justice. It is ambivalent because, in principle, Christianity seeks to ground its social program in ideas about God’s love for us and the love that we should consequently have for each other. Such a view opposes moral propositions against political realities. In that conflict, the purely moral forces inevitably have a hard time of it. The American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr has warned us about the problems inherent in this approach.

Writing in 1935, Niebuhr’s words have survived the passage of time extremely well. He said,

Living as we do, in a society in which the economic mechanisms automatically create disproportions of social power and social privilege so great that they are able to defy and evade even the political forces which seek to equalize and restrain them, it is inevitable that they should corrupt the purely moral forces which are meant to correct them.. Christian love in a society of great inequality means philanthropy. Philanthropy always compounds the display of power with the expression of pity. Sometimes it is even used as a conscious effort to evade the requirements of justice, as, for instance when charity appeals (are) designed to obviate the necessity of higher taxation for the needs of the unemployed (*12)

There is an inevitable tension between the concepts of love and justice. It is not easy to bring into a comfortable relationship an ethic based on love, goodwill and fellowship (faith, hope and charity) and a coercive social order which must meet demonstrable need and enforce basic human rights. Nièbuhr did not deny the important place of ideals such as love. What he did was to reverse their order in our perception.

The problem of politics and economics is the problem of justice. The question of politics is bow to coerce the anarchy of conflicting human interests into some kind of order, offering human beings the greatest possible opportunity for mutual support ... All these opportunities represent something less than the ideal of love (*13).

Ideals and actual policies are also quite different entities. Interposed between our ideas and the policies we espouse are levels of investigation, assessment and decision. There are many opportunities for both error, in the sense of simple mistakes, and for unwisdom in the sense of making a judgment that turns out to have been ill-advised.  Michael Knight, a writer about the welfare of children, points this out in a sharp paragraph.

……attempts to translate (altruism, love and kindness] into terms which have meaning for society via its social systems succeed only in transforming them into something very different. The resonances they produce within the systems of modern society reproduce them in economic terms as unpaid labour or ‘budgetary savings’, in law as rights and duties, in science as measurable factors to be subjected to scientific truth-testing, and in politics as attributes that have no place in politics (*14).

The art of politics is no different for churches than for anyone else. It will inevitably involve us in choosing something less than we desire and believe in. It will involve us in assisting a society to be as just as it can, even when we know that it will not be as just as it should.

If we turn to biblical sources for guidance, we come upon some important observations. The book Deuteronomy set out some laws about caring for the needy members of the Hebrew community. Who these persons were likely to be is described in this way:

For the LORD your God... executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and... loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt (*15).

The basis of the care to be exercised for the needy is shared human experience. You were strangers in the land of Egypt, so bow can you not understand the plight of the dependent? The widow, the orphan and the stranger were, in the society of those times, the persons most likely to be poor and needy. Why this was so is related to the nature of that society. The organisation of the society was strictly patriarchal. Everyone belonged to a family under the control of the senior male. This is why the widow, the orphan and the stranger were at such risk. They were without the support and protection that living in that society required. The widow’s husband had gone; the orphan’s father likewise. Being outside that protection limited their access to the resources that their society offered. The stranger did not belong at all.

I have pointed out how disadvantage in biblical society came about because it emphasises to us that the risks to which we are subject are largely the result of how our society is organised. Being a widow, an orphan or a stranger is still a risk today, although not to the same extent as in ancient times. Our society has its own distinctive contribution to make to the existence of human need. Justice, on this analysis, is closely related to the capacity to have a share in the good things that the society can produce.

In our society, the principal causes of disadvantage are lack of employment and lack of access to affordable housing. These are the two issues that your Social Justice Network has concentrated on in the past year. Whilst the patriarchal aspects of contemporary society may be debated at length, it is clear that general wellbeing is no longer dependent on that structure. The resources to live are, for the most part, dependent on access to an income generated through employment or through the redistribution of that employment over the life cycle. Housing is the major single expense on that income. Thus the lack of either or both of these resources creates extreme relative disadvantage.

Such disadvantage is far from being a simple misfortune, it extends into all aspects of a person’s life. Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald on 21 September 1998, Fred Ehrlich, Professor of Rehabilitation, Aged and Extended Care at the University of New South Wales, commented on the cumulative effects of social disadvantage in the areas of health and mortality. He said

Low self-esteem, social isolation, poor job satisfaction or employment insecurity are sources of stress, and the lack of control over work and home life has powerful effects on health.  Once again, these are cumulative through life and eventually result in poor mental health, often physical disability and premature mortality (*16)

In making this claim, Ehrlich is saying nothing new. Rather he is reporting the results of extensive research both here and in other countries into the consequences of social disadvantage. The risks of disease amongst those who are socially disadvantaged are routinely reported as being twice the level of the norms in most communities. I do not need here to comment on the fact that indigenous persons are at a still greater risk. For indigenous persons the risks associated with lack of employment and housing are compounded by the consequences of dispossession. Such research emphasises that social causes lie behind disadvantage. It is for this reason that we may clearly label them as justice issues.

If we wish to deal justly with those in need, we must legitimate their claims upon us. One of the most distressing features of contemporary political culture is the tendency to regard the socially disadvantaged as enemies. Thus, for example, success in the administration of our social security system is constructed to be the detection and prevention of welfare fraud. In the pursuit of this desirable but greatly exaggerated risk, every downward adjustment of a social security payment is represented as a strike against fraud, even though the rate of prosecutions remains constant.

In public discourse, the use of the term industry to describe the public presentation of the claims of the  disadvantaged is a signal that a dangerous stereotyping is entering the ongoing consciousness of the nation. Those claims can then be seen as the self interest of the persons thus disadvantaged or of their supporters. Thus the welfare industry or the aboriginal industry. We need to be alert to the fact that our society offers us both the opportunity to promote justice and the opportunity to escape from doing so if we wish.

These considerations lead us to the conclusion that justice consists in empowering people to participate in the society, not in binding them to continuous occupation of the lowest positions. There is a price to be paid for justice, but it should not be paid  principally by the victims of injustice.

What I have been talking about so far may seem to refer principally to events, to things that happen to people. The proper response to need arising from accidents or events is charity or welfare. However important such responses are, they are not equivalent to justice. The question of justices arises not from the response to need as it occurs but from the observation that the incidence of need is not always, or even mostly, accidental. Since, as we have observed, need arises principally from social and structural causes, its redress requires structural change and thus becomes a matter of justice.

Since also churches exist in the same structures as produce the injustice, they are implicated in that injustice as much as they can participate in its redress. The economic capacity of the church to resource the fight against injustice cannot be divorced from the capacity of those economic resources to share in the creation of the injustice itself To revert at this point to my opening comments, there can be no pride for us here, only a humble joining with others. We have surely learnt this lesson when we have faced our complicity in the stolen generation of indigenous Australians, or the victims of abuse within our own institutions.

Commentators tell us that the first appearance of the term social justice in Christian discourse was in Pope Pius Xl’s encyclical Quadragesimo Anno in 1931 (*17).  In that encyclical His Holiness said:

Now, not every kind of distribution of wealth and property amongst men is such that it can at all, and s~i1l less can adequately, attain the end intended by God. Wealth, therefore, which is constantly being augmented by social and economic progress, must be so distributed amongst the various individuals and classes of society, that the common good of all, of which Leo XIII spoke, be thereby promoted. lb other words, the good of the whole community must be safeguarded. By these principles of social justice, one class is forbidden to exclude the other from a share in the profits (*18).

Leaving aside the social changes that have occurred between 1931 and today, this concept of social justice supposes an active process by which a fair distribution of resources is achieved. It assumes the existence of community as distinct from separate individuals and seeks to ensure the wellbeing of that whole. Such a concept stands in stark contrast to contemporary approaches that suggest that justice is a consequence of a properly ordered economic system. I am here drawing attention to Pius Xl’s distinction between justice as a consequence of a process and justice as something to be achieved by action. There is nothing in Christian teaching or, indeed, in human experience to suggest to us that the consequences of social and economic processes are necessarily, or even likely to be, just. On the contrary, it is because such consequences are patently unjust that an active intervention is necessary.

