Posted By PastorM on January 19, 2010
Most of the churches in Cluj are celebrating the international Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. We kicked it off last week with an English-language service (with some prayers and lessons in both Romanian and Hungarian). Official visitors came from the Roman Catholic, Reformed and Unitarian churches, who are the closest partners of the Lutherans in this area. A Charismatic friend was detained at the last moment.
I have a small personal connection to the Week of Prayer. It was the brainchild of Paul Wattson, a monk who founded the Greymoor Monastery in Garrison, New York — a very short drive from where I was raised. In fact, I led a retreat for Lutheran deacons at Greymoor just a few months ago.
But despite this strong New York connection, this has never been an important observance in any of the New York parishes Terri and I have served. Oh, there are the big events — an annual lecture at a fancy Manhattan church, for example. But in most parishes, we add a petition or three to the Prayers of the Church, and move on. We pastors, and the pastors at most of our neighbor churches, are often just too busy to organize any special events to celebrate the ecumenical movement.
And that’s a shame. Literally, a shame.
Ecumenism matters. It matters spiritually, and it matters evangelically. Every pastor, at some point, has been talking to a new Christian, or a newly-returned Christian, when the subject of the many different churches comes up. And every pastor has dutifully started to explain the similarities, differences, and relationships among the different Christian communions — only to see the usually joyful face of the new Christian go blank, and then then fall with disappointment.
“But Jesus didn’t say, ‘Go do your own thing,’” they blurt out, with a frown. ”He said ‘I will build my church’ — singular — and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it. Pastor, are you saying they did prevail?”
Of course not. For most of the past century, the ecumenical movement worried aloud, and often, about what was called the “sinful division” of the community we claim to be — the “one holy, catholic and apostolic Church.” Over time, these worries turned to something much more useful: a recognition that each of the the separated Christian communities has a charism, a gift, to offer the others. In our separation, we have grown stronger, and have the potential to make one another stronger as well.
Perhaps, pastors and theologians have started to say, we are separated for a reason — according to some divine order which it is our duty to discern. And perhaps that separation, great though it may seem to be, is not, upon close inspection, very large at all. We are separated by doctrine and order; but we are joined by our baptism into Christ. And God’s claim on us surely trumps our various claims about God.
Christian unity, it seems to me, is a paradox: it already exists, and always has; yet at the same time it is always a new thing, coming into existence afresh as Christians encounter one another in the world, exploring their differences and rejoicing in newfound similarities.
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Our first worship service was held on 13 December, the Third Sunday of Advent. I preached and presided at the Eucharist, assisted by Imola Lorincz, a student at the Protestant Theological Institute.