Disunity about Unity: Organic Union vs. United/Uniting Churches

The Angli­can counter-proposal to the fed­er­al­ism model for unity is known as “organic union.” The word “organic” here empha­sizes the body-imagery of the church, the inter­con­nect­ed­ness of many parts but in a sin­gle whole. Nat­u­rally this relates to the epis­co­pal require­ment in Angli­can under­stand­ings of the church, as in the Lam­beth Quadri­lat­eral.

The 1920 “Appeal to All Chris­t­ian Peo­ple” issued by the Lam­beth Con­fer­ence spoke of an ecu­meni­cal ideal of an “out­ward, vis­i­ble and united soci­ety, hold­ing one faith, hav­ing its own rec­og­nized offi­cers, using God-given means of grace, and inspir­ing all its mem­bers to the world­wide ser­vice of the king­dom of God.” The his­toric epis­co­pate would then be the cen­ter point of vis­i­ble unity.

Need­less to say, this kind of vis­i­ble unity was unap­peal­ing to non-episcopal churches. To this day there has been the least suc­cess in bring­ing together epis­co­pal and non-episcopal churches among all the union ven­tures that have taken place.

Inter­est­ingly, at the first Faith and Order meet­ing in 1927, the only report fail­ing to get uni­ver­sal approval from the con­fer­ence was the one on the unity of the church and the rela­tions among the churches. One way or another, in the years to come the vision of organic unity has slipped from the cen­ter­stage, not least of all because it some­how seems to ask churches to stop being them­selves and become some­thing else instead, and few are will­ing to do that.

Even though Angli­cans have been the biggest pro­po­nents of “organic unity,” most actual orga­ni­za­tional merger has taken place between Protes­tant bod­ies. These are the “united” or “unit­ing” churches, merg­ers of pre­vi­ous church bod­ies that have decided to relin­quish their old iden­ti­ties and take on a new one.

While there are some pre-twentieth-century united churches, such as found in the Evan­gel­i­cal Church of Ger­many (Evan­ge­lis­che Kirche in Deutsch­land), most of them have come into exis­tence since the Sec­ond World War, and in places where colo­nial pow­ers were with­draw­ing. In such cir­cum­stances, dis­tinct con­fes­sional iden­tity was nowhere near as strong as the need for com­mon Chris­t­ian wit­ness and sup­port. They have also tended to be among Protes­tants with con­gre­ga­tion­al­ist and pres­by­ter­ian struc­tures, though occa­sion­ally Angli­cans have joined, such as in the Church of South India (though many for­mer Angli­can con­gre­ga­tions even­tu­ally with­drew from the Church of South India).

Johannes Oesch says:
October 15, 2010 at 9:02 am
Isn’t the Lutheran World Fed­er­a­tion a Com­mu­nion bring­ing together epis­co­pal and non-episcopal churches? The Por­voo agree­ment and the Meis­sen aggree­ment do not match, but within the LWF this has not yet devel­oped as a church divid­ing issue. I still hope that it will not either.
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