C ENTRO P RO U NIONE Semi-Annual Bulletin A publication about the activities of the Centro Pro Unione “UT OMNES UNUM SINT” Digital Edition A Ministry of the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement Centro Pro Unione Web https://bulletin.prounione.it E-mail bulletin@prounione.it In this issue Josef Stern The Unbinding of Isaac: Maimonides on the Aqedah `Centro Conferences 18 Archbishop Joris Vercammen A Challenging Relationship. The International Roman Catho- lic/Old Catholic Dialogue’s Contribution to Ecumenism `Centro Conferences 11 Kenneth G. Howcroft Catholic Spirit: Harvesting the Fruits of Methodist, Anglican and Roman Catholic Dialogues `Centro Conferences 3 James F. Puglisi, SA `Letter from the Director 2 Watch on https://webtv.prounione.it A new channel for media content: initiatives, programs and video formative resources `Launch of the WebTV / 120 Seconds of Ecumenism 27 2532-4144 Digital Edition ISSN N. 86 - Fall 2014 E-book2 Centro Pro Unione Bulletin Centro Pro Unione Bulletin A semi-annual publication about the activities of the Centro Pro Unione The Centro Pro Unione in Rome, founded and directed by the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement, - www.atonementfriars.org - is an ecumenical research and action center. Its purpose is to give space for dialogue, to be a place for study, research and formation in ecumenism: theological, pastoral, social and spiritual. The Bulletin has been pubblished since 1968 and is released in Spring and Fall. IN THIS ISSUE Letter from the Director EDITORIAL STAFF bulletin@prounione.it Contact Information Via Santa Maria dell'Anima, 30 I-00186 Rome (+39) 06 687 9552 pro@prounione.it Website, Social media www.prounione.it @EcumenUnity CENTRO PRO UNIONE A Ministry of the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement DIRECTOR'S DESK N. 86 - Fall 2014 Fr. James Puglisi, SA – Director Centro Pro Unione James F. Puglisi, SA Director Centro Pro Unione Fall 2014, n. 86 / Digital Edition (Web) ›Kenneth G. Howcroft ›Archbishop Joris Vercammen ›Josef Stern he Fall issue is a rich harvest of some of the interesting research that has gone in the past years and the progress that is slowly but surely advancing in ecumenical and in- terreligious relations. Unfortunately we are unable to share two of the lectures that were offered this Fall for the reasons that I will explain. The first of these was given in November by Luis Antonio G. Cardinal Tagle entitled: Vatican II and Asia’s Reception. A Cultural Reading from the Philippines. The Cardinal did provide an interesting analysis of Asian theology as it received the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium especially chapter one. Tagle explained the same vision that Pope Francis has of the church as going out of itself to the margins of society. This is what Asians, in general, and Filipinos, in particular, have attempted to do since the Council. Tagle explained this is really what gave new energy to the Christians of Asia to become key players in Christianity. The second lecture that does not appear in the Bulletin was given by Walter Cardinal Kasper. It was the 17th annual conference in honor of the Servant of God, Father Paul Wattson and Mother Lurana White, co-founder of the Society of the Atonement. His confer- ence was entitled: The Theological Background of Pope Francis, Bishop of Rome – Disciple of the Second Vatican Council has since been published in Italian, German and English as Pope Francis’ Revolution of Tenderness and Love. Theological and Pastoral Perspectives. Kasper did a reading of Pope Francis’ Vatican II formation and the Argentinian liberation theology. As in the case of the reception of the Council in Asia, so too with Pope Francis the starting point is the council’s document Lumen Gentium that invites the Church to move out of herself to the periphery where the poor and marginalized live to bring the Gospel of tenderness and radical love. What we are able to share are the conferences given by the former Pastor of the Methodist Church in Rome and current moderator of the British Methodist church Kenneth Howcroft. He shared with us the reception of the Catholic Spirit as found in the Anglican, Methodist and Catholic dialogues – a sort of “Protestant Harvesting the Fruits”. This conference was followed by that of the Old Catholic Archbishop of Utrechrt, Joris Vercammen who spoke about the challenges of the International dialogue between the Roman and Old Catholic churches. These two churches share much of the same histo- ry. What is interesting concerns the question of the reception of a council. The archbishop opens for the reader some challenging thoughts in regards to this issue especially since Catholics are in the process of the reception of Vatican II. He shares some fascinating in- sights into this process and the unity of the church. The third conference was jointly sponsored by the Centro and the John Paul II Centre for Interreligious Dialogue at the Angelicum. Dr. Josef Stern presents a reading tak- en from Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed concerning the binding of Isaac which he de- scribes as one of the most terrifying stories found in the Torah. He presents his own unique understanding of what Maimonides is