A Renewed Young Adult Ecumenical Movement.
In 2005, a small group of young adult delegates, students and seminarians from throughout the United States gathered in Chicago, in preparation for the WCC 9th Assembly in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and voiced their hopes and vision for a renewed young adult ecumenical movement. This gathering, entitled Shift Your Space-Transform the World, set in motion a coordinated effort to connect ecumenically engaged young adults through awareness, education and relationship.
Read some of their their testimonies, and share your own ecumenical story!
Foundations for Ecumenism:
When I was in college I was an intern with the Department of Campus Ministry of Creighton University, in Omaha, NE. Creighton is a Jesuit, Catholic university and as a Presbyterian I felt very engaged to share my faith experience with my friends and classmates who were mostly Roman Catholic or Protestants from other traditions.
Planting seeds for ecumenical life:
Many of my Protestant friends and I felt like a student organization that specifically brought together mainline protestants was necessary for our own experiences of spiritual growth and Christian formation. So, we gathered. Together we formed a Protestant Student Association that was formed to specifically bring together Protestant students and yet all our activities were open to any student on campus. As an organization we would come together in prayer, worship, study, fellowship, advocacy and service. This experience was my first true introduction to what being 'ecumenical' might me for me in my life.
What ecumenism means for me:
For me, being 'ecumenical' does not mean giving up who I am or my specific religious traditions, rather it encourages me to expand my understanding of other traditions and more fully enrich the life of the greater Church. Although I may be dedicated to the life of my specific 'Communion' I can only become more fully 'catholic' in my understanding of the nature of Church if I engage Christians from other traditions, communions, and families.
My spirit is deepened each time I stand with Quaker and Mennonite brothers and sisters against war and violence. My spirit is deepened each time I gather around the Lord's Table with Anglican and Reformed brothers and sisters. My spirit is deepened each time I sing my faith with my Lutheran and Methodist brothers and sisters. My spirit is deepened each time I engage in theological dialogue with my Roman Catholic and Baptist brothers and sisters. My spirit is deepened each time I fast with my Orthodox brothers and sisters. My spirit is deepened each time I sing praises with my Evangelical brothers and sisters. My spirit is deepened when I allow myself to be open to experiencing the Spirit of God moving in the lives of each Christian I meet. My spirit is deepened.
New Fire 2009 has been a great ex-experience. The fellowship with others from different denominations and races has been a life changing thing.
Greetings from the New Fire gathering in Minneapolis! We have been very busy here sharing in ecumenical worship, learning about ecumenical history, practicing dialogue tools, visioning, and doing strategic planning work to re-vitalize the young adult participation in the Church and sustaining the ecumenical movement into the future.
I have been inspired by the dedication and leadership I have seen from the young adults here, who have thought together about what is needed to strengthen young adult leadership in the Church and have committed to 100% participation in our fundraising campaign!
I thank God for the Spirit's work to renew our relationships and energize the Church with young peoples' zeal!
I attended the New Fire meeting of young adult ecuminists in Minneapolis in early November. It was an awesome experience to gather with other young adults from various Christian communions; to listen to and learn from each other; to build networks and relationships that will last a lifetime. The church of Jesus Christ is called to be one body. And this is the time for young adults to step up as leaders in dialogue, action and relationship building in efforts to lead the church into unity through our diversity.
I was a participant in the 2005 event "Shift Your Space." For me, this event brought to life what my mentors and elders had shared with me about their passion for the ecumenical movement. In those days, I met other young people who were moved to live a life walking with Christ, and in doing so together - to seek to solve some of the major social issues of our time.
I remember some of the conversations I had at that meeting with people - and how their faith inspires them - and those insights continue to inform my participation in the "ecumenical movement" through the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches, and through local projects and programs that the churches in my neighborhood initiate.
I had some neat ecumenical experiences, but I didn't 'buy into' the ecumenical movement until I went abroad to Argentina after college.
For one year, I was a Young Adult in Global Mission with the ELCA (Lutheran). It was a joint program with the PCUSA (Presbyterian Church), and I was placed at a Reformed Church and an ecumenical human rights organization.
At the ecumenical human rights organization I learned about how different Christian Churches came together to demand an end to the brutal dictatorship of the late 70's/early 80's. Christians risked their lives to meet and demonstrate. Their solidarity helped bring down the military dictatorship and restore democracy. Their witness had a profound impact on me and my faith.
"Worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness." --Psalm 96:9
These words come up in the liturgies for morning and evening prayer in the tradition that helps form and sustain me. It's a directive I take seriously, but--like all the work of the church--it's not something I can do alone. In fact, I submit that it's not something any one person, parish, or communion can do alone. If you've found your way to this site, I suspect you agree.
My ecumenical experiences have taught me that we inch a little closer to