The Revd David Gill,  13 July 1996

1. It is fitting that, early in our life together, the National Council of Churches in Australia should gather in Brisbane.  For Australian ecumenism owes much to the churches of the sunshine state.

2. In the early 1980s, by happy coincidence, Australia's three largest churches were led by Queenslanders:  John Grindrod was Primate of the Anglican Church, Rollie Busch presided over the Uniting Church, and Frank Rush was chairing the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference.  For years they had worked together to challenge a reactionary, racist and corrupt state government.  All three of them had suffered outrageous attacks from politicians, public opinion and members of their own churches who should have known better.  All three bore similar scars.  All three had become friends, colleagues, brothers in Christ, partners in ministry.

3. Then tragedy struck.  A few weeks after standing down as President of the Uniting Church, Rollie Busch suffered a heart attack that was to take his life.  The two archbishops, visiting Sydney at the time, asked if I would take them to the hospital.  I will always remember that scene at the bedside:  three old friends together facing the mystery of death, together affirming faith in the lord of life.  That scene, a gift of Queensland, remains for me, always, as an icon of ecumenism.

4. I recall that icon now not only in gratitude for three special saints of God, not only in deference to Queensland's substantial contribution to the wider ecumenical scene, but also in recognition of that "knowledge of the heart" which led our churches into the NCCA, which has sustained our journey during the two years past, and which goes before us now into the work and worship of this National Forum.

5. Recall for a moment what lay behind the NCCA's formation.  When the preceding Australian Council of Churches made way for this Council, it was not just a change of name and structures.  It was the churches entering into a covenant with each other and moving, as one of the documents said, "from cooperation to commitment".  Three things about the change should be noted.

...  OF CHURCHES

6. More than its predecessor the NCCA stresses that it is to be seen as a council of churches.  The thirteen member churches determine policy, representation on commissions and committees, and stances on public issues.  The heads of those churches participate in meetings of the NCCA Executive, and there is increased consultation with the churches before the Council's commissions and committees make decisions.

7. The churches' enhanced sense of ownership of their council is certainly a plus.  Yet we should not forget Archbishop Keith Rayner's warning, at the inauguration, about a possible loss of the Council's prophetic role because of the tighter ecclesiastical control.    That warning must be taken seriously.    We will sell the ecumenical movement short if we deprive it of its capacity to provoke, to disturb, to renew.  More precisely, we will sell the gospel short if we obsure its capacity to provoke, to disturb, to renew.

8. But what is it that makes ecumenism a creative disturbance in our midst?  Why does this strange movement stir us to dream new dreams, think new thoughts and contemplate the possibility of new relationships with brothers and sisters in Christ?  Ecumenism's challenge, I submit, arises not primarily because of structures that have liberated themselves from the churches, but rather from the dynamic let loose when churches seek, together, to discern the will of God and to set out, together, to follow the footprints of God in the dust of human history.

...  A SHARED MEMORY

9. Australia's new NCC was given a new beginning, a new name, a new constitution.  Relationships with bodies like the World Council of Churches and the Christian Conference of Asia had therefore to be renegotiated.  But for all the stress on newness, the fact remains that ecumenism in Australia has a history, a memory, an experience too rich to forget.

10. Some delicate footwork is needed to do justice to that history, while remembering that it is a history not fully shared by all the NCCA's member churches.  The Roman Catholic Church was not part of the ACC.  Other churches were not involved with the developments associated with the Second Vatican Council.  We have different ecumenical memories, and the process of building these into a shared memory with which all equally identify will take time and sensitivity.

... UNDER CONSTRUCTION

10. "Don't waste time, do it!" was the instruction to those who brought the NCCA into being.  The new council was inaugurated on the basis of bare essentials, with many issues of programme, style and structure to be worked out on the run.  Two years later, the NCCA is still a council under construction, as the churches figure out the implications of what they committed themselves to  -  and discover that other churches sometimes read the implications differently.  The resulting conversation  -  part of which we will conduct during this meeting  -  is to be welcomed as a legitimate and necessary manifestation of the desire to move "from cooperation to commitment".

THE CHURCHES' COMMITMENT

12. To what have the churches committed themselves?  The NCCA's Basis says it well:

"The NCCA 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".

13. Note the key motifs:   pilgrimage; confession of faith;  the scriptures; a deeper relationship with each other;  the unity Christ wills;   common witness, proclamation and service;  doxology;  and the Trinity.

14. What are the obstacles on the way, the barriers to be overcome, the temptations to be resisted?  We all know them, but let us name the devils afresh.

FALSE STEREOTYPES

15. On my first day in the office, following the NCCA's inauguration two years ago, I had to cope with an apoplectic phone call from someone who denounced Rome and all its works, quoted the King James version of the bible at me for fifteen minutes straight and warned of the sticky end awaiting all who fraternise with papists.  The same day, at the other end of Parramatta Road, Bishop Bede Heather received a similar call attacking Catholic leaders who had started consorting with people from other denominations.  It would be nice to think that one of these days those two callers might meet  -  they will have lots to talk about!