trying to do in his exegesis. I hope you will find his article both enlightening and challenging. Next year’s activities of the Centro will include: Prof. Geoffrey Wainwright’s con- ference during the Week of Prayer celebration on the reception of Vatican II as found in the 50 years of dialogues between Methodists and Catholics, the annual course on Catholic Rome and Lutheran Wittenburg of St. Olaf College (USA), the visit of the students and pro- fessors of the Ecumenical Institute of Bossey Switzerland, from the Università degli stu- di (Torino), Prof Andrea Poma will speak on “La Chiesa e la sfida del post-moderno”, visit- ing professor at the Angelicum, Rabbi Jack Bemporad will speak on “Violence: A Jewish Perspective” and finally the Centro will join in the 50 th anniversary celebration of the work of the Joint Working Group between the World Council of Churches and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity with a series of presentations on the 23rd of June. In this Bulletin you will find news of a new initiative called 120 seconds of ecu- menism on the new webTV (http://webtv.prounione.it) of the Centro as well as the Italian ini- tiative of our Associate Director Dr. Teresa Francesca Rossi entitled “Costellazioni Conciliari” which continues the Centro’s three year celebration of the 50 th anniversary of Vatican II. This year’s Summer course: Introduction to the Ecumenical and Interreligious Movements will run from June 29 to July 17. Remember to continue to look at our new website (http://www.prounione.it) for news and activities of the Centro Pro Unione. This Bulletin is indexed in the ATLA Religion Database, published by the American Theological Library Association, 250 S. Wacker Drive, 16 th Floor, Chicago, IL 60606 (www.atla.com). T3 Centro Pro Unione Bulletin CENTRO CONFERENCES N. 86 - Fall 2014 Forgive me if I re-enforce your stereotypes of Methodists and begin with a quotation from the scriptures, the Gospel of Mark 4:26-29. He also said, ‘The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.’ I know that passage is about the grain harvest whereas the second part of my title this evening (adapted from Cardinal Kasper’s book published in 2009) is about harvesting fruits, but the point being made holds. When we are dealing with the creative and re-creative love of God transforming things until all are one in God (envisioned here as the ‘kingdom’) we are asked to co-operate with God. It looks and feels as if we are scattering seeds in hope. We can hardly see them when they are scattered. We cannot make them grow by ourselves. Even Jesus in his earthly life went to the cross having sowed the seeds of the kingdom but not seeing much harvest and not able to do much other than hand himself over into the hands of the Father. But God raised him to life. When we sow the seeds, we are not the only ones working in the situation. God enables them to sprout and grow. But when the time for harvest comes, we have to discern it and co-operate actively again. For decades we have been sowing ecumenical seeds. Some of our churches would trace this back in the modern era to the Edinburgh Mission Conference of 1910. For the three dialogues we are concerned with in this paper [Anglican-Roman Catholic; Roman Catholic- Methodist; Anglican-Methodist] the starting point was the Second Vatican Council from 1962-5. Over 40 years later, Cardinal Kasper and others discerned that it was time to gather any harvest that had appeared. The book that appeared in 2009 attempted to do so in so far as the international Roman Catholic dialogues with the Lutherans, World Alliance of Reformed Churches, Anglican Communion, and World Methodist Council were concerned. In the immediately preceding years there had been what I will politely call pauses, firstly in the work of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) whose second phase had ended by 2005, and whose third phase (despite a preparatory meeting in 2007) did not begin until 2011; and secondly in the work of the International Anglican –Roman Catholic Commission on Unity and Mission (IARCCUM) which had begun work in 2001. Whereas ARCIC is a meeting of theologians to address theological principles, IARCCUM is a meeting of bishops charged, firstly, with promoting the reception of the ARCIC reports and the implementation of those principles; and, secondly, with monitoring and connecting regional developments in various parts of the world with the international work. To this end, in 2007 IARCCUM produced an overview (or even ‘harvesting’) of the ARCIC and allied processes to that point entitled Growing Together in Unity and Mission. In the same period, the international Roman Catholic-Methodist dialogue had been assessing its own progress. In 2006 it produced a report The Grace given you in Christ: Catholics and Methodists reflect further on the Church. That report describes itself as seeking to harvest the blessings of 40 years of dialogue on that topic. This then led to the 2011 report Encountering Christ the Saviour: Church and Sacraments which explored some areas of significant divergence identified in the 2006 report by revisiting selected topics in the 1982 World Council of Churches’ text Baptism, Eucharist, Ministry (often called the “Lima” text). But