Theologian is wary about new ecumenical movement
The Layman Online, May 17, 2002
Clifton Kirkpatrick, stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church (USA), has joined 32 other U.S. church leaders in a new ecumenical group – “Christian Churches Together in the USA” – that he calls “a major turning point in the ecumenical life of this country.”
He told the Presbyterian News Service that the group’s participants will lift ecumenism in the United States to a new level. Their first act was to sign a statement expressing regret about issues that divide Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Evangelical and Pentecostal Christians.
“We are Christians who long for greater unity,” the signatories say. “It is our longing which most clearly points us toward ‘something new’ as a possibility for the churches in the United States. We celebrate the unique traditions, gifts and charisms of our respective faith communities. We also acknowledge that when our differences create unnecessary divisions, our witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ is distorted.”
“I have serious doubts about the statement,” says Dr. Thomas C. Oden, a leading Protestant theologian who has promoted evangelical renewal in his own denomination, the United Methodist Church, and among other mainline Protestants, including the PCUSA.
Oden, professor of theology at Drew University, noted that evangelicals who have “defended classic Christian teaching and have been working faithfully for a quarter century … as the Association for Church Renewal” were not invited to join Christian Churches Together.
“Evangelicals remain uninvited,” he added, “yet evangelicals constitute 30-50 percent of the mainline lay leadership.”
Oden said many of the leaders of the new movement are the “very leaders who have led the old and dying ecumenism astray. Most are the old-hand social activists and liberal bureaucrats who have accompanied them.”
He contended that the Protestants in Christian Churches Together – which includes some Roman Catholic participants – are “out of touch with mainline evangelicals. Otherwise, they would know something about the thirty or so confessing movements, evangelical organizations and renewal movements that exist within the mainline, and they would have made sure – absolutely sure – that these voices were heard.”
Oden has written about what he calls the “new ecumenism,” but he says Christian Churches Together does not fit that model. “It is a regurgitation of the old ecumenism that has every indication of continuing to be hierarchical ecumenism, pro-controlled economies, anti-free market and soft on sexual revolution.”
The Christian Churches Together document included the following assertions:
- We are divided, and our divisions too often cause mistrust, misunderstanding, fear and even hostility.
- Our differences keep us from speaking effectively on matters critical to the Gospel and to our society.
- Our failure to be faithful to each other has muted our prophetic voice on crucial issues relating to human dignity and social justice.
- No current ecumenical organization represents the full spectrum of Christian belief in the United States.