Reflections on an Ecumenical Vision
for the United States in the 21st Century

United Church of Christ General Synod

June 2, 2009

I can remember when I was a kid some of my friends got money for getting good grades, and I never got a cent.  “What’s the deal?,” I asked my grandmother.  “Did I just end up with a cheap family, or what?”  And she answered, I still remember it, “you don’t get rewarded or praised for doing what you’re supposed to do.” 

There is something of the gospel in that (faith, for example, is surely its own reward, not a ticket to heaven), but my reason for bringing it up now is that, according to the grandma principle, I need not thank the United Church of Christ for living out your ecumenical calling. I don’t need to thank you for your extraordinary support of the NCC because, after all, it’s what you’re supposed to do as part of the covenant relationship you have made with 34 other communions.  No, I shouldn’t have to say thank you for being a Christian church that actually acts as if it’s part of the one body of Christ!  But, grandma, forgive me, I’m going to do it anyway. 

Since I became General Secretary in January of 2008, the UCC has taken the lead in articulating an ecumenical stance toward the Middle East and made it possible for the Council’s president, Archbishop Aykazian, and me to travel to the region; has also made it possible for us to visit China and South Korea, establishing strong working relationships with colleagues in that part of the world; has given leadership to our work of interfaith relations; has strengthened the Council’s Washington office by sharing with the NCC a colleague in racial justice and human rights; has driven the Council’s witness with regard to public education and given leadership to the whole education commission; has opened doors to possible individual donors (once thought of as completely taboo).  Your General Minister and President has modeled ecumenical leadership by insisting that all the churches be present through the NCC when making public witness; and your Ecumenical Officer has been my closest colleague and friend in this ministry, single-handedly ensuring that our crucial program of church-to-church visits would become the success that it is. 

Of course, I won’t mention Peter Makari and Xiaoling Zhu and Linda Jaramillo and Sandy Sorenson and Jan Ressinger and Jose Abraham de Jesus and Don Hill and Wally Kuroiwa and John Thomas and Lydia Veliko (among others) by name – but you know who you are. 

And then to be here on the evening when you honor Barbara Brown Zikmund who, in 2007, was absolutely instrumental to the restructuring of the Council – without which I wouldn’t be here at all…!  Over the years, I have picked on your church and mine a hundred times for stupid things we’ve done; but this evening I need to be blunt in the other direction.  Since becoming General Secretary, I have insisted, above all else, that the NCC is not an organization the churches join, it is a covenant they make with one another to grow in visible expression of the unity that is our gift – not our achievement, but our gift – in Jesus Christ.  And only one communion really seems to get it.  Thanks! 

*** 

I did not expect, or hope, to be General Secretary of the NCC is such lean times; but, while I dislike talking of silver linings when people are hurting (as they certainly are in this economic crisis), this could be a moment of opportunity for discovering new ways of living ecumenically.  At the recent meeting of the NCC Governing Board, I offered three observations about ecumenical leadership in these lean times.  I want to share them briefly with you this evening before commenting more specifically on the NCC. 

1. This is a moment when church leaders need to decide if ecumenism (which John Thomas nicely defines as life together with friends we didn’t choose) is essential to their communion’s identity.  Most churches profess that it is in their official documents, but the question, of course, is what they actually do in lean times. Is ecumenical dialogue and witness something a church supports out of its excess, but cuts when resources shrink (an expendable addition to the work of “the church”), or does it see life with others as central to its own self-understanding and spiritual well-being?  Times like these could be an opportunity to take seriously the famously-ignored Lund Principle:  “doing all things together except those which deep differences of conviction compel us to do separately.”  Or times like these can reinforce the pull toward ecclesiastical introversion, which is always the greatest obstacle to manifesting unity.  I warned at the Governing Board that if this latter is the course they take, then the churches should be prepared for more tensions in their relationships as a result of internal pressures and competition borne of scarcity. 

2. This is a moment when we should see more clearly the spiritual foundation of ecumenism.  Since we cannot revel in our institutional success, we have an opportunity to affirm that God is the Chief Actor in the movement, or else it does not move at all!  The formal evaluation at the end of my first year as General Secretary indicated that there was still a honeymoon, but one respondent did complain that “Michael spends too much time trying to get us to pray together.”  Let us pray:  God, help us all be guilty of this charge!

3. This is a moment when church leaders need to distinguish between “problems” and “conditions.”  Shrinking budgets in a time of financial crisis may be a problem which we can, to some extent, “fix” through cuts in expenditures and increases in development activity (both of which we have done).  But beneath these problems are major shifts in the cultural and ecclesial landscape, changed conditions that do not lend themselves to such solutions.  “Problems,” writes church consultant, Gil Rendle, “require action.  Conditions require learning.”  I would suggest, for example, that the growing religious diversity of this culture, which Barbara Brown Zikmund has engaged so effectively, is not a problem to be fixed by changes in mission strategy; it is a changed condition which may be a way (dare I say it?) that God is still speaking.  Similarly, it could be that the problem of decreasing income may force us to ask the deeper question:  What shape should conciliar life take in an age when networking is replacing centralized structures?  Even as we must act decisively in response to lean time problems, can we risk learning new ways of expressing our unity in the face of changed conditions?  And will God grant us the wisdom to know the difference? 