it also led to a more broad ranging “harvesting” of the dialogues in the 2010 text Synthesis: Catholic Spirit: Harvesting the Fruits of Methodist, Anglican and Roman Catholic Dialogues Kenneth G. Howcroft - Pastor, Ponte Sant’Angelo Methodist Church and Co-convener of the Joint Implementation Commission for the Covenant between the Methodist Church in Great Britain and the Church of England Conference given at the Centro Pro Unione, Thursday, 22 May 2014 Kenneth G. Howcroft – Pastor, Ponte Sant’Angelo Methodist Church `Pastor Kenneth G. Howcroft 4 Centro Pro Unione Bulletin CENTRO CONFERENCES N. 86 - Fall 2014 Together to Holiness – 40 years of Methodist and Roman Catholic Dialogue. So far as the Anglican – Methodist dialogue is concerned, the Anglican-Methodist International Commission for Unity in Mission (AMICUM) produced a major report in 1996 entitled Sharing in the Apostolic Communion. There was then, as in the other dialogues, a pause. A second round of conversations began in 2009 and its report Into All the World: Being and Becoming Apostolic Churches is to be published in late summer 2014. This report again ‘harvests the fruits’ of the previous dialogue in the context of other bi-lateral and multi-lateral dialogues, and in particular of the World Council of Churches convergence texts Baptism, Eucharist, Ministry (Lima, 1982) and The Church: Towards a Common Vision (Busan, 2013). At the same time, it surveys practical progress in all the “regional” Anglican-Methodist relationships in various parts of the world (including the Covenant between the Church of England and the Methodist Church in Great Britain, for which I have served as the Methodist Co-Convenor of its Joint Implementation Commission). So, why the pauses? Why the need to produce overviews? Some would say that it was because we had on all sides reached a dead end. The metaphor “ecumenical winter” had begun to be used. Some would even say that there were no fruits to be harvested. Others would say that what fruits there were, were withering and going rotten on the vine or the tree. Certainly complaints and concerns are voiced in both the Roman Catholic-Methodist dialogues and Anglican-Methodist dialogues about the lack of response to and reception of the work of those dialogues in the various parts of those churches around the world. We shall return to this later. It is true to say, however, that there has been a greater amount of formal response to the Anglican- Roman Catholic dialogue, even if those responses revealed that some areas needed further work. Moreover, the ways that those responses were made neatly revealed that the discernment and decision making processes and the ecclesiologies in the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion are still anything but convergent. The terms that I have just used (“Church” and “Communion”) exemplify the point. To put it simply, and at the danger of over-simplifying it, ARCIC I was published in 1981. It dealt with the Church as Communion; Authority in the Church; Ministry and Ordination; and Eucharistic doctrine. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith made a number of critical observations about it. Although a few responses from Episcopal Conferences were published, this practice soon ceased. Concerns were expressed about damage being caused to the process by women and openly homosexual men being ordained to ministry, including episcopal ministry, in parts of the Anglican Communion, even though these matters were not part of the ARCIC report. Eventually the formal response from the Holy See emerged in 1991. It commended the emergence of a developing consensus on some matters, particularly on the Eucharist as both sacrifice and presence, and pointed to further work that needed to be done (for example on the understanding of transubstantiation). But it also pointed to a number of issues (for example, the ordination of women, papal primacy and infallibility) which needed to be addressed before further progress could be made. The implicit methodology was that the magisterial teaching of the church is a seamless robe. Much progress or convergence could not therefore be made on one point until it was made on all. This was different to the method of growing into deeper communion by stages set out in the Malta Report of 1968 which had eventually led to the work of ARCIC. It also differed from ARCIC’s method of returning to read scripture and the tradition together in order to restate together for today the faith of the Church. In the meantime, the autonomous churches in the Anglican Communion considered ARCIC I. In the light of their responses (and in the absence of a formal response from the Holy See) the 1988 Lambeth Conference (a consultative and collaborative body of bishops from the autonomous regional and national churches that make up the Anglican Communion, and not therefore a governance body) expressed the ‘mind of the Communion’ as welcoming and supporting the convergence in the ARCIC report, and noting some areas for further work. But ‘expressing a mind’ does not result in the constituent parts of the Communion being committed to anything or feeling bound by it. That means that it can be hard for anything to be turned into action. At this point