Why it should be supposed that a system that specifically excludes moral propositions from the direction of policy should result in justice is hard to understand. Perhaps such a conclusion can arise only from the loss of community unity to which Pius XI referred and the lessening of confidence in our soda] capacity to make any difference at all.

The reality is actually worse than I have described. Not only is morality excluded from the initial equation, that equation is already built upon injustice. As Roger Ruston notes:

…..the way things are is always the product of some previous injustice. In the market on which our world-society is founded, we make bargains with people who are already disinherited, already pauperised by the appropriation of their ancestral common lands, already made slaves of by some single-product economy such as motor cars or sugar, already proletarianised and reduced to the status of people who have nothing to bargain with but their bodies (*19).

The dominant economistic thinking of today’s social policy actively discourages the consideration of justice issues. It does this first, as I have already noted, by excluding such issues from the original equations. It does so, secondly, by assuming that there is only one motivation, that of self interest. Thus both persons and organisations are assumed to respond only to threats or enticements that affect their narrowly conceived interests. This reductionism both degrades the human person and questions the validity of community organisations. It makes community into a transient product of accidental conjunctions of interest. It is this kind of thinking that is transforming community welfare organisations into competitors for government contracts, replacing cooperation with ‘commercial-in-confidence’ considerations.

Paradoxically, we also see the major economic institutions becoming the promoters of apparent moral virtues. Thus the National Australia Bank pretends to support our most intimate desires, and an instant coffee marketer creates family unity. A canned fruit processor attacks racism by a commercial in which some of their products exhibit hostile views against other of their products. A health insurer tells us that the most important person in the world is oneself It is indeed a paradox when the processes of the market exclude moral considerations while the players in the market, both overtly and covertly, manipulate the moral values that they perceive the community still to possess. In a more subtle way they shape those values by processes that reduce the capacity of nations to determine their own destinies or the capacity of families to determine their own daily programs (*20)

Roger Ruston, from whom I have quoted, asserts that a fundamental part of a Christian concept of justice is the preservation of community. What we are witnessing, however, are fundamental changes to our understanding of community.  We have come a long way from the organic communities of the past. We have seen how those communities have operated to limit the capacity of individuals to forge their own way in the world. There is no need for us to adopt any romantic view of a golden age of community in the past. We have embraced functional communities that support individual aspirations and we have come to believe that community is a social form that is open to constant manipulation. We can, we now think, have any kind of community that we wish, probably composed of individuals whom we have designed.

We are now seeing the limitations of that view. Ways of life cannot be destroyed at will without deep consequences for human welfare. We are seeing this played out now in rural Australia. Economic and structural changes are stripping rural communities of those very features that enabled them to support life in what were and are difficult and demanding environments. The consequences in terms of’ political reactions are clear to see. The capacity to live in a supportive and sustainable community is surely one of the most fundamental of human rights. It is an issue of basic justice.

How can we do what is just?

How then, can we do justice? First we must listen. At the centre of the original act of biblical deliverance is a God who hears the cry of the afflicted.

The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them (*21)
You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt You shall not abuse any widow or orphan. If you do abuse them, when they cry out to me, I will surely heed their cry; (*22)

There can be no justice if those who experience injustice are not heard. It is a marked feature of our present political climate that the voices from the bottom are devalued. This occurs when their protests are described as ‘the politics of envy’, when their protection is described as being against the national interest. Thus the sacrifice of the tights of the disadvantaged is justified by a narrowly conceived economic interest. Although described as national, such an approach simply equates the interests of the powerful with those of the whole.

Secondly, we must accept that justice comes with a price. We must collectively be prepared to pay that price. This inevitably involves some limitations on the acquisition of wealth and on personal consumption.

I am reminded of a television commercial for Johnny Walker Red Label whisky. In that commercial a bartender sought to persuade his customer to buy the product even though it was more expensive than some of its competitors. He said, ‘Do you want the whisky you want to drink, or the whisky you want to pay for?’ I will not enter into a debate about whether this commercial represented a good evaluation of the merits of the particular whisky. But the commercial sets out for us the essential problem of seeking a just and civil society. There are inevitable costs and many people do not want to pay them. Yet the question still remains, ‘Do you want the society you want to live in, or the society you are prepared to pay for?’

The analogy goes further than that. We will inevitably have to pay the price of the society we actually live in. That price may ultimately be higher than we think. If we develop an underclass, a group of persons who are permanently barred from a just participation in the society, we will pay the price for that. The price includes a growing fear about personal security, increasing social division, a growing prison population and the self-defeating promotion of retribution under the guise of justice for the victims of crime.

Populist pressures seem to require political parties to promise tax relief in societies where the living standards are already higher than any that the world has hitherto known. This is necessary here even when Australia is not a highly taxed country.

We need next to develop a spirituality that will support our endeavours for justice. I do not speak lightly when I say that the greatest challenge facing the Christian churches of Australia in the new millennium is not whether we will be able to discern what is just or what is not just. It is whether we will be able to speak to our fellow Australians with integrity. Will we be able to speak and will we be able to say anything that can be heard?

In his book, Reaching Out, Henri Nouwen talks about the three movements of the spiritual life. All three of these movements involve a form of reaching out. The first he calls ‘From loneliness to solitude’. In this movement we reach out to our innermost self The third movement is ‘from illusion to prayer’, in which we reach out to God.

Between these two movements Nouwen places ‘from hostility to hospitality’. This is a reaching out to others. He says:

In our world full of strangers, estranged from their own past, culture and country, from their neighbours, friends and family, ,from their deepest self and their God, we witness a painful search for a hospitable place where life can be lived without fear and where community can be found.  Although many, we might also  say most strangers in this world become easily the victim of a fearful hostility, it is possible for men and women and obligatory for Christians to offer an open and hospitable space where  strangers can cast off their strangeness and become our fellow human beings (*23).

In Nouwen’s view, hospitality is a fundamental spiritual value. Its place in the middle of his three movements is deliberate. Only persons who have found themselves can reach out and find others. Only those who have found themselves and others can confront the illusions that separate them from God.

Much of the present turmoil in Australian social and political life can be linked to our national failure to move from hostility to hospitality. Surfacing in our present discord are those hidden hostilities from which we all suffer. Even though we may reject much of the extremism that we see and hear, we need to recognise in ourselves the very origins of that extremism, our own unresolved fears and uncertainties.

Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald on 29 August this year, Hugh Mackay commented on a growing tendency to hide our guilt under hostility towards the disadvantaged. He commented on hostility towards indigenous Australians, one parent households and the poor. His column concluded with these words:

How will we reconcile our desire for tax cuts with the knowledge that, sooner or later, the tax burden will have to increase if we are to carry with us those for whom we simply can’t find work? One solution, obviously, is to become less tolerant towards the poor.  “Bugger them!” (There, that feels better.) (*24)

What price a nation dominated by fear and hostility, a nation that rejects the stranger? Such a nation will soon lose the capacity to tell who is a stranger and who is not. It will be divided against itself and be unable to stand (*25).

I do not underestimate the difficulties that we face in speaking today. We will not be able to speak with integrity unless we are firmly anchored within an appropriate spirituality. Having such an anchor does not, however, guarantee that we will be heard.

At the end of his massive work on the future of Christianity, Christianity: essence, history and future, the German theologian Hans Küng comments on the disappearance of a language in which to conduct our common discourse. He says that we will never recover a world in which there will be a uniform world view. There will always be a multiplicity of views. But, he says, ‘this multiplicity does not exclude the quest for a fundamental social consensus.’(*26) That consensus, in Kung’s view, can be achieved only through the development of a concept of partnership. And this is the point at which I come to the list that I said at the beginning I would not produce.