16. More soberly, Ut Unum Sint urges upon us  "the necessary purification of past memories".  You and I may have transcended the sectarianism and paranoia that marked inter-church relationships in the bad old days, but none of us is free of preconceptions, stereotypes, false expectations  -  yes, and anxieties too.  All of us, separately and together, have many memories that need purifying.

INSTITUTIONAL INERTIA

17. A recent issue of Ecumenical News International [Feb '96] carries a telling quote from the General Secretary of the WCC.  Says Konrad Raiser:

"The institutional representatives of the churches ... are caught in a framework of rules and norms which have been formulated over centuries to justify or maintain separated identities ...  An ecumenical vision that can inspire new commitment and can generate hope must break out of these constraints".

18. Indeed it must.  But breaking through such constraints,  never easy at the best of times, is particularly difficult when the churches find themselves in trouble.  The deeper the trouble, the more tempted we are to hold tight to familiar constraints and turn away from fresh challenges.  Australia's churches right now are, I believe, in very considerable trouble.  Symptoms vary from church to church, but they include declining numbers, tightening budgets, aging congregations, ambivalence about authority, uncertainty about the substance of the faith, rampant parochialism, hesitancy about mission and, as the bottom line, a morale crisis of very considerable dimensions.

19. A danger in all this, as I have warned before, is that the ecumenical movement gets relegated to the backburner until what appear to be more urgent denominational agendas get sorted out.  But ecumenism is not a matter to be thought about when more pressing items have been disposed of.  As Fr Banawiratma, an Indonesian Jesuit, reminded a recent consultation of the Christian Conference of Asia and the Federation of Asian Bishops Conferences, ecumenism is not primarily a matter of programmes, structures or activities;  it is first and foremost  "a way of being Church".  It is that set of perspectives on the faith, that quality of relationships with other Christians, that openness to the whole Church across the nations and through the centuries, within which we wrestle with the fundamental questions of obedience and look for the wisdom needed to put our respective houses in order.

PRIDE

20. How many bilateral encounters have you known where both sides were hammering the table, with each church making maximalist claims for itself as having the fullness of the Christian faith, the fullness of means of grace, the fullness of apostolic order?

21. Why do we do this, when each of us in our own heart is painfully aware of our own church's inadequacies and shortcomings?  What would happen, if we could replace the ecumenism of pride with an ecumenism of penitence?  If instead of asserting strength we felt able to acknowledge weakness?  If rather than demanding each other's acceptance our churches were big enough, trusting enough, to ask each other's help, correction, encouragement and support?

22. What would happen if each of our churches, quite explicitly, would seek such help from others so that it might enter more deeply into that shared tradition of faith to which, severally and together, we are all heirs?  That faith tradition, held in common through centuries of unity, contested often bitterly through centuries of division, is richly diverse yet centred on the same cross, proclaiming the same mystery of grace, informed by the same scripture, inspired by the same saints and martyrs, entered by the same waters of baptism, nourished by the same bread and wine, imbued with the same pentecostal Spirit, gifted with the same charisms, drawn towards the same destiny in God.

23. Finding our way afresh into that shared heritage of faith and faithfulness is an exciting journey indeed.  This place where we meet  -  Grace College  -  offers us sustenance for the journey, in more ways than one.  Over my head is the college logo:  a cross, undergirded by the words  "My grace is sufficient".   That gospel promise, I submit, cries out to be taken with radical seriousness by our churches.  The all-sufficiency of grace is not only what makes ecumenism possible.  It is also what makes ecumenism inescapable.  And it is what assures us that, no matter what the difficulties ahead, our ecumenical pilgrimage together will be one of joy and laughter.

1. Centenaries and millennia seem to have special significance for mortals, no doubt because we have ten fingers.  God does not have ten fingers, so presumably sets rather less store by such occasions.  Divine disregard notwithstanding, our compatriots may be expected to want to mark 2000/2001 as in some way special, and the question is whether the churches acting together wish to plan particular initiatives to help them do so.

2. The centenary of the Commonwealth of Australia and the advent of the third millennium of the Christian era are two quite distinct issues and care will be needed to keep them disentangled.

TOWARDS THE SECOND CENTURY OF FEDERATION

3. Given the significance of 2001 and our past stances on the issue,  the churches may be expected to give priority to pressing for a constitutional amendment acknowledging prior occupancy by the indigenous people of Australia.  The significance of such an action rests not only on doing justice to the past, but also laying an adequate foundation for a new beginning with indigenous/non-indigenous relationships in this country.  A referendum on the issue would need to be timed to avoid entanglement with the Sydney Olympics and in order for it to come into effect on January 2001.  It would be a fitting culmination for the present process of reconciliation.