Methodists, who place a strong emphasis on the idea of all members of the Church participating in appropriate ways in its oversight but do so within an even stronger commitment to mutual discipline and accountability, stand side by side with the Roman Catholics in tearing their hair out: until, that is, they reflect on the difficulty they themselves have in gaining a binding consensus about anything across the Methodist world! To return to our question: are there any fruits? Implicit in what we have been saying is the recognition that there are. The fact that we can start to identify and face the next order of questions suggests that progress has been made with the first set of questions. The more that I hear or read (particularly on the internet) people from all our traditions saying that the whole ecumenical process is a failure and a waste of time, and should be stopped, the more I think that the dialogues must have achieved something important. Otherwise why are these people so afraid, so furious and vitriolic; watching over one another in hate rather than in love (to re-coin a favourite phrase of John Wesley). Kenneth G. Howcroft – Pastor, Ponte Sant’Angelo Methodist Church5 Centro Pro Unione Bulletin CENTRO CONFERENCES N. 86 - Fall 2014 The first great fruit, as Cardinal Kasper recognises, is that despite all our histories and arguments, we do indeed share the same apostolic faith. ARCIC almost takes this for granted as it deals with other matters which keep their two traditions apart. An example is paragraph 45 of the 1990 ARCIC II statement The Church as Communion. It is now possible to describe what constitutes ecclesial communion. It is rooted in the confession of the one apostolic faith, revealed in the Scriptures, and set forth in the Creeds. It is founded upon one baptism. The one celebration of the Eucharist is its pre-eminent expression and focus. It necessarily finds expression in shared commitment to the mission entrusted by Christ to his Church. It is a life of shared concern for one another in mutual forbearance, submission, gentleness and love; in the placing of the interests of others above the interests of self; in making room for each other in the body of Christ; in solidarity with the poor and the powerless; and in the sharing of gifts both material and spiritual (cf. Acts 2:44). Also constitutive of life in communion is acceptance of the same basic moral values…. The Anglican-Methodist dialogue in 1996 set out a list of agreed core doctrines in paragraph 15ff of Sharing in the Apostolic Communion. In paragraph 97 it then recommended that the Lambeth Conference and World Methodist Council …. affirm and recognize that: • Both Anglicans and Methodists belong to the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church of Jesus Christ and participate in the apostolic mission of the whole people of God. • In the churches of our two Communions the Word of God is authentically preached and the Sacraments instituted by Christ are duly administered. • Our churches share in the common confession and heritage of the apostolic faith. These affirmations have since been made in agreements between various particular national or regional Anglican and Methodist churches in various parts of the world, such as in the Covenant between the Church of England and the Methodist Church in Great Britain. The Methodist-Roman Catholic dialogue also makes the point explicitly. Paragraph 45 in the Synthesis document states that Both Methodists and Catholics accept the Scriptures, the creeds and the doctrinal decrees of the early ecumenical councils, and hold that all doctrines must remain under the Word of God…. The report then sets out what from John Wesley onwards Methodists have considered to be ‘the essential doctrines of the gospel’. It recognises that “The Roman Catholic Church is at one with Methodists about these essential doctrines…”. It also notes that Wesley distinguished between, on the one hand, these essential doctrines; and, on the other, views about some matters of worship, ecclesiastical polity and even the ways in which people articulated their experience of being transformed by the truths encountered in the essential doctrines. All these latter things he termed ‘opinions’. There is obvious resonance here with the Roman Catholic recognition of a ‘hierarchy of truths’ of Catholic doctrine. “For Methodists and Catholics, therefore, there is an order among the doctrines of the faith based upon their relationship to the core of that faith: the love of God revealed in the redemption” (para 48). Yet the report also notes that the Roman Catholic Church “… emphasises that the whole teaching of the Church constitutes an organic unity; its members are therefore called upon to believe the full teaching of the Church”. We are back here to the issue of the magisterial teaching of the Roman Catholic Church being a seamless robe, and the effect of that on the dialogues. As the Synthesis document puts it (para 45) “Though Catholics and Methodists share to Kenneth G. Howcroft – Pastor, Ponte Sant’Angelo Methodist Church `Dialogue and conversation among lecturer and conference attendees.6 Centro Pro Unione Bulletin CENTRO CONFERENCES N. 86 - Fall 2014 a great extent a common faith, they are not yet fully agreed