Now for the list

Küng’s big questions for the future are:

• partnership with nature. He argues that we must move from the modernistic exploitation of nature to a partnership with it.
• partnership of men and women. Küng characterises inequality between the sexes as the major human rights issue on a global scale.
• international distributive justice. Here Kung places social and economic inequality on an international scale (*27).

Given his global focus, these forms of partnership would seem appropriate. When they are translated to a national and Australian scale, however, some other partnerships become important. First, without any doubt, is a partnership between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. To a certain extent this is contained within Küng’s concept of international distributive justice, since what we see in Australia is a local manifestation of the colonisation that covered the whole globe and is partly the origin of the massive inequalities we now see.

Implicit in any new partnership between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians is a new partnership with the land. Australia as a whole cannot ignore the deeply spiritual relationship that indigenous Australians have with the land. We ought to accept and endorse that relationship out of respect for it in itself More fundamentally, however, we cannot ignore it because it exemplifies the idea of partnership to which Kiing has directed us.

Kung’s concern about human rights exhibited by his reference to the need for partnership between men and women is entirely appropriate for our own circumstances. On our more local scale, however, we need to include other partnerships: a partnership between young and old, a partnership between employed and unemployed, a partnership between rural and urban Australians.

I need finally to say that, even when we have done all of this, doing justice is hard work. It is hard work because it takes serious attention to data and policy formation. There is no cheap road to justice in Australia or elsewhere. The justice contribution of this council is dependent on the resources that its member churches are prepared to devote to the task.

Justice is not only hard work, it is risky work. It exposes us to criticism. Some of the criticism is that we do not have the competence. On the contrary, we have access to as much competence as any one else in our community, providing we are prepared to do the necessary work~ Other criticisms revolve around claims that we are only, after all, a sectional voice with our own interests to pursue. This is a fundamental claim against our integrity.

Finally, a strong justice stance is likely to be internally divisive. There is no particular reason why Christians should all agree about specific social policy proposals. Nevertheless, the most fundamental threat to our capacity comes from within when members of our own communities consider themselves to be affected by what we say. I always operate on the view that the attitudes of Christians are more likely to be closer to those of their neighbours than to those of the gospel, so this comes as no surprise. Nevertheless, we must take care not to fail to understand the diversity of our own membership and the legitimate interests there represented.

Can we then know and do justice in a new millenniurn?  We can and we must. But we will only do so if we can both expound and model the justice that we seek to do. We cannot expound and model the justice that we seek if we will not pay the costs and run the risks.

****

(*1)  Paul R Wilson (ed), Australian Social Issues of the 70’s, Sydney, Butterworths, 1972.
(*2)  Psalm 90:4; Ecclesiastes6:6; 2Peter3:8.
(*3)  This text was taken up by Isaac Watts in his 1719 hymn ‘O (Our) God, our help in ages past’
        (No. 46 in The Australian Hymn Book), one verse of which runs:
        A thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone:
        Short as the watch that ends the night before the rising mm
(*4)  2 Peter 3:8 But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand
        years, and a thousand years are like one day
(*5)  Ecclesiastes 6:6 Even though he should live a thousand years twice over, yet enjoy no good—do not
        all go to one place?
(*6)  ‘Pelagianism is the heresy which holds that man can take the initial and fundamental steps toward
        salvation by his own efforts, apart from Divine grace.’ F L Cross and E A Livingstone, The Oxford
        Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd edition, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 1248-9.
(*7)  Ecclesiastes 3:17
(*8)  Proverbs 1:7
(*9)  1 Corinthians 13:9 (NRSV)
(*10) Revelation 20:2-7
(*11) See ‘Millennium’  in D L Jeffrey, A Dictionary of the Biblical Tradition in English Literature, Grand Rapids Ml, William B Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1992, pp. 509-512.
(*12)  Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1987, p.112
(*13)  Niebuhr, p.85.
(*14)  Michael King, A Better World for Children: Explorations in morality and authority, London, Routledge,     1997, p. 107
(*15)  Deuteronomy 10:17-19NRSV
(*16)  Fred Ehrlich, ‘In sickness and in wealth’, Sydney Morning Herald, 21 September 1998, p. 17.
(*17)  Alister McGrath (ed), The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Thought, Oxford, Basil Blackwcll, 1993, p. 291.
(*18) Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, para 57.
(*19) Roger Ruston, A Christian View of Justice, Blackfriars Publications, Peace Preaching Paper No 2, 1993.   (Available on the internet at www.bfpubs.demon.co.uk/justice.htm
(*20) Max L Stackhouse, ‘Beneath and beyond the state: social, global and religious changes that shape welfare reform’, in Stanley W Carlson-Thies and James W Skillen (eds), Welfare in America:  Christian Perspectives on a Policy in Crisis, Grand Rapids MI, William B Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1996, pp. 2048.
(*21)  Exodus 3:9(NRSV)
(*22) Exodus22:21-23(NRSV)
(*23) Nouwen, p. 63.
(*24)  Hugh Mackay, ‘The poor intrude on the wealthy’s comfort zone,’ Sydney Morning Herald, 29 August 1998, p. 32.
(*25)  Matthew 12:25.
(*26)  Hans Ktlng, Christi tinily: essence, history andfuture, New York, Continuum, 1996, p. 774
(*27)  Kung, (pp. 776-7)

Romans 8:14-25  -  Dr Mary Tanner

(Sunday 4th October 1998, St James Anglican Church, Sydney, Australia)

Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ, I take as my text a verse from the end of that wonderful but demanding reading we heard from St Paul’s letter to the Romans: ‘In hope we were saved.’

You, like me, can, I expect, point to moments of disclosure in your own life, transforming experiences which have changed the direction of your lives forever. In 1974 I found myself quite unexpectedly in Accra, in Ghana, at a meeting of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches. It was the first time that Faith and Order had met in what we called then a ‘Third World’ country. It was my first encounter with the Faith and Order Commission and with the World Council of Churches and my first visit to Africa. My university Professor, the distinguished Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, Geoffrey Lampe, a large man in stature, in vision and in understanding had amazingly asked me to attend the meeting as his proxy. I didn’t realize it at the time but looking back I can see that was a mark of his total commitment to opening up the circle of interpretation to women and to young people, his commitment to creating a more inclusive ecumenical community. So I arrived, naive and young, weighted down with my Hebrew and Greek Bible, large dictionaries and an even larger concordance. What else did elderly, male theologians do than sit around a table discussing the latest discoveries of biblical criticism?

Instead, I found myself in one of a number of groups charged with the task of giving an account of our hope. When asked directly, ‘What is your hope?’ I remember the feeling of panic, I simply didn’t know what to say, how to answer. I wonder how you would answer that same question. Try putting it to yourself at the end of today. What is my hope?... All IL could do was to grasp at conventional biblical language and pictures about hope - the lamb lying down with the kid, the weapons of war turned into ploughshares, the land flowing with milk and honey. All I could do was to repeat conventional biblical language and pictures about hope for the future - the Old Testament concept of shalom, the beautiful visions of Isaiah, or the flights of apocalyptic imagination, or in the very vaguest of ways talk of hope for life beyond death. My grasping desperately at biblical images was of course a way of evading the existential question put to me - What is your hope? I began to wonder whether I could talk of hope at all. Nor was I alone. The confusion some of us shared had something to do with the fear of facing up to the fact that hope played so little, practically no part, in our own lives. Our responses sounded theologically wise and erudite, with their heap of biblical clues - but it was difficult for some of us to say we actually lived in and by hope, or that we connected with hope at all. There seemed so little immediate personal dimension to hope.

