Disunity about Unity: “All in Each Place” vs. Christian World Communions

The 1961 assem­bly of the World Coun­cil of Churches in New Delhi, India, had yet another ecu­meni­cal vision in mind: “all in each place.” The idea was that ecu­meni­cal rec­on­cil­i­a­tion must begin locally, so that all Chris­tians in each “place” in the world could have one fel­low­ship and speak and act together.

But that is not exactly an obvi­ous idea either. What con­sti­tutes a “place”? Is it a city or a state? Is it in church or in every place where Chris­tians meet each other? What about lin­guis­tic and cul­tural dif­fer­ences within each “place”? Does such a local focus actu­ally cre­ate a new kind of nation­al­ism within the churches? Does it do jus­tice to the global unity of the church?

These are real dif­fi­cul­ties, yet it is hard to imag­ine how ecu­meni­cal rec­on­cil­i­a­tion is at all mean­ing­ful unless churches within the same locale are able to speak and act together as friends and fel­low mem­bers of the same body. A heart­en­ing effort to gather “all in each place” in one city today can be found in Buenos Aires, Argentina. A vari­a­tion on this theme that has been par­tic­u­larly suc­ces­ful in Eng­land and New Zealand is the “local ecu­meni­cal part­ner­ship,” which is a very spe­cific coop­er­a­tion between indi­vid­ual parishes across denom­i­na­tional lines, for all kinds of activ­i­ties from wor­ship to mis­sion to service.

Per­haps the oppo­site of “all in each place” is the devel­op­ment of Chris­t­ian World Com­mu­nions. These started in the 19th cen­tury with the con­sol­i­da­tion of the Angli­can com­mu­nion through the Lam­beth Con­fer­ence of bish­ops, fol­lowed by an Alliance of Reformed Churches through the World Hold­ing the Pres­by­ter­ian Sys­tem and an Inter­na­tional Con­gre­ga­tional Coun­cil (which merged in 1970 to form the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, which itself merged with the Inter­na­tional Reformed Coun­cil just this year to form the World Com­mu­nion of Reformed Churches), a World Methodist Coun­cil, and an Old Catholic Union. The 20th cen­tury saw the for­ma­tion of the Bap­tist World Alliance, the World Con­ven­tion of Churches of Christ, the Friends’ (Quak­ers’) World Com­mit­tee for Con­sul­ta­tion, the Lutheran World Fed­er­a­tion, the World Evan­gel­i­cal Fel­low­ship (now the World Evan­gel­i­cal Alliance), the Pen­te­costal World Con­fer­ence, and still others.

In some sense these Chris­t­ian World Com­mu­nions have pur­sued global inter­con­nect­ed­ness, based on a com­mon con­fes­sion or the­ol­ogy or church struc­ture, to mir­ror the global inter­con­nect­ed­ness of explic­itly epis­co­pally gov­erned bod­ies like the Ortho­dox and Catholic churches. The ben­e­fit is in help­ing churches to get out of the ghetto of their own national cir­cum­stances or church cul­ture, rec­og­niz­ing that their the­o­log­i­cal com­mit­ments span the globe and are embod­ied in many dif­fer­ent cul­tures and lan­guages. They allow for mutual sup­port and the­o­log­i­cal integrity. But in the same way these Chris­t­ian World Com­mu­nions have been crit­i­cized exactly for putting empha­sis on global instead of local con­cerns and strength­en­ing a the­o­log­i­cal iden­tity that some see as an obsta­cle to full church unity rather than an asset.