What precisely will this look like?  I am tempted to say that if you want to make God laugh, try to answer that question!  But, in fact, the contours of conciliar life in the coming decades are beginning to emerge. 

For one thing, the NCC’s Strategic Plan for this quadrennium is surely correct to emphasize relationship building even above program development, since the essence of the Council (often forgotten) is the relationship of the member communions to one another. 

Yesterday, I was speaking at the meeting of the General Board of the American Baptist Churches in Pasadena.  During the time for questions and comments, a pastor from Seattle admitted that she found herself “less invested” these days in the Seattle and Washington councils because there are now so many community organizations and interfaith coalitions that are doing justice-oriented programming – probably better than the councils can do it.  Well, of course, if a council is thought of as simply another social agency, then we can withdraw support from it in favor of more effective “competitors.”  But no one else, I said to her, can be what the Council is: a community of churches whose very life together is an embodied witness to a God of reconciling love.  Perhaps, I suggested, the role of the staff is to help the churches know one another and to invite them to work together rather than do work for them, to act on behalf of the churches by convening groups working toward common goals, to extend work initiated in the churches, to urge them to pray for and with one another – all of it as response to the God whose love has brought you together as council. 

Let me return to the problem of lean times.  As General Secretary, I will not allow the NCC to be whittled away, to be killed by inches as various churches, under internal pressure, see ecumenism as something external and, thus, demote it on their list of priorities.  If our aggressive efforts at fundraising in the churches do not bear adequate fruit in the coming 18 months – if, in other words, my colleagues and I are unsuccessful in helping the churches think of the NCC as “us” rather than “them” – then I will ask the Governing Board to radically change the Council’s profile:  making relationship building the focus of a small core staff, with only limited duration programs that must be entirely self-sustaining (as is the case with our highly successful work in ecojustice).  And I will challenge the churches to give leadership to particular ministries, dear to their heart and heritage, on behalf of their conciliar partners – as you are now doing by funding a position in racial justice and human rights and sharing that position with the NCC.   It is not simply making a virtue of necessity to say that the financial “problem” may actually be the catalyst for us to act like a council of the churches. 

Along with this focus on church-to-church relationships is the networking I hinted at a moment ago.  As you know, councils of churches at local, state, national, and global levels are not structurally related; but it is past time that we gave up the turf-protecting illusion of independence.  Let me offer an example. When I became General Secretary, the NCC was doing little, if any, work on the pressing issue of immigration reform; but lots was underway in various state councils.  So instead of starting our own program, I invited state council leaders to join me on a conference call, asking what the NCC might do to augment their efforts.  As a result of their suggestions, our website is now a clearinghouse for information on state and local initiatives, and we have convened a task force - made up of representatives from state councils, Church World Service, and NCC communions – to promote coordinated advocacy and to prepare grant proposals that promise collaborative activity from Tucson to Capitol Hill. 

In the same way, we need now to develop a network of “ecumenical congregations.”  You, of course, are blessed with an Ecumenical Officer who works hard at connecting councils and congregations, and we have colleagues here from the ELCA and the Presbyterian Church (USA) who do the same; but (my understatement of the evening) this is not universally the case.  My staff colleagues and I have no intention of circumventing the national denominational structures that are the constituting members of the NCC; but we have every intention of asking denominational leaders to authorize us to relate directly to congregations and parishes – providing educational materials on what it means to live ecumenically, sharing information about the other members of this community of Christian communions, offering a prayer cycle that will invite us to pray for the others with specificity, and recommending strategies for expressing our shared justice commitments.  These congregations won’t stop being Lutheran or Presbyterian or Methodist or Orthodox or Episcopalian or Baptist or Disciples or United Church of Christ – but they will hopefully show to the world that being these things is to be ecumenical.  And such a network may also give us a way of relating to “emerging churches” and others that do not fit patterns of denomination-based membership. 

Speaking of membership, Lydia, as chair of the Membership and Ecclesial Relations Committee, and I are exploring alternative forms of relationship between the NCC and churches that have historically been reluctant to become full members of the Council, including the Church of God (Cleveland, TN), the Church of God in Christ, the Mennonite Church, the Christian Reformed Church, the Romanian Orthodox Church, the Community of Christ, the Apostolic Catholic Church, the Catholic Apostolic Church, the Old Catholic Church.  And just last week, at their invitation, I met with the entire national leadership of the Church of Christ, Scientist to discuss possible involvement with the NCC.  Every day on this job I rediscover that my sense of the church is far too small! 