And this stood in such stark contrast to others in the circle whose faces simply shone when they were asked to talk of their hope. They talked with such burning passion and conviction. It was those who lived in positions of oppression and violence and hopelessness. Desmond Tutu in the midst of the situation of apartheid in its seemingly most hopeless days, laughing with hope, bubbling over with hope. Gordon Gray in the midst of the mindless bombings in Northern Ireland, the violence that seemed unending which he described in a poem;

Father, I am a man of my time and situation
Around me, the signs and symbols of man’s fear hatred, alienation
a bomb exploding in a crowded market square
demagogic faces on TV twisted in mocking confrontation the forces of opposion too great.

The women who were overwhelmed by the violence done to women in the world and in the Church , women always at the bottom of the pile, whose vocations could not be named or tested by the Church. We’ve heard with dreadful clarity the same stories of violence done to women in the Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women.

It was those in the most hopeless of situations who spoke not faltering, hesitant words but confident words of hope, hope against hope. Their testimonies of hope were not the repetition of the Isaianic idyllic time, not the New Jerusalem of Ezekiel, not the City that comes down out of heaven of the Book of Revelation.

Their picture of hope was the certain knowledge of Jesus Christ crucified and risen from the dead, a radical hope, the sure knowledge that in the midst of the obscenity of apartheid, in the midst of the inhuman bombings in Northern Ireland, in the midst of the violence done to women, there was and is the power of life over death. It was this that made them as sure as Mother Julian of Norwich that ‘all things shall be well, all manner of things shall be well.’ Asked to give account of the hope that was in them what came first was not the assurance that apartheid would be overcome, not the assurance that the bombings in Northern Ireland would cease, not the confidence that the violence done to women would end. What came first in their account of hope was a certainty that at the heart of their lives, at the heart of all life, is the simple and glorious truth of Jesus Christ crucified and risen from the dead, and the belief that through that mysterious event, God’s Spirit had been poured into their lives and into the lives of all who turn to God, and that through those events, the coming of God among us and Gods identifying with us and dying for us, their life was given meaning and they could dare to hope against hope.

Desmond and Gordon and Connie and the others knew what St Paul knew in that lesson we heard read that in the middle of the most death-dealing situations, unimaginable to most of us there was life — that life was not on the other side of the awfulness, on the other side of suffering - but there in the very midst of the awfulness and bloodiness of it all. In the middle of it they knew and could count on a life-giving relationship with God, through the cross of Christ, and in the power of the Holy Spirit. They could trust in a God who had been there before, a God who was very close and was holding them like a parent cradles a child. The women in particular knew exactly what Paul knew. It is not some remote, stern Victorian Father that held them, but the close, familiar and tender parent we dare to call Abba, Daddy.

What we discovered together as a community of reflection charged to give an account of our hope was the inextricable relation between hope and faith. Hope is the other side of the coin of faith. Hope is faith in action, hope is faith springing into life, and springing into life in the middle of hopelessness and despair - in the middle of it and not on the other side of it. We discovered what St Paul tells us in Romans, ‘in hope we were, and are, saved -‘It is this that gives assurance of what Paul tells us in Romans;

the sufferings of this present time are not
worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed.

and the glory to be revealed is the liberation of all things - all humanity and the whole of the created universe, from violence, and pain and sorrow. Christian hope is not only for humanity, but for the whole of the created universe. We are only slowly seeing the implications of this for our responsibility to care for creation.

It is, isn’t it, the same faith and hope at the heart of all things, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the very truth of a God who redeems and sanctities, that each of us has to discover for ourselves, We have to discover it over and over again in our personal lives when we loose a friend, a parent, a child, someone we love. In the middle of the awful aching and apparent hopelessness of their going we discover a little of the truth that life has, and will, triumph over death, our little crucifixions blossom in a spring of hope. We learn that we can, in the power of the Spirit, hope against hope, because the ground of our hope is in the God who died and rose again that we might have life in all its fullness.

And in our community of reflection those days in Accra we discovered something else as we struggled to give an account of hope, the hope that was in us. We discovered that our faith in the central message of the Gospel, Jesus Christ crucified and risen was what united us. Whether we were Roman Catholics, or Orthodox, or Protestants, or Disciples of Christ, or Lutherans paled into insignificance compared to the unity that was already ours in our shared faith . We found a profound unity at the very heart of the Gospel message. This put our disagreements over the ordained ministry, over primacy, over the ordination of women to the priesthood, over eucharistic theology in a totally other perspective, in the perspective of those whose lives and whose hope depend upon the one and the same faith. We could look at one another as brothers and sisters who together call Abba . Our ecclesial divisions were both relativised and seen for what they are - an absurdity and a scandal, a denial of the faith we held in common. We could see starkly that our refusal to live out our common faith in the midst of the brokenness of the world’s Irelands and South Africas, today’s Sudans and Bosnias, damages the credibility of our faith and obscures our hope.

And that leads me to one final thought. As we learnt to exchange our accounts of hope we discovered that hope breeds hope - and hope increases faith. Celebrating signs of hope together is a way of confirming in us our common faith. Gordon Gray again, in the midst of the blasts of Northern Ireland. I thought of his poem written twenty-five years ago in Accra, when I saw him on television speaking the same message of hope in the latest tragic bombing only weeks ago in Omagh:

I do see signs of hope.
I see them immediately around me
my children, full of life and zest, of hopes and dreams
my wife, incarnating your love as teacher, setting free
from ignorance men imprisoned and detained without trial, no matter who they are
the member of my church who said ‘I’ve thought of what you said and changed my mind.’

I see a wider sign

a new determination among some to replace sectarianism with socialism
Christians transcending the past by finding each other in united witness to their faith.

I see a sign
flowers growing on a bombed out site.
The sign - an empty cross.

My Sisters and Brothers we are called to celebrate signs of hope so that we may ,as Paul says in Romans, abound in hope’ and thus be strengthened in our common faith,

- I take back to England the gift of hope you have given me in the signs of reconciliation - the reconciliation of memories - with the aboriginal peoples and their response of generosity;

this service is a sign of hope - a sign of our shared faith and hope;

the fellowship of the National Council of Churches in Australia is a sign of hope in the middle of our church divisions;

our celebration a few says ago of a decade of women’s solidarity with women is a sign of hope;

the fifty years together in the fellowship of churches that make up the World Council of Churches that we celebrated on the 20th of September is a sign of hope.

As we travel from the Assembly in Canberra to the Assembly in Harare we celebrate together the theme: Turn to God; Rejoice in hope. The hope that we shall rejoice in together at Harare, is the hope that knows that in the midst of brokenness, in the midst of the groaning of creation, life will triumph over death – the sure knowledge that God is – that the Son of God died and rose again for us – and that by the power of the Holy Spirit, God will bring to pass all the glory – the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

This is the hope symbolised in the shattered pieces of the pots that we will take with us - the sure hope that in the midst of brokenness and in the midst of the groaning of creation there is and will be life unending.

This is our common hope, this is our common faith.’ In hope we are saved.’ Let us rejoice in hope.

AMEN

Bishop Michael Putney

In 1981 the Joint Working Group between the Roman Catholic Church and the World Council of Churches produced a report entitled, Common Witness. I would like to quote a paragraph from it:

When he prayed that all be one so the world might believe (John 17:21), Jesus made a clear connection between the unity of the Church and the acceptance of the Gospel. Unhappily Christians are still divided in their churches and the testimony they give to the Gospel is thus weakened. There are, however, even now many signs of the initial unity that already exists among all followers of Christ and indications that it is developing in important ways. What we have in common, and the hope that is in us, enable us to be bold in proclaiming the Gospel and trustful that the world will receive it. Common witness is the essential calling of the Church and in an especial way it responds to the spirit of this ecumenical age in the Church’s life. It expresses our actual unity and increases our service to God’s word, strengthening the churches both in proclaiming the Gospel and in seeking for the fullness of unity.

