Exploring New Forms of Co-Operation: The Project of "Mending the World."

The church to which I belong sometimes has been accused of being ecumenically arrogant. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the United Church of Canada came into being as a first-fruit of the modern ecumenical movement. It was the first church union to cross confessional boundaries, and it may be that successive generations of United Church people are driven to see themselves as always in the vanguard of ecumenism. As well as serving to mark the end of the second millennium of the Christian era, the year 2000 will mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the United Church of Canada. After significant confessional reunions in 1875 (the Presbyterians) and 1884 (the Methodists), the church union of 1925 saw Methodists, Congregationalists, and two-thirds of the Presbyterians uniting in one body. The conversations leading to church union in Canada originally had included Anglicans and Baptists, and the newly inaugurated church hoped that one day all non-Roman Christians in Canada would belong to a church that fitly be called national. (It could never be an established church, of course, but it could be a voluntary national church with considerable moral and political clout.) The vision of its founders was that the new church would be a uniting church and that its existence as a denomination was accordingly provisional. However, over the years the momentum for further church union in Canada has dissipated. The only major addition to the existing union occurred in 1968 when, with their brothers and sisters in the United States uniting with the Methodist Church, the Evangelical United Brethren in eastern Canada joined the United Church. At the time, this appeared to be the harbinger of greater fulfillment of the ecumenical dream in Canada. Talks begun in 1943 at the instigation of the Anglican General Synod at last had gathered steam, and the Anglican Church and the United Church had been joined at the negotiating table by the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). But, in 1975 the Anglicans balked at continuing with the published Plan of Union, and the United Church declined to resume the discussions on a different basis. Eventually, conversations between the United Church and the Disciples also ground to a halt, with the Disciples feeling that, once the Anglicans were gone, the spirit of mutuality had become less ardent. This end to church union discussions in Canada produced a quiet crisis in the United Church. If in fact its identity were a matter of continuing to be a uniting church, if its confessional rooting and standards had been relativized for the sake of more comprehensive expressions of faith, and if its own denominational status were truly provisional in nature, then what was the United Church when the achievement of organic unity no longer seemed feasible? Apprehension was that the United Church of Canada would become more evidently what it already was - another denomination with its own history and traditions. Out of a sense of urgency that the United Church had not been called by God to be another denomination, a standing committee of the General Council began the Ecumenical Agenda Research Project (EARP), whose goal was to renew the identity of the church through the renewal of its ecumenical vocation. What emerged as a result of almost ten years of investigation, congregational study, and response is a report titled Mending the World.(1) Whole-World Ecumenism From the very beginning of the EARP process, voices were heard calling for priority attention to the imperiled condition of the earth's eco-system and to the desperate circumstances of many of its peoples. In the spirit of the Hebrew concept of tikkun olam, Abraham Heschel presented an image that stands as an overture to the argument of Mending the World. When God gets up in the morning, the Holy One gathers the angels and asks, Where does my creation need mending today? …