We are in the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. In fact this is the one hundredth week of prayer observed every year by all the Trinitarian churches where we focus on how we might make more concrete the belief we state in the Creed that there is only one church and that all Christians baptised in the name of the Trinity, belong to the Kingdom of God.
We all know that the history of the Church is a catalogue of fragmentation and division. Our own church of course separated itself from the rest of Western Christendom in the sixteenth century since which time a great proliferation of new churches have emerged. But even if we go right back in time, there has never been a heyday of Christian unity. Even in the fourth century the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus wrote, “no wild beasts are such enemies to mankind as are most of the Christians in the deadly hatred they feel for one another.” With the prospect of another Lambeth Conference looming, we might say, “plus ça change”.
Christian unity has always been something to pray for, and Christ himself seems to have foreseen that since he prayed for it on the night he was betrayed. Prayers have led to action, and the twentieth century ecumenical movement has indeed made extraordinary advances. Perhaps through the recognition within all the churches, particularly in Europe, that our position is more fragile than it has been for some time, solidarity has become a pragmatic strategy for survival and growth. In the face of growing secularism and the multi-faith context, we have put aside some of the divisions of the past and, as it were, joined hands and faced the world.
A Roman Catholic sister said to Fr Stephen and I on Wednesday that as a young women she had been uncertain as to whether it would be acceptable to recite the Lord’s Prayer publicly with non-Catholics. Now our two churches have virtually identical liturgies, we recognise the full legitimacy of one another’s baptismal rights, and on a local and national level we join together in a great many activities.
But there is no cause for complacency and structurally the Christian Church remains deeply disjointed. And it does seem to me that the ecumenical movement has, in our time, somewhat run out of steam. For all the Church of England’s movement toward the Roman Catholic Church, the possibility of officially-sanctioned shared communion seems as far away as ever. And in our relations with the free churches, many themselves struggling with aging congregations, our offers of closer cooperation can appear like corporate takeover and compromise of identity, particular confronting difficult questions like the role of bishops.
So what has gone wrong? Well it seems to me that the work of Christian unity is entering a new phase and the way we do ecumenism is changing. Think of it like Foreign Policy. A hundred years ago, relations between one nation and another were the responsibility of political leaders and diplomats. Men in suits negotiating on behalf of mass populations and forging treaties and alliances that secured the common good and filtered down into the lives of more or less passive citizens. And ecumenism was the same, bishops and church leaders gathering at the World Council of Churches and bilateral meetings to take decisions on behalf of their more less monolithic constituencies of believers.
Today, foreign policy has changed enormously. The role of the national government within the global economy has been dramatically relativised by many forces. There are now multinational corporations whose annual turnover far exceeds the GDP of small countries. There are alliances of people throughout the world united around specific issues and causes such as environmentalism or trade reform. And we are constantly being told that the threats that we now face as a nation no longer come exclusively from other alliances of enemy nations but from networks of dissidents within our own nation, connected with isolated rogue states.
Similar changes have taken place in the makeup of the Church. Even the most hierarchical churches are no longer such “top-down” institutions where our leaders can formally claim to represent exactly “who we are”. The Church too has trans-national alliances of reformers and traditionalists. Christians are uniting with others in other churches around particular issues and are far less subject to the authority of the particular church within which they happen to find themselves. And there are also great swathes of Christians today who think in exclusively non-structural ways and have no interest at all in a concrete unity of Christians beyond their immediate congregations.
And when you put all this together, it becomes no surprise that relations with other churches have to some extent stalled when we within global Anglicanism ourselves actually contain all the breadth of identity – and all the division that goes with it – that Christendom has ever known. Leaders cannot represent churches that have no shared sense of who they are and from where that identity derives.
Well that might all sound a bit depressing. But there’s no point being nostalgic for the past. This is the new reality of the Church. The Foreign Office now talk about “public diplomacy” which engages better with the realities of citizens on the ground, and perhaps we too need to adjust to a new kind of “public ecumenism”. This would mean that the question of Christian unity becomes something that is not merely the concern of those put in positions of responsibility above us, as if in the Week of Prayer we just pray for other people to get on with making the Church one. Today the need for Christian unity is brought back within our churches, between our congregations and within individual congregations themselves. Christian unity is no longer just a matter for diplomatic negotiation, church leader to church leader, it has become a fundamental part of discipleship, baptised believer to baptised believer.
And it is from this standpoint, as it were from the “bottom-up”, that the work of Christian unity must be renewed. In fact I think it is the only way that ecumenism could ever have life, because structural questions of order and authority with which church leaders are concerned, will only ever make sense if there is from within the Church the energising movement of the Spirit of unity which makes us see the very point of “being Church” at all. What constitutes the Church is not the imposition of some kind of order but a dynamic pointing to Christ from believer to believer.
This Gospel passage is the perfect illustration of this. It is the very primary moment of the formation of the Christian Church. And it comes with the recognition by John that Jesus is the one who will unite us with God. And that recognition comes from one who very self-consciously defines himself as less than Christ. Jesus does not turn up and say “ok, this is how things are going to be”. He does not take the “top-down” approach to church order. The constitution of the Church flows from a recognition by the believer that Jesus is where life is to be found. And, of course, it doesn’t stop there. The one who recognises who Jesus is and what Jesus is offering points others to him. And so John relinquishes those who are following him by showing them that Jesus is the only one to be followed. They in turn point others to Christ, Andrew saying to his brother “We have found the one anointed by God”. And he in turn becomes a disciple and is given the name Peter, because from all this sharing of the life of Jesus between believers, church order will eventually flow and this disciple will be at its head. All the characters in this story are not becoming subject to an order imposed on them but are responding to Christ’s call “come and see where I am staying”. And as Henry Vaughan concludes in his poem about these verses, all these disciples come to realise that Christ’s dwelling place is none other than their own sinful heart.
And that is where we need to think of Christian Unity as beginning, within the heart of each believer and flowing out from there into our congregations, as we do what these first disciples do, in pointing one another to Christ. That goes for the unity of this congregation too. If we are to move beyond being a group of Christians who simply gather together, to becoming more fully part of the One Holy Catholic Church, we need to pray that the Spirit will inspire us to do more to point one another to Christ. That will be in the example that we set to one another, in showing something of the love of Christ in our actions. That will be in what we say to one another, taking the time to talk to people we don’t know, taking an interest in their lives and sharing their burdens.
And that will also be more explicitly in overcoming our embarrassment to talk about our faith, our doubts and difficulties, as well as our own personal encounters with the love of God in Christ. We need to say to one another that “we have found the messiah” and, like these first disciples, we struggle to understand what that means and sometimes we lose our grip on the sense that it is even true. But as we explore that together in the company of Christ and energised into action by the Spirit of Unity, we grow more deeply together and consequently we grow closer to God.
The Lent groups are an important opportunity to do this and I hope that we will all consider how much we might receive from participating in this short 5 week course where we will not just talk about the content of our faith (what we might sometimes feel is imposed on us as order). But in our focus on prayer and spirituality we will be considering what is at the very heart of our encounter with God, both in personal terms and as a church.
So in this 100th week of prayer for Christian unity, we celebrate all that has been achieved in drawing the churches closer together. But we recognise that our prayers lead us to renew our commitment to unity in the church through the deepening of our faith and our belonging to one another. To paraphrase the song, let there be Christian Unity and let it begin with us.