I would like to repeat the second last sentence: “Common witness is the essential calling of the Church and in an especial way it responds to the spirit of this ecumenical age in the Church’s life.” In describing what common witness might involve, the text emphasised two different dimensions. Firstly: “Through proclaiming the cross and resurrection of Christ, they affirm (i.e. those engaged in common witness) that God wills the salvation of his people in all dimensions of their being, eternal and earthly.” Secondly, it recognised: “(Common witness) means Christian involvement in matters of social justice in the name of the poor and the oppressed.”

Right throughout the history of the World Council of Churches there have been tensions between the different movements which brought it into being. For example, there is a tension between the Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation (JPIC) stream/movement/programme and the Faith and Order or Christian Unity movement/stream/programme. In their earlier forms, these two movements were present and participated in the formation of the World Council of Churches fifty years ago. However, it was only in 1961 that the International Missionary Council became part of the World Council of Churches. As someone who has been most involved in the Faith and Order stream I have continually argued for its importance, indeed its necessity, in the World Council of Churches and the larger ecumenical movement. However, I have to say that whatever marginalisation I may have imagined had occurred for Faith and Order or the quest for Christian unity, such marginalisation is nothing in comparison with the marginalisation of the missionary movement within the larger ecumenical movement and the World Council of Churches. The missionary movement has always been “the poor relation”.

Many ecumenists seem to be either focussed on the world and its need for justice, peace and the protection of the environment, or on the churches and their need to come together in Christian unity. I do not deny that working for justice, peace and the integrity of creation is integral to the mission of the church and unity between the churches is crucial to its mission. However, I believe that the foundational missionary dynamic of wishing to proclaim Jesus Christ to the world very seldom comes to the forefront in ecumenical programmes or even, I fear, in the heart of many ecumenists. Everyone easily points to the Johanine text containing Jesus’ prayer that we would be one so that the world might believe that it is the Father who sent him, but we are too easily side-tracked into affirming only the first part of his prayer: “that they/we may be one”; or unconsciously concluding it only with: “so that the world will exist injustice, peace and protective of the integrity of creation.”

Last year, the fourth phase of the International Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and some representatives or members of classical Pentecostal Churches came to a conclusion. The topic for the phase, from 1990 to 1997, was Evangelisation, Proselytism and Common Witness. It’s a very interesting document because, as many would know, in parts of Latin America there can sometimes be great tensions between the Roman Catholic Church and Pentecostal Churches because of the rapid growth of the latter at the expense of the former. In paragraph 118 of the Report, a kind of definition of ‘common witness~ emerges:

Common witness means standing together and sharing together in witness to our common faith. Common witness can be experienced through joint participation in worship, in prayer, in the performance of good works in Jesus’ name and especially in evangelization. True common witness is not engaged in for any narrow, strategic denominational benefit of a particular community. Rather, it is concerned solely for the glory of God, for the good of the whole church and the good of humankind.

There is no suggestion in the report, in fact the contrary, that such common witness between Roman Catholics and Pentecostals would be easy. Later in No. 122 the report indicates that when it speaks of common witness it is not suggesting that there should be any compromise involved in making this possible. On the contrary, “Common witness is not a call to indifference or to uniformity” it says. The report clearly affirms that common witness does not prevent individuals, communities or churches from witnessing to their own distinctive heritage and, indeed, witnessing separately on matters about which they disagree. “However,” as it says, “this can be done without being contentious, with mutual love and respect.”

I think this document stands as a testimony to the fertility of the ecumenical movement through the generous loving activity of the Holy Spirit. It also stands as a challenge to churches like our own which are very often willing to bear common witness on issues of justice, but sometimes less willing to bear common witness to the gift of salvation in Jesus Christ. I believe both forms of witness are essential and integrally related. To offer Jesus Christ to a society is to offer the way of life which he came to initiate in our world and that means to offer justice, peace and care for the environment.

But common witness does mean offering Jesus Christ. Have some of us perhaps become just a little reticent about this? Is one reason for such reticence the fact that we have entered into dialogue with our culture and with other World Religions? If reticence is a result of such dialogue, we have misunderstood the nature of dialogue. Authentic dialogue presupposes genuine witness. There is no value in dialoguing with “the other” whoever that may be if we are not truly ourselves, and to be truly ourselves is to be truly Christian, to be truly disciples of Jesus Christ. In our case it means being truly convinced that he is the way, the truth and the life.

I would hope we go much further than we already have as Christian churches in our dialogue with World Religions. I would hope that we have enormous respect for the gifts of our culture and the signs of the Spirit that are there before we even utter one word of the gospel. At the same time, I believe we carry within ourselves and in our communities an enormous treasure which is the knowledge and love of God revealed to us in Jesus Christ, and I would hope that we are willing to offer this gift, the greatest of all, to our society —and to do it together.

If we are so willing, and presumably many are, the question arises of how we might deal with those matters about which we disagree. There is already a common faith which all could proclaim and to which all could bear witness which has become obvious in our ecumenical dialogues, both bi-lateral and multi-lateral. I have in mind especially the results of the WCC Faith and Order Commission project “Towards the Common Expression of the Apostolic Faith Today.” This study has explored our common faith as expressed in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and has thereby laid a rich and broad foundation for common witness by a very wide range of Christian churches.

Some churches might not see the need for even all that has been discovered in this very important study. They would be content for churches to come together around a simple message of salvation in Jesus Christ. Some of these would not consider many of the different beliefs and practices of churches outside of this core as affecting the essentials or the fundamentals of the gospel. Common witness for these Christians only becomes difficult if they believe another church has compromised this basic message by their doctrines or practices. They would need to be assured of this first.

Others would want to affirm the essential interconnectedness of the various truths of salvation as found in the scriptures and proclaimed in the credal formulas of the Church through the ages. While they too would begin with a simple message of salvation and also believe that this was a non-negotiable essential core, proclaiming the fullness of the gospel for them would lead them deeper and deeper into the full faith of the church through the ages as they have come to understand it. So there would be other essentials for them, less central but still integrally part of the gospel or the Apostolic Tradition or the Word of God as they understand it. They would not want any partners involved in common witness to suggest that other truths of the faith which they hold dear are peripheral or even questionable. These latter churches would want any common witness to draw people back to the church of their baptism, if such people have already been baptised but have drifted from the church. Such matters would need to be addressed with sensitivity before common witness could take place in an effective way.

Evangelisation, or evangelism, with all the challenges which I have just outlined has to be an integral part of the common witness of Christian churches. But it is not all of it. Integral to bearing witness to or living the gospel is the way in which we live and the kind of world we are called to work for by the grace of God. To proclaim Jesus and not also to be willing to proclaim reconciliation with Indigenous Australians, for example, is to proclaim a Jesus who is not the Jesus of the gospels. At the same time, to proclaim justice and peace and the integrity of creation but not Jesus is to offer only the fruits and not the source of the new life our world needs so desperately.

Our very coming together here and our very willingness to worship together is itself a common witness to Australia that we are in earnest about what we share and our desire to share it even more deeply — and in common. However, we need to ask what it is that Australians might expect to hear from us as a result of these three days. Perhaps they would expect to hear about our steps towards unity or about our social concerns and their social failures. Would they expect to hear about God and about the life and hope that Jesus Christ came to offer us? Sadly, I do not think Australians would be expecting too many of such words from us any more. Mind you, the right words are not easy to find. I find it hard to find them myself, because I would want Jesus himself to be heard and encountered in any proclamation I offered, and I know how easily I convey something less than Jesus Christ by my lazy, simplistic or individualistic account of him and what he desires to offer our society. Only he can show us the way Only he can enable us to discover the right words. Maybe we could reflect together on why we sometimes appear so tongue-tied — and he might even loosen our tongues.