4. The multicultural character of Australia cannot be taken for granted.  There needs to be a sustained commitment between now and 2001, from all levels of government and other national institutions, to ensure that Australians of non-Anglo-Saxon background go into the 21st century secure in their sense of equality with other Australians.  That commitment to strengthening the multicultural mindset must include a recognition of the primacy of the indigenous culture.

5. The churches will hope for a strong challenge to the complacency of many Australians towards the inequality and disadvantage that still afflicts sections of Australian society  -  eg.  the growing gap between rich and poor, the continuing denial of human rights to children, women, homeless youth, the mentally ill, prisoners and the unemployed.   Under this heading, consideration must be given to the issue of self-determination for indigenous people.  

6. Contemplating 2001, we are bound to recall some of the less impressive features of 1988.  Welcoming the approach taken by Joan Kirner's Centenary of Federation Advisory Committee, the churches will hope that this centenary is marked by a positive theme that captures the ideal and vision of the community, rather than the insipid, self-indulgent tone of  "celebration of a nation"  that characterised 1988.

7. What of our churches themselves?  It is hardly surprising that we are likely to concentrate rather more on the third millennium of the Christian faith than on the second century of the Commonwealth of Australia!  However, the national observances will give the churches an opportunity to engage with people of other faiths, and of none, in a shared conversation about visions, goals and values for an Australia whose identity is still being shaped.  As statistically the largest of the faith communities, Christians have a particular obligation to take initiatives in this regard.  The absurdity of trying to do so other than together hardly needs stating.

8. A major religious event, or events, of some kind would be appropriate to mark the country's new century.  If we don't take the initiative in this, others will.  There are two options and it would be desirable not to blur the line between them:  either an inter-religious celebration that does not purport to be an act of worship, or a specifically Christian event that is quite clearly an act of worship, or perhaps both [but separately].  In either case, encouragement and resources could be made available for similar gatherings taking place concurrently around Australia.

TOWARDS THE THIRD MILLENNIUM OF CHRISTIANITY

9. It is worth noting, at the outset, a warning sounded by Konrad Raiser,  general secretary of the WCC, in a memo to the WCC Executive Committee.  Granted that the Christian calendar has been accepted even outside the predominantly Christian part of the world, Raiser says we should beware of assuming that the change of the millennium will receive universal recognition.  "Any Christian observance should be aware of this inter-religious and inter-cultural dimension and should avoid triumphalist claims,"   he urges.

10. Internationally, Jerusalem and/or Bethlehem will be the focal point for celebrations, and the initial responsibility will lie with the local churches on the  spot.  The Middle East Council of Churches, which includes in its membership all the churches concerned, has appointed a committee to reflect, plan and coordinate such initiatives and to help the local churches respond appropriately to any initiatives coming from outside the region.

11. In a letter to WCC member churches, Raiser writes:  "Preliminary explorations among the churches, regional ecumenical bodies and Christian World Communions, and most notably among the Roman Catholic Church, which will celebrate the year 2000 as a Holy Year, converge on the proposal of gathering the heads of Christian churches/communions in Jerusalem or Bethlehem for a common celebration of Pentecost or Christmas in the year 2000 or of Easter in the year 2001 [when the western and eastern dates of Easter coincide].  Celebrations on the world level will primarily include church leaders and a few other church representatives.  But ways should be found to make the ecumenical observance of the year 2000 a matter of the whole people of God in each and in every place.  A sequence of occasions for joint witness and celebration could be envisaged, starting from the Week of Prayer in January  [note:  in Australia the Week of Prayer falls between Ascension and Pentecost] of the year 2000, and proceeding through Pentecost and Christmas and culminating in the common celebration of Easter in the year 2001.  The Executive Committee has encouraged us to give priority to fostering such efforts on local and national levels."

12. Some Australian churches will find it important to relate to global denominational initiatives, like the Holy Year.  For others, such events in far away places will have less significance.  For all, it should be important to encourage appropriate observances, nationally and locally, in which as many of our people as possible can become involved.

13. The common date of Easter in 2001 is particularly significant, given the strong Orthodox presence in this country.  An Easter focus would also help disentangle such specifically Christian celebrations from the various national events surrounding the centenary of federation, which presumably will focus on 1 January 2001.   

14. The tone of anything we do will need careful watching.  On the one hand, the past millennium of Christian faith and witness gives plenty of cause for repentance.  Our often murky history provides little justification for Christian triumphalism.  On the other hand, there is much for which we can be genuinely thankful, not least the emergence of the ecumenical movement during the past century with its qualitative change in relationships between the Christian churches.  To borrow Raiser's words, the observance of the year 2001 should be oriented towards repentance and forgiveness, commemoration and liberation, thanksgiving and hope.   It should also take care to be forward-looking, with a strong emphasis on the young, on the mass involvement of many and on one or two major symbolic events. 

