This interesting article came across my feed the other day. From the earliest, exclusively-Protestant days of the modern ecumenical movement, it seems, the notion of praying together was being considered, at least in some lay circles: not only as permissible, nor even desirable, but as a necessary element of the journey towards unity.
Who could have been the author of a paper on the relation of prayer to Christian unity published by the movement for a world conference on Faith and Order in its early years?
— Read on www.oikoumene.org/news/on-an-anonymous-layman-and-how-lukas-vischer-supported-paul-couturiers-view-on-praying-together-for-unity
The Catholics didn’t join in until after the Second Vatican Council, which remarkably included Protestant observers as one of the first steps the Catholic Church took towards the ecumenical movement. The Council produced the even more remarkable teaching that the Church of Christ — the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic” church of the Nicene Creed — “subsists in” the Catholic Church: rejecting the original draft that reiterated prior claims that anyone outside the Catholic Church was not part of the church affirmed in the Creed.
The notion that Catholics and Protestants were all Christians together was new and invigorating. In the 70s, at least in my childhood diocese, the norm was that Protestants were welcome to receive communion at special occasions such as baptisms, weddings, and funerals. My current parish was founded in the seventies, in an interfaith center shared with several Protestant congregations. They decided together that they would all take the name St John the Evangelist, as a sign of unity. I am told that in the early years, on Palm Sunday, the churches would all celebrate the procession with palms and the liturgy of the word together, separating only after the homily/sermon to celebrate the Lord’s Supper separately, according to our separate rites and beliefs.
Alas, these ecumenical practices were repressed as part of the soi-disant “reform of the reform”, and my parish’s interactions with the remaining Protestant congregation in the center tend to be practical cooperation rather than prayerful. We do not, for example, come together for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, which I find particularly disappointing given our history and location.
Today Christians of all traditions, he notes at the outset, pray for the unity of the Church of Christ. … What makes problems – indeed theological problems – is divided churches praying together for unity.
In recent years, I’ve experienced ecumenical prayer in two contexts. First, during my time as a master’s student at the Ecumenical Institute, many of our classes began or ended with prayer, typically the Lord’s Prayer since we hold that (mostly) in common. This was not explicitly prayer for unity. Second, at a weekend meeting of the North American Academy of Ecumenists, which I blogged about at the time. I found the prayers liturgically wonderful, but not, as far as I recall, explicitly ordered towards repentance for our divisions, as advocated by the anonymous layman referenced above.
While discussing potential paper topics for my first ecclesiology course at the EI, I commented to my instructor that I was surprised that no one, as far as I was aware, had compared the rending of the churches, Christ’s mystical body, to the rending of Christ’s body on the cross. “The problem with that,” she said, “is that it would imply that the divided churches are necessary for our salvation.” So much for that idea, in her course, at least.
But I disagree with that reasoning. For one thing, we’re talking about metaphor. A metaphor by definition doesn’t take on all the attributes of its referent; you might as well say that we can’t call God “Father” because it would imply that God has a penis. For another, it seems quite possible to me that the divided churches might be necessary for our salvation, as part of the long, slow, Spirit-led, but still human, process of understanding, interpreting, taking on, and living out the Good News. Sometimes you have to take things apart in order to see how they fit together. In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity; but humans are easily confused about essentials versus non-essentials,
The essence of the problem of remaining divisions is the churches’ lack of penitence and the means to solve it is… prayer.
But this anonymous layman’s article suggests to me additional support for making such a comparison. Jesus’ suffering and death have been a locus of penitence and sorrow throughout the Christian tradition. If the problem is a lack of penitence, then framing the rending of the churches in terms of Christ’s passion might well elicit it.
Imagine Friday prayers for Christian unity composed in such terms, for churches to pray either separately or together. Surely they would inevitably move us to praying together, as one body, one spirit in Christ.
Gracious God, we pray for your holy catholic church.
Fill it with your truth;
Keep it in your peace.
Where it is corrupt, reform it.
Where it is in error, correct it.
Where it is right, defend it.
Where it is in want, provide for it.
Where it is divided, reunite it;
for the sake of your Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ.
Amen.
Gaudete Theology 