I would like to repeat by way of conclusion, the point made in the paragraph first cited from the Joint Working Group: “Common witness expresses our actual unity, increases our service of God’s word, and strengthens each of our churches both in our proclamation and in our seeking of the fullness of unity with each other.” In other words, to struggle with all the issues that arise in trying to bear witness together will not only strengthen the witness itself, our proclamation of the gospel itself, but also our movement towards Christian unity. Not to struggle with the issues that arise around common witness is to seek Christian unity as an end in itself, forgetting the prayer of Jesus: “Father, that we may become one so that Australia will believe that it is you who sent him.”

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION:

I wish to acknowledge a number of things before opening up this question for discussion.

Firstly, I have been deliberately provocative, at least thought-provoking, in order to stimulate discussion on what I consider a very important question.

Secondly, I have spoken out of my own Catholic tradition and my own position in that church. There may be others here who would see the question quite differently and may have found my language or approach unhelpful. I am sorry if I have caused any disquiet for them.

Thirdly, I especially acknowledge that I am a Western Christian and have not in any way tried to address the approach or the concerns of Orthodox Christians. It would be good if we could hear them in our discussion.

Fourthly, I wish to emphasise again that I am deeply committed to working for Christian unity and for justice, peace and the integrity of creation.

All these things having been said, I now would like us to discuss the following questions:

- Am I right in my analysis of the priority given to evangelism/evangelisation in the ecumenical movement and in the NCCA?
- Are we truly tongue-tied?
- If you answer “yes” to the above question, please consider the following questions:
- Ought proclamation of Jesus be more central to the NCCA and to the ecumenical movement in general?
- What can we do to make that happen?

If you answered “no” to the above question please bring forward examples of how we are giving due weight to this dimension of the ecumenical movement. You might also consider how we might do this more fully or with greater enthusiasm.

Called to Common Witness - Bishop Michael Putney

1-5 October 1998
Sydney, New South Wales

The Revd David Gill

1.  The American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr observed that the only time the Church is really sufferable is when it is at prayer, for when it talks the Church invariably claims too much for itself. The same no doubt holds true for councils of churches and, especially, for reports perpetrated by their general secretaries. I must preface what follows, then, with an acknowledgement  – using the well known line from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer -   that “we have left undone those things which we ought to have done;  and we have done those things which we ought not to have done”. But I am not prepared to utter the next phrase: “And there is no health in us”. Our frailties and shortcomings notwithstanding, there is I believe quite a bit of health in the National Council of Churches in Australia and what it represents.

2.  Seven important convictions undergirded the transition from the old Australian Council of Churches to the NCCA. They remain fundamental to how this council understands itself and tries to do its job. Recall them for a moment.

2.1  Humanly speaking, the primary actors in the ecumenical movement are  the churches.

2.2  Ecumenical structures must be seen as interim, provisional, flexible and responsive to the churches that comprise them.

2.3  A council of churches has to respect the differing convictions of member churches, not least in the way it spells out the ecclesiological implications of membership.

2.4  Membership implies sustained commitment by the member churches -- to the council, yes, but more importantly to one another through the council.

2.5  Decision-makers in ecumenical bodies should be genuinely and authoritatively representative of the churches that comprise them.

2.6  Councils are to focus on fostering trust and deepening mutual understanding, and the reconciled koinonia for which we yearn must find expression in how we deal with each other in ecumenical decision-making even now.

2.7  Ecumenism does not start and stop at the national frontier, so other councils of churches -- world, regional and national -- are essential partners in what we are attempting to be and to do.

3.  The first of these convictions inspires the rest and requires unpacking further. The Basis of the NCCA says it well. The council, it states, “gathers together in pilgrimage (note the language of movement) those churches and Christian communities (note who is doing the moving) which confess the Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour according to the scriptures (note who gives the movers their distinctive identity)  and commit themselves

i)  to deepen their relationship with each other in order to express more visibly the unity willed by Christ for his Church, and

ii)  to work together towards the fulfilment of their mission of common witness, proclamation and service,

to the glory of the one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”

4.  “Churches ... which confess ... and commit themselves...”. The NCCA’s Basis is, in effect, the undertaking entered into by each member church on joining the council; a solemn vow made to other member churches, and to God. A National Forum is the right setting to reflect on how Australia’s churches are going at keeping these solemn undertakings, and on how this council is going as the instrument they have created to help them.

5.  But first let us underline yet again the identity of the pilgrims. We are not talking about the officers, staff, committees and assorted activities of the NCCA, not principally anyway. In an important sense the NCCA as such is of no significance. An interim report from the Special Commission on Orthodox Participation in the World Council of Churches, presented to last February’s meeting of the World Council’s Central Committee, makes the point eloquently:

* The member churches are the subject of the quest for visible unity,  not the council.
* The member churches teach and make doctrinal and ethical decisions, not the council.
* The member churches proclaim doctrinal consensus, not the council.
* The member churches commit themselves to pray for unity ...
* and the member churches are responsible for developing the sensitivities to sustain their dialogue.

6. Seven years and four days after the NCCA’s inauguration, we must acknowledge gratefully the early steps the churches have taken through and around the council. The ecclesial communities that came together in that new mix in July 1994 were right to give priority to building relationships rather than running programmes, deepening their companionship rather than organising activities. As the late Jean Tillard remarked some years ago, trying to broaden the celebrated Lund principle of maximum inter-church cooperation: “It is not enough
to do everything together that we can do together. We must also be everything together that we can be together.” Without always being fully aware of it, your representatives have been developing ways of praying together, thinking together, arguing together, making decisions together, laughing together, being together, that enshrine gratitude for each other’s gifts and respect for each other’s sensitivities as well as a healthy appreciation of each other’s human frailties.

7.  But more. The working papers before this meeting, reflecting the work of the member churches’ representatives on our assortment of commissions and networks, offer some exciting possibilities for helping our churches move forward together towards the fulfilment of the vows they have made. For example:

• the covenanting process, developed through our Faith and Unity Commission, which invites churches to use some sanctified imagination and find ways of giving more visible expression to the real albeit incomplete communion they already share;
• the efforts we are making through Christian World Service to encourage greater inter-church cooperation  in the area of international relief and development;
• the Social Justice Network’s initiatives to help us understand why our churches severally speak as they do on social issues and how they might with more integrity speak ecumenically; 
• the solid homework done by our Aboriginal and Islander Commission to help churches find their place alongside all who yearn for the nation’s healing;
• and more.

8.  Such reports and proposals, it must be remembered, represent only a series of institutional tips on the ecumenical iceberg. The ecumenical movement, thank God, is much vaster than the structures we set up to serve it and the programmes we adopt to advance it. During these days we will be reminded, not least in the joint report of our working partners the state ecumenical bodies, of how much is happening in the wider scene. Some people, sadly, fail to recognise the strength and creativity of the continuing drive towards Christian unity. Some persist in referring to our time as “an ecumenical winter” -- a depiction which is doubly misleading, because it implies a sunny past, which never was, as well as a bleak present, which certainly is not. On the evidence, it would be more accurate to speak of a continuing ecumenical spring, with of course occasional showers and every so often a storm to make things interesting.

9.  In any case, we are on this pilgrimage together not because of the climate of the moment but because unity is the will of God, because a gospel of reconciliation demands a manifestly reconciled and reconciling community, and because -- to use the memorable image of Lesslie Newbigin -- a divided Christianity has about as much credibility as a temperance society the members of which are perpetually drunk.

10.  Note, however, the danger that is lurking for would-be pilgrims: the temptation to stop, put their feet up and relax. Too many councils of churches have begun with a clear ecumenical vision, only to become bureaucracies behind which the churches have sunk back into the torpor of denominational business-as-usual. It can happen so easily, and when it does the council in question has ceased to be an “ecumenical instrument” and become an “ecumenical alibi”  –  a device that gives all concerned the comfortable illusion of journeying towards unity while permitting the status quo of denominational immobility to continue unchallenged.