on what doctrinal accord is necessary for the full communion of faith which would unite our traditions.” The Harvesting book outlines some other achievements which make a rich harvest. We do not have time to go into them all in detail, but the headings are • A fresh and renewed understanding of the relation between Scripture and Tradition • Basic agreement on the doctrine of justification • Deepened understanding of the nature of the Church • New approaches to the sacraments of baptism and eucharist. The Anglican-Methodist dialogues reflect the same achievements. Let me give just two examples. First, debates about the interaction of scripture and tradition tend to be across both families of churches rather than between them. The 1996 report Sharing in the Apostolic Communion stated that 18.The churches of our two Communions hold in common a number of official doctrinal texts and standards. We all affirm the Scriptures as the supreme rule of faith and life and their sufficiency as containing all things necessary to salvation. We all affirm the beliefs contained in the Apostles’ and Nicene-Constantinopolitan creeds which we employ in our services of worship. We all affirm the fundamental principles of the English Reformation, to which the formularies of the 16th century, Homilies, Prayer Book and Articles, bear historic testimony. Both Anglicans and Methodists have used the rites of the Book of Common Prayer as received and adapted by the various churches in the two communions. Our contemporary revisions of the liturgy all draw on commonly shared research in the context of the modern liturgical movement. The 2014 report Into All the World: Being and Becoming Apostolic Churches states in paragraph 55 that “Our two churches understand that apostolic faith is multi-faceted. The scriptures have a normative place in interpreting the faith and discerning its truthful expression in every age. 1 The historic creeds [and, I would add, later doctrinal texts and standards], while not expressing every aspect of the apostolic faith, are faithful witnesses to (and ecumenical declarations of) it through 1 Re scriptures, see also World Council of Churches Faith & Order document The Church: Towards a Common Vision (CTCV) (2012), #11 time and space. As one member church puts it, they are ‘authoritative statements of the Catholic faith, framed in the language of their day and used by Christians in many ways, to declare and to guard the right understanding of that faith’. 2 ” Second, with regard to deepening understanding of the nature of the Church, particularly as being in communion with the Triune God, Sharing in the Apostolic Communion says that Recognising our common Baptism, we now hear the Holy Spirit calling us to fuller communion. We yearn to respond to this divine call which prompts us to reclaim one another. We recognise that we are called to fuller communion not only by practical considerations, but also by the very nature of our Gospel Faith, which calls us into communion with the Triune God and with one another (koinonia). The Scriptures portray the unity of the Church as a joyful communion with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit, as well as communion among its members (1 Jn 1:1-10; cf. 2 Cor 13:14). Jesus prays that the disciples may be one as the Father is in him and he is in the Father, so that the world may believe (Jn 17: 21). Our quest is to share more fully life in the Triune God. (Para 7) So, why the pauses in the first decade of this century? Why the need to stop and gather the harvests? I would argue that it was indeed because they were not being harvested as they ripened and were in danger of rotting on the vine or the tree. To put it another way, the truths, the grace, the movements of the Spirit being revealed through the dialogues were not being embodied or incarnated in the Churches. They were not being received in a way that affected the day to day lives of those Churches. That is partly because implementing them and acting upon them takes us from more abstract, theoretical theology (both doctrinal and spiritual) of the nature of the Church to more concrete matters about the practice of our actual Churches as the body of Christ that is engaged in worship and mission. When we reach this point we are, of course, dealing with issues of power, and status and vested interests because however holy the church is, it is made up, individually and corporately, of sinners who are in the process of allowing themselves to be transformed into saints and into being a more perfect embodiment of the body of Christ. I have long believed that we have not paid sufficient attention to the interconnection between and 2 Uniting Church in Australia, Basis of Union, 1971, #9 Kenneth G. Howcroft – Pastor, Ponte Sant’Angelo Methodist Church7 Centro Pro Unione Bulletin CENTRO CONFERENCES N. 86 - Fall 2014 interdependency of worship and mission. I have also long believed that we have not paid sufficient attention to the connection between our ‘theoretical’ dialogues and the ‘practical’ life of our churches. I have struggled with this for the last five years as the Co-Convenor for the Joint Implementation Commission for the Covenant between the Church of England and the Methodist Church in Great