Bottom of the Ninth Assembly
The Recent World Council of Churches Assembly & the End of the Ecumenical Movement
by George Conger
The decision has been a generation in the making, and no single vote, speech, motion, paper, legislative minute, consciousness-raising session, litany of repentance, people’s drama, or interpretive dance arising from the World Council of Churches’ 9th Assembly, held February 14–23, 2006, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, can be accounted as the definitive end of its Christian life. The thirty-year battle for the soul of the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the institutional ecumenical movement has ended.
Founded in 1948 to foster the reunification of Christian Churches, the WCC has effectively shed its religious calling, and in its place has chosen social activism in the pursuit of "relevance.”
The Relevant WCC
This “relevance” found voice at the opening session of the 9th Assembly when the North American delegates offered a litany of repentance. Americans and Canadians confessed to the delegates from more than one hundred countries “the sin of racism,” “our compulsion to despoil the earth,” “our thirst for violence,” “the hunger for revenge,” “our lust for empire,” our “self satisfaction and self-adoration,” and our “hearts hardened by terror and media manipulation.”
Latin American delegates joined the chorus agreeing that America was the problem, confessing to having “to breathe air polluted by foreign-owned industries” and to being “subjected unilaterally to the interests of large corporations or the countries reckoned to be great.”
Asian delegates added a refrain, calling for repentance for “the invalid babies still born in Vietnam as a result of Agent Orange used [by America] during the war in Vietnam.” The call had to be made in absentia, however, as no Vietnamese were actually present.
But while the seed of political relevance has taken root in the institutional ecumenical movement, it has yet to flower in all of the WCC’s 348 member churches, and thus prompted the call for a new “ecumencial paradigm” at this gathering. The 691 delegates learned from the WCC’s Moderator, Aram I, the Armenian Catholicos of Cilicia, that some believed their organization was in “crisis.”
The ecumenical movement had lost “contact with the vision; and the vision appears to be vague and ambiguous” he said; yet this presented an opportunity for the WCC. The way forward was not to regain the WCC’s founding vision of a fellowship of churches but to adapt the WCC to the changing state of the world.
“More and more churches and ecumenical circles consider the ecumenical movement as a ‘forum’ or a ‘space’ for encounter and collaboration,” he said. Although this had led to “sidelining the goal of visible unity,” this should not be of concern, Aram concluded, as “we should not waste any more time and energy on the perpetuation of vestiges of ageing ecumenism. The ecumenical movement must serve its sacred cause and not remain paralyzed within ossified structures.”
George Conger , a priest of the Episcopal diocese of Central Florida and an honorary canon of St. Matthew?s Cathedral in Dallas, Texas, was accredited to the 9th Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Porto Alegre, Brazil, for The Church of England Newspaper and the Living Church magazine.
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