11.  With this in mind, and noting that 2004 will mark a decade from the NCCA’s inauguration, I wonder if this National Forum might do well to ask your new Executive, assisted by the fresh eyes and as yet uncorrupted mind of your new General Secretary, to undertake a review of how the council is measuring up to the objectives set for it. Let me push my luck a bit further and suggest several concerns such a review would need to include within its field of vision.

12.  First, a deficiency of the NCCA is that some members of the family still feel unable to gather under its roof. Yes, it is more inclusive than the old Australian Council of Churches, but the Serbian Orthodox Church, several Protestant churches like the Baptists and the Presbyterians and the whole Pentecostal stream, remain outside. When any church is absent from the growing fellowship of Christ’s people, that fellowship must be considered sadly incomplete.

13.  A second challenge is that our council finds itself operating in working relationships that are seriously unbalanced. Most of our key ecumenical partners -- the WCC, the Christian Conference of Asia and most NCCs in the Asia region -- comprise only Protestant, Anglican and in some cases Orthodox churches. While trying to foster a comprehensive ecumenism at home, we find ourselves having to draw insights from and work together with a largely Protestant ecumenism elsewhere. One consequence is that we need to remain ready to share the experience we have gleaned from our privileged ecumenical mix in this country with less inclusive partners elsewhere. Another is that we must continue to take special care to ensure that the ecumenical imbalance abroad does not lead, by default, to a similar imbalance of substance and style developing in the NCCA.

14.  Third, through these years your efforts through the NCCA have been hamstrung by a lack of resources. As the Finance Committee recalls in its report, the task group responsible for planning the new body had alerted prospective member churches to the anticipated requirements, in staff and program costs, of the objectives they were setting for the council: $400,000 a year, in 1993 dollars. Member church contributions to the council have never reached even half that figure. My hope had been that the churches’ greater sense of ownership of the council would translate into a matching financial responsibility for it. In that, clearly, I was naive.

15.  The result is that some of the council’s key objectives remain pious hopes, with little prospect of much being done about them in the foreseeable future. Our Commission on Mission, Social Justice Network and Network on Women and Gender Relations struggle to operate with no staff support at all. The Faith and Unity Commission and Youth Network have minimal, very part-time staff support. Budgets of most commissions and networks have no provision for travel, which makes the “national” in our title at least questionable. A further consequence is that committees and staff are, by default, having to seek funding from sources other than member churches. To the extent that they succeed, their very success must start to call in question the emphasis on the organisation being a council of churches and introduce the risk -- which our Christian World Service commission is already grappling with -- of funding sources subtly influencing the NCCA’s policies and priorities. More than churches perhaps have realised, a council’s self-understanding and its sources of income go hand in hand.
 
16.  Fourth, the NCCA has not yet discovered an effective way of bringing the churches’ views into the public forum, when matters of national or international importance are up for debate. This is partly because the council has no staff capacity for media work, so what is done happens in someone’s spare time using whatever amateur skills he or she can muster. But it is partly too because constitutional constraints on the making of public statements, devised to ensure that what the council says truly echoes the convictions of its member churches, require consultation and therefore time. The media does not work that way, however, with the result that --  as the report of the Aboriginal and Islander Commission observes -- the churches’ voice at times may have been muted. Our intention -- that the NCCA should express what the churches think, not what a commission or a general secretary thinks the churches ought to think -- is absolutely correct. But a viable way of achieving this laudable goal has yet to be found.

17.  Fifth, the challenge in Australia today is to discover an ecumenism for a time of stress. Our churches are in trouble, like those in Europe and North America. Numbers are down or at best static, in many denominations. Budgets are tightening. We feel less significant, more peripheral to the nation’s life. There are conflicts in a number of churches, not least over questions of authority. Morale is suffering. At such times, introversion is an all-too-natural response, with ecumenical commitments put on hold until what seem to be more urgent issues can be sorted out. But of course ecumenism is not an item that can be moved up or down an agenda. It is a way, it is the New Testament way, of being Church. It is the gospel-inspired set of relationships and commitments within which, severally and together, we wrestle with the question of what obedience to Jesus Christ requires of us, in good times and in bad.

18.   Finally, let no one underestimate the wonderful opportunity that stands before us. Tim Winton, in his novel The Riders, has his lead character, an expatriate Australian, pondering the countryside in Ireland. “It was a small, tooled, and crosshatched country,” he muses. “Every field had a name, every path a style. Everything imaginable had been done or tried out there.” But his homeland, he remembers, felt different. “In Australia you looked out and saw the possible, the spaces, the maybes”. Other countries may have long histories behind them. Modern Australia’s history has barely begun. The national identities of others may be set in concrete. Ours continues to evolve. Those dramatic possibilities, those spaces, those maybes, combine to make Australia an extraordinarily exciting nation to be part of right now.

19  They also make this, as Hugh Mackay told us yesterday, an extraordinarily exciting context in which to try to serve Jesus Christ. A society in flux, a national identity under construction, a nation whose history lies before us not behind, offers our churches untold possibilities for redefining their imported relationships, reconciling their separated memories and reworking ecclesial identities that were shaped for times and places far from here. My hope for this council, in these days and in the years ahead, is that it may become an increasingly significant sacred space from which Australia’s churches together are inspired to look out and glimpse what are for us “the possible, the spaces, the maybes”.

The Revd Dr Lance Steicke

Archbishop Keith Rayner and I were guest speakers at the March meeting of the South Australia Council of Churches. The topic: Is Ecumenism still an Issue: Where to in the Future?

Is Ecumenism still an issue? I said it has waned as an issue for interest and excitement, and as a priority in people’s thinking and activity. If the question were, should ecumenism still be an issue, my answer would be a strong and definite YES.

Archbishop Keith said: ‘young people are not particularly concerned about Christian unity’.     ‘The question for most young people’, he said, ‘is no longer, Which religious tradition is best? Or does church unity matter? The question among most young people is, Does religion matter at all? Does Christianity matter at all? Does God matter?’

We’ve come a long way. But that journey hasn’t always been easy and straightforward.

Joseph A. Burgess in In Search of Christian Unity (P. 11) says, ‘Ecumenism in recent years has been an anomaly of progress and frustration’.

It’s very interesting to report evidences of that same progress and frustration very close to home. Both the Lutheran-Anglican and Lutheran-Uniting dialogue are currently in a state of progress with considerable excitement. Some light seems to be shining at the end of the tunnel. But only a few years ago both dialogues were in frustration. The Lutheran-Anglican went into recess because it was felt nothing more could be done. The Lutheran-Uniting floundered and threatened to totter altogether.

It’s difficult to understand this anomaly of progress and frustration. Is it due to institutional inertia and/or the self-interest of church leaders?  I daren’t try to answer the question. I simply let it hang.

I would not have predicted 50, 40, 30, even 20 years ago that we would be where we are today. The development has exceeded all expectations.

What is my vision for the future?

1. Restoring the Centre. Already something of that is happening - a concern for the centre, the essence, the heart and core of what we’re on about as church. If you think about it, it’s this that has divided us to a fairly great extent. Most, if not all, movements within the church and sectarian groups, arose because of a deficiency within orthodox or established Christendom. But with the emergence of these movements, denominations and sects, the emphasis was often off-centre. How easy it is for us, and how tempting, to devote our time and effort to what is peripheral and off-centre. My vision for the future is one whereby the churches will give themselves more fully to core issues, to the centre. And, of course, that centre, those core issues, focus on the  common confession of Jesus Christ on the basis of the Holy Scriptures and the interpretation of the early Christian Creeds.

2. Rediscovery of the gospel. This, of course, is not unrelated to the previous point. In fact, it’s very closely allied to it. I probably betray my Lutheran roots in this. The essence of the Lutheran Reformation was the rediscovery of the gospel. This is seen clearly in the emphasis on grace alone, faith alone, Christ alone. We are saved alone by the grace of God solely through faith in the atoning work of Jesus Christ. This, the gospel, was important to Martin Luther. It’s important to me. I believe it should be important to all of us. Every generation is in danger of losing the gospel. How can we help each other rediscover it, preserve it, stand on it, proclaim it? Does the NCCA have a role in this regard? And, if so, what is it?