Britain. There is too often dissonance and disjunction. I suspect that it has been a sense of that disjunction which has caused there to be an increasing emphasis on “Unity in Mission”. One of the fruits of the dialogues for me has been the recognition that apostolic faith is not just about the transmission of the content of what is to be believed, but is the presentation and re-presentation - through word, sacrament and holy lives - of Christ as a living person to be believed in. Moreover, apostolic faith is also about a commitment to being sent to share in the mission of the kingdom. So it is not surprising that we have seen the development of, say, IARCCUM alongside that of ARCIC. But I believe that there is something more to be learned here. When I reflect on the experience in my own country, something interesting emerges. Until the late 1980’s ecumenical work was done through Councils of Churches under the aegis of the British Council of Churches. The sense was that as with the ecumenical councils of the church in previous ages, these councils were bodies playing a part in the oversight of Christ’s church. They were in a sense embryonic or anticipatory oversight and governance bodies for the united church that was emerging into existence. The model was of a visible unity that was organic, institutional and uniform rather than pluriform. It was impossible for the Roman Catholic churches in Britain to be full members. Whatever the actual nuance of the phrase, the statement from the Second Vatican Council in Lumen Gentium that the Church of Christ ‘subsistit in’ the Roman Catholic Church prevented it. At the same time, the statement in Lumen Gentium that there are elements of truth and sanctification in other Christian churches and communities raised the question of how the Roman Catholic Churches would relate to them. The breakthrough was the Swanwick Declaration in 1987. That led to the abandonment of the conciliar model and its replacement by a “Churches Together” model of working. In 1990 the British Council of Churches was disbanded and Churches Together in Britain and Ireland (with sub-groups such as Churches Together in England) was created. These were definitely not oversight or governance bodies. They were conferring and co-ordinating bodies supporting the churches as they worked together. The model was therefore one of “Unity in Mission”. Visible unity no longer meant – at least in the foreseeable future – organic, institutional uniformity, but churches that retained high degrees of autonomy yet worked with and alongside each other in mission. The language began to shift from talk of ‘visible unity’ to talk of ‘communion’. The goal started to become ‘autonomy in communion’. But that phrase is not without its difficulties. It has been used to propose a model for the Anglican Communion that might see it through some troubled times. But as a lawyer once said in a meeting that I was at, “Of course, in theory there is no difference between theory and practice….”!. This model has released energy and enabled many good things to happen. But that very fact creates a potential tension with the models previously inherent in the formal dialogues. Ironically, that is particularly true for the Roman Catholic Church which inspired much of the move towards “Churches Together”, because of the tension between the new model and the implications of the phrase ‘subsistit in’. So it is not surprising that the harvesting of the fruits has led to the identification of this as a new question to be addressed. Most strikingly, a major part of the mandate for ARCIC III is To re-examine how the “commitment to the common goal of the restoration of complete communion in faith and sacramental life” is to be understood and pursued today; and “to consider the Church as Communion, local and universal, and how in communion the local and universal Church come to discern right ethical teaching” – where the emphasis on ethical teaching will really sharpen and test the efficacy of any models proposed. This is potentially exciting in that it should require the work in the formal dialogues on ‘the Church as Communion’ to interact with the practical issues and problems of engaging in “Unity in Mission”. One issue to be addressed is that if you ask people from different traditions what the phrase “local church” designates, you will get markedly different answers. So, in particular, deeper thinking about how the local and universal cohere will be extremely helpful. It is important to note that how the local and universal cohere is not just a question between churches but also within them. It is not just the Anglican Communion which has a problem here. It is a great shame to me that Methodism is so dysfunctional at international level. There is no single system of oversight or governance for the world Methodist family of churches. There is no Conference (in the sense of a supreme oversight and governing body) at its head. The work of the World Methodist Council is not binding on member churches. We are churches each of which likes to be very tightly knit itself, but which can therefore only be loosely knit to each other. That is because of our history. For example, the mother movement of Methodism is the British tradition. But the mother church