Well, there are many more things to suggest – like being more intentional about drawing on the resources of seminaries in order to help rebuild the connection between theological education and ecumenism or doing much of our advocacy and grant proposals in collaboration with interfaith partners, which we are beginning to do, especially with the Jewish Council on Public Affairs and the Islamic Society of North America – but perhaps this is enough to stimulate your own reflections. 

I will simply add that at the NCC we now envision 2010 as a crucial year for exploration and implementation of new ecumenical structures and relationships.  Both the NCC and CWS boards have voted to turn our joint annual assembly into a much broader commemoration of 100 years of modern ecumenism (100 years, that is, since the Edinburgh World Mission Conference of 1910).  Already a number of partners have indicated their intention to be present, including the Caribbean Council of Churches, the Latin American Council of Churches, the Canadian Council of Churches, the National Association of Ecumenical and Interreligious Staff, the executives of state councils of churches, the US Catholic Conference of Bishops, Christian Churches Together, and the US Conference of the World Council of Churches.  This will be an opportunity to assess where we have been as a movement and where we need to be headed; and in order to prime the pump, study processes undertaken with ecumenical partners are already developing papers on the following themes:

• Christian understanding of unity in an age of diversity
• Christian understanding of mission in an age of interfaith relations
• Christian understanding of creation in an age of environmental crisis
• Christian understanding of war in an age of terrorism
• Christian understanding of the economy in an age of scarcity

I obviously believe that the ideas I have shared this evening are important, even necessary; but what I have talked about thus far is mainly “orthopedic” when our deepest issues are “cardiac.”   The greatest single challenge we face, in my judgment, is to recover the theologically-grounded passion for the unity of the church that led to the formation of the UCC and has animated this movement as a whole for nearly a century.  Of course our understanding of unity will change, especially under the impact of a new appreciation for diversity; but it is one thing to speak of changing, deepening understanding and quite another to reduce the ecumenical goal to periodic cooperation around issues on which we generally agree. 

This past week, I was in Cuba where on two occasions I heard leaders of the Cuban Council of Churches lament the churches’ divisions, calling them a scandal that undermines our witness to Jesus Christ; and I thought to myself, “How I long to hear that in the NCC!”  For most of its members, I fear, the NCC is a comfortable arrangement of mutual forbearance that keeps the scandal of disunity at arm’s length, that permits the churches to remain self-contained, while doing together those things which, for reasons of expediency, they would rather not do alone. 

When I started as General Secretary, I would have said that one answer is to reaffirm the centrality of the NCC’s Faith and Order Commission; but I am now convinced that such a strategy only serves to further marginalize the unity agenda in the life of the Council.  Or, to say it another way, one of our orthopedic problems is the compartmentalization that still plagues the Council and the movement, dividing unity from justice as if each were not essential to a proper theological understanding of the other.  No, the whole of the NCC needs to focus on unity, even as we insist that the unity agenda is not only sacraments, ministry, and authority but also racism, violence, and poverty. 

Closely related is the tendency to regard Faith and Order (to which I am obviously committed) as the “theological arm” of the NCC – a perception that may have contributed to the theological atrophy in the Council as a whole, especially in its governing bodies.  Starting this fall, I intend to build careful biblical study into the agenda of the Governing Board and, God help me, to ask the members of the Board to name the theological basis of their interventions.  We cannot (yet) claim a shared understanding of our sources, but aren’t we still accountable to on another for the way we use and interpret scripture? For our church’s understanding of (or suspicion about) Tradition? For the interpretation of reality, explicit or implicit, in our church’s teachings?  The point is to enable genuine conversation among those who have been talking past one another and to move beyond a superficial level of theological pluralism by giving an account of the foundation of our convictions – not just in one commission but in the whole of the NCC. 

*** 

I will end by mentioning again my time in Cuba.  From last Friday until Wednesday, I met with church and government leaders, preached in various churches (including a wonderful Pentecostal congregation that had utterly no regard for clocks or decible levels!), and participated in a consultation commemorating a famous Latin American mission conference, held in Havana in 1929.  This meeting in 1929 was, itself, a response to the 1910 conference in Edinburgh – which may be the symbolic beginning of modern ecumenism, but had only seventeen participants from outside the North Atlantic, and only one lonely observer from all of Latin America! 

This is a great reminder, in case we needed one, that the ecumenical movement moves – that is, it changes in response to growing sensitivities and new insights on the gospel.  But at the heart of the movement is a paradox that is as true today as it was in 1910 and 1929.  Our churches, said our sisters and brothers from Cuba and Latin America, must be self-determining, reflecting the freedom that is ours in Christ and the diversity inherent in the church.  And yet, they added, no part of the church is finally self-determining because we are interdependent members of his body, deeply impoverished without one another. 

This is the gospel.  And in a fragmented world, it is very good news.

Michael Kinnamon
General Secretary
National Council of Churches