PRELIMINARY CONVERSATIONS

15. After initial consideration by the national heads of churches, the NCCA Executive, the Faith and Unity Commission and national and state ecumenical staff, the General Secretary convened a group of creative minds to consider what initiatives might appropriately be taken by the NCCA.

16. The question before that group was not what Christians should do in connection with these key dates, or even what the churches qua churches should do.  Christians, can be expected to take many initiatives to mark these dates, and that is all to the good.  The question for the NCCA is:  what if anything might Australia's churches appropriately plan to do together?

DATES  -  AND POSSIBILITIES

17. The key dates will be:

_ Advent 1999 through to 31 December 1999
_ May 2000  Week of Prayer for Christian Unity/Week of Prayer for Aboriginal Reconciliation/Pentecost, all   roughly coinciding
_ September 2000  -  Olympic Games
_ January 2001 Centenary of Federation
_ Easter 2001  -  common date for all Christians
_ May 2001  Week of Prayer for Christian Unity/Week of Prayer for Aboriginal Reconciliation/Pentecost

Some of the above dates will be more directly of concern to the churches than others.

18. Advent 1999 through to 31 December 1999:   NCCA might encourage watch-night services, providing liturgical material and ideas as well as encouraging denominationally specific input.  The world can be expected to go berserk with balloons and fireworks, but the churches should not hesitate to be strongly counter-cultural as they invite people to silence, prayer and waiting before God.  Some fairly bizarre manifestations of apocalypticism may be expected, and that has implications for the way the churches will present their Advent message.

19. May 2000:    Weaving together the themes of Pentecost, Week of Prayer for Christian Unity and Week for Aboriginal Reconciliation, Australia's churches might engage in a  "Pilgrimage to the Heart"  with heads of churches gathering symbolically for prayer in the heart of the continent to initiate a spiritual journey by our people across the land.  This would underline the fact that the new century requires more than just changes to our constitution, but a spiritual journey by all Australians.  The journey motif is important.  We would seek to involve all churches, not just those in the NCCA.  Help would be given to enable people locally to engage, together, in this movement of the soul.  In some way, it is recognised, indigenous Christians will need to be seen to be playing a  leading role in it.

20. September 2000:  Sydney Olympics.   We understand that Sydney churches are planning various activities in connection with the Olympics, and we do not foresee the need for any initiatives by the NCCA.

21. January 2001:    Centenary of federation.   It would be appropriate for the NCCA to express interest in what the federal government may be planning, and to register its readiness to be involved in appropriate ways.  Again, there would be the question of ensuring the availability of appropriate liturgical material for local use. 

22. Easter 2001:   Common date of Easter.   From Easter to Pentecost 2001 would be the culmination of the churches'  "Pilgrimage to the Heart".  It should include a process of mutual commitment, locally and at all levels, in which Christians commit themselves to each other.  Study resources?  Prayer resources?  Ideas for local movement from cooperation to commitment?  Throughout, there would be a stress on the shared resurrection faith and the common pentecostal inheritance.

23. May 2001:   Pentecost, Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, Week of Prayer for Aboriginal Reconciliation.  Culmination of the process begun a year earlier.

A PROCESS

24. There will need to be contact with the Australian Consultation on Liturgy, to see what they may be developing;   with state ecumenical bodies;    with the ABC and religious media;   and perhaps with the Australian and New Zealand Association of Theological Schools regarding the phenomena associated with millenarianism.

25. Australia's experience with Taizé-style spirituality as a means for engaging a broad cross section of people in a spiritual journey should be considered, although at what point it might be most relevant to the above scenario is not yet clear.  Preliminary conversations with Brother Ghislain of Taizé have opened up a number of possibilities.

26. What the churches can do together in Australia will be governed largely by whether they can make available staff and other resources to enable the exercise.  This may be the moment to note that the Council  has at its disposal something called the Initiatives Reserve.  Currently worth about $110,000, this was put aside from a surplus following the hosting of the WCC Assembly as  "a reserve fund for use at the discretion of the Executive Committee to foster significant initiatives aimed at helping Australians discern the global dimensions of Christian obedience and give local shape to their ecumenical commitment".

27. Specifically, the National Forum will need to indicate whether and to what extent the Australian churches wish to act in concert, in preparing to mark these occasions, and whether and to what extent the possibilities outlined in this document suggest an appropriate way forward.  If the response to both questions is affirmative, the responsibility for taking plans forward will need to be defined and located.    Recommendations will be offered to the National Forum, and the Revd Tony Doherty,  Dean of St Mary's Cathedral in Sydney, has been invited to address the National Forum on issues raised in this report.

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