of Methodism was what has now become the United Methodist Church in the United Kenneth G. Howcroft – Pastor, Ponte Sant’Angelo Methodist Church8 Centro Pro Unione Bulletin CENTRO CONFERENCES N. 86 - Fall 2014 States. As the British movement gradually separated from the Church of England and became a church in its own right, it began to send missionaries around the world. The American church also sent missionaries. The history of both those missions mirrors the political and social history of the two nations. The British founded an empire of churches, and then in the mid-20 th century decolonised and encouraged its daughter churches to become sister churches in something like a Methodist commonwealth of churches. The Americans ended up with a federal system, rather like their political constitution. Their overseas work was federated with the work that was being undertaken in the various states of the Union. Both ‘overseas’ and ‘home’ work were under the jurisdiction of a single General Conference. They never thought of what they did as an empire, and so in a sense never de-colonised. But recently European and African Methodists in the United Methodist tradition have shown signs of wanting to be European and African Methodists rather than European and African versions of American Methodists. Moreover, it is not just the Anglican Communion and world Methodism that have problems about how the local coheres with the universal. If we dare say it, there have been times when particular regional Catholic Conferences of Bishops have had tensions with the Curia. Then, to widen our brief for a moment, there are the tensions over Eastern Rite churches existing in the same countries as Orthodox Churches which see themselves as the sole legitimate Churches of those countries. Although there are signs in Britain that Orthodox churches are recognising that they cannot just remain as ex-patriate communities when their members are increasingly British, the Orthodox have a strong sense of relationship to nations or countries. That is matched by various European Protestant Churches. The Porvoo Communion of Anglican Churches in Great Britain and Ireland and Lutheran Churches in Nordic and Baltic countries is marked by that fact. Things are different when churches have overlapping territorial jurisdictions. One of the surprising things we have uncovered in the Covenant between the Methodist Church in Great Britain and the Church of England is the nature of the relationships between the Anglican churches in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The Methodist Church in Great Britain is a single entity that exists in England, Scotland and Wales. It is in a covenant relationship or a partnership with the Anglican churches in those countries – the Church of England, the Scottish Episcopal Church and the Church in Wales. The question has never been answered, or even properly asked, whether the goal of visible unity means three separate united churches in England, Scotland and Wales. If so, the price of such unity for Methodists is likely to be that of dividing itself into three, with the result that the Methodist charisms cannot be nurtured in each of the three united churches. So another way forward would be to develop something like a Porvoo agreement between the three Anglican churches and the Methodist Church in Great Britain. However, we have received strong indications that the Anglican churches do not wish to go down that route. They do not wish to get too close to each other. They like to be in communion with each other, but to remain autonomous and separate as far as possible. It seems to me that this is much more like reconciled diversity than visible unity, and that their sense of being in communion is very attenuated. The Methodist in me says that communion must mean more than that. If being part of the body of Christ means being transformed and swept up with the other parts into the communion (koinonia) of the Triune God, it must involve developing the mind of Christ and, at a practical level, coordinating action. That in turn must involve discerning the grace and will of God together, making decisions together and deploying our resources together (and it is interesting to note that the Acts of the Apostles sees the working out of the implications of koinonia as involving the use of financial resources). So what do we Methodists bring to this issue? I would argue that it is a strong sense of being in communion as I have just outlined it, but one that is allied to another sense of being what we call “in full connexion”. The Synthesis document seems to suggest Kenneth G. Howcroft – Pastor, Ponte Sant’Angelo Methodist Church `Convivial post-conference encounter.9 Centro Pro Unione Bulletin CENTRO CONFERENCES N. 86 - Fall 2014 that communion and connexion are synonymous terms, but I would argue that the latter denotes a much tighter and stronger relationship than the former. To the factors that I have outlined as constituting what it means to be ‘in communion’, being ‘in connexion’ adds the sense of exercising mutual accountability within a common framework of discipline. Methodism began as a movement in the Church of England. It took the form of a religious society or even what we might call now a religious order. From its earliest days it was distinctive in being both a holiness movement and a missionary movement (in the broadest sense of that term) within the Church of England; and its members were still meant to participate in that Church so far as worship and the sacraments were concerned. The leader of the Methodist movement was John Wesley supported by his brother Charles (the hymn writer) and others. The phrase “in full connexion” was used to describe those who allied themselves with John Wesley and, through him, with each other in the movement. The movement was structured, organised and disciplined. Its leaders met regularly in Conference to discern together what God was doing amongst them and requiring of them, and to decide what to do. In an almost papal way Wesley wrote up the outcomes of the Conferences and published them as the Minutes. He was acting as the extraordinary overseer or episkopos of a movement within the Church which was not at that stage itself a Church. But he was also acting as an overseer who worked collaboratively in Conference with others. This latter emphasis gradually gained in importance. After Wesley’s death at the age of 87 there was a strong feeling that there should be “no more king in Israel”. In a sense Wesley had anticipated this himself when in his early 80’s he had made legal provision to define the Conference as a fixed number of named people working collectively and collaboratively – the Legal Hundred. So as Methodism gradually started to become a Church in Britain, the supreme source of episcope (oversight) in human terms became the corporate person of the Conference rather than the individual persons who were episkopoi (overseers, superintendents, bishops, call them what you will). Most Methodists in the world have bishops – the exception for historical reasons are those churches originating in my British tradition – but they are not bishops in the historic episcopate. All Methodists recognise that there is a need for the oversight of the corporate person, the Conference, to be secondarily focussed in and represented by individual persons throughout the Church. The question, and often the tension, is how those individuals relate to the Conference. You can see the same question and tension the other way round in those traditions which make the oversight of the individual person primary, and then have to work out how individual and corporate bodies may relate to and participate in it. In the British Methodist Covenant with the Church of England we have tried to find ways forward. In chapter 11 of the report we published in September 2013 we have said: In the life of the Church there therefore need to be signs [sc. of apostolic continuity infaith, worship and mission] that ‘represent’ all the constituent parts of the body of Christ in the world today and throughout history, and which also ‘re-present’ them to each other in the sense of making them real to each other, connecting them to each other, and making them impinge upon the consciousness, understanding, prayer and action of those who gather in a particular place. In a profound sense such signs are sacramental. They make visible those profound realities that are otherwise invisible; and by making them visible they effect what they signify: they do not just speak of or point to bonds of communion or connections, they actually connect people. Moreover, since what is being realised is a matter of personal relationships (both individual and corporate; both spiritual and practical), and because the Christian faith is incarnational, the signs which point to, nurture and effect them are most appropriately embodied in persons (individually and collectively). There is a need to explore the relative roles in ensuring the apostolic continuity of Councils of the Church on the one hand, and Popes and/or Bishops on the other (to put it one way); or (to put it in the terms of my tradition) of Conferences on the one hand, and Presidents or Superintendents or Bishops on the other. Then we British Methodists might be able to persuade ourselves at last that taking the historic episcopate into our system really is for the bene esse of our Church and will increase our effectiveness in worship and mission in communion with our fellow Christians. We have said we are prepared to do it for nearly 50 years, but we have never seen enough evidence from elsewhere of any benefit being realised by t to make us actually do it. Perhaps we lack faith or hope. But our close colleagues in the Methodist Church in Ireland have just made a big potential breakthrough in their relationship with the (Anglican) Church of Ireland. Both Churches have agreed that the President of the Methodist Church in Ireland can be properly identified as an Episcopal Minister (neatly and helpfully avoiding the word Bishop which is problematic for many Methodists). In future, Church of Ireland Bishops will be involved in the installation of Irish Methodist Presidents and their consecration as Episcopal Ministers, and vice versa. Such moves will ensure that all future Methodist ordinations are within the historic episcopate. But because the identification of the Presidents as Episcopal Ministers Kenneth G. Howcroft – Pastor, Ponte Sant’Angelo Methodist ChurchNext >