3. Serving each other in a mission context. Jesus said to the church, ’Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you’. And then he breathed on his disciples. And he continues to breath on us and on the church to this day. The breath of Jesus. The Spirit of God. The sound of a rushing mighty wind, a breath. On Pentecost Sunday I told the congregation that I was serving at the time that I had thought of getting into the pulpit, going BREATH, and then sitting down and letting them ponder on that. There’s life in breath. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation is evidence of that as one person breathes life into someone no longer breathing. Jesus breathed the breath of the Spirit into his disciples. The early church, filled with that breath of Jesus, that Spirit, went out and they turned the world upside down. They witnessed to Jesus, as he had told them to do. Witness, mission, evangelism is crucial. Bring two or three or more Christians together and what should they immediately want to do? Worship and evangelize. We are probably not ready to do a great amount of mission work together as churches, but what about:
a) common approaches and strategies
b) research into Australian culture, the context for mission. Friday’s Seminar is a good example of this.
c) Working together as at Seaford
d) Planning together: You go here, we’ll go there. Rather than set up side by side

4. Helping the churches be the church.  How can the NCCA better serve its member churches and the cause of church cooperation, covenanting and collaboration in Australia?

Karl Barth (Thielicke I BELIEVE P. 235) says, ‘The church lives from her function as herald, she is God’s company. Where the church is alive, she must face the question of whether she serves this function or whether she is an end in herself. If the latter is the case, the church usually begins to taste “sacral”, to act pious, to become priestly, and to taste sour. Anyone with a sensitive nose will smell and find it dreadful.’

Is the NCCA serving member churches and helping them in their function as ‘herald’? Because of particular and different confessions the task of being ‘herald’ is no doubt denominational, but resourcing for the task, sharing homework, providing challenges, motivation, mutual encouragement, prayer – this can come from a common pool.

How can the NCCA better serve its member churches?
This is a key question. And a key issue. The Constitution asks it of us.

The first two of the four Objectives of the Constitution say that the NCCA is to encourage and enable the member churches to do this and that. That’s where the emphasis lies – the NCCA serving the member churches - ‘through prayer, dialogue and shared engagement in mission’. It is to include ‘the areas of spirituality, liturgy, theology, history, sociology and culture.’

How can the NCCA better serve its member churches?
Dare I suggest that we need to work a lot more and a lot harder at such things as:

1. The affirmation of each other. We have been good at condemning each other, not so good at affirming.
2. Allied to this is the removal of condemnations. Lutherans and Roman Catholics took a giant step forward when they did this in the Joint Declaration on Justification. But we have a long way to go.
3. Are member churches open to admonition about the limitations of their own traditions? I know I’m very sensitive in this area. And I suspect we all are, some more so than others. Now we must defend our own traditions and our convictions, our confessional position. But what about that which is not an essential part of our confession?
4. How can there be interchange of clergy (and acceptance of each other’s ministry) given our different standards for the ordination and calling of clergy and our different stands on ministry. Lutheran-Anglican dialogue has been working hard on this.
5. Are we working on the right agenda? Or are there are other issues and agenda items before us which we should be tackling?

5. A greater sense of belonging.

Konrad Raiser in To Be the Church says, (P.5)’ An initial general – and sobering – observation is that for many member churches, particularly in the southern hemisphere, the World Council of Churches is a distant organization about which they know very little’.

This applies within denominations. Congregations often know very little about the work of the wider denomination. Denominations know little about the NCCA. It is a ‘distant organization’.

My visit to WA last year  made it clear to me that those in the West see the NCCA as something in the east, far removed from them, not interested in them. How can the West own the NCCA? What can we do to create a sense of belonging, of ownership, of commitment?

How do we deal with the communication gap? Getting the message to the churches and from the churches into its various parts.

Konrad Raiser, (P. 12) ‘None of the churches can face these challenges alone’. He had been talking about such things as evangelism, education, church-state relationships, church-to-church relationships on the national level, denominational defensiveness, training capable ecumenical leadership, involvement of youth in the ecumenical movement, etc. What evidences are there of the churches in Australia  facing the challenges before us together? How can we do so? What is the role of the  NCCA in this? What can the NCCA do to help churches face the challenges of   the day together?

6.   An evaluation of structure.   I realize that the NCCA is only seven years old. But that does not preclude us from considering an evaluation of our structures. You will gather from the above that I have focused on essence, identity, purpose, vision. But structure cannot be omitted or by-passed entirely.

The Executive recently debated our premises. Do they serve us adequately? Would we be better off outside of down-town Sydney? What are the implications of a change – to the churches, to the staff, to the work?

The Executive has also discussed earnestly from time to time finances and resourcing. It should be no secret that income is not what it ought to be from the member churches and that income is hardly keeping pace with requirements and expenditure.
What are the options?

· Increase income. Efforts have been made, but reality is different.
· Decrease expenditure.
· Streamline for greater efficiency and more effective ministry.
· Take up the even greater (and, of course, harder) question, are we over-ecumenicalized ( ! ) in Australia? Do we need the two tiers we have now – full and complete State organizations and administrations, dependent to varying degrees on assistance from the national body especially so far as CWS is concerned, and a full-blown national structure with all that goes with it?

7.   The scope of the ecumenical movement.

I have basically spoken only of the wider ecumenical scene. I have not touched the local or grassroots level. Is there any co-relation between what happens at the local level and on the state or national level? Can we be quite out of kilter with each other’s thinking? Can the leaders of the church be way out there with their thinking while the grassroots is still wondering whether a Catholic boy and a Lutheran girl can hold hands with each other without committing ecumenical sin?

Or is it the other way round? The grassroots is way out ahead with their thinking and practice leaving the leadership lagging behind.

The disparity between local and other levels varies from time to time, place to place, and issue to issue. Let me really stick my neck out and say that I’m not too convinced that the NCCA or its predecessor ACC has done too much to alter or influence the thinking of grassroots Australian Christians to any great extent. Nor am I convinced that grassroots Australian Christians have contributed anything vital to the NCCA. I am not pronouncing judgment. I am not saying whether this is good or bad. I believe it’s a fact.

Lack of resources may force all of us, national, state and local to look at greater streamlining and more efficiency of administration for the future.

8.   The need to rekindle the ecumenical vision.

Konrad Raiser talks about ‘the need to rekindle the ecumenical vision’. TO BE THE CHURCH,  P. X.    The last millennium, he says, was  ‘the millennium of Christian division’ with 1054 and 1517 being the outstanding dates.

I might add that the first  millennium wasn’t all that crash hot either.

Is it a utopian dream to think this new millennium will be any different?

The twentieth century could be classified as the century of the quest for Christian unity. At varying stages in the century the ecumenical vision was very much to the fore.

But what is the ecumenical vision?

· Is it rooted in WCC, NCCA, denominations, local churches, dialogue?
· Is it a leadership or a laity issue? Bishops or grass roots?
· Is it to do away with differences? I would never want to deprive the world of Orthodox worship, but I don’t want a world where Orthodox worship is the only option either.
· Is it visible unity, as most Catholics would want and expect and many others would aspire to as well?
· Is it full fellowship, altar and pulpit fellowship, even though structures and denominations might remain?

I don’t believe we would have consensus for one moment on what the ‘ecumenical vision’ is that we would want to rekindle.

And perhaps that is a good place to conclude this address. Not only because I’m probably over time, but also because I leave up in the air the very issue that brings us together, the question, why? Why have we come together? Why have we formed an NCCA? What for us is the ecumenical vision? What are the issues we should work on? What is central?

May God bless us richly as we tackle the agenda and the issues we do do together in the name of and on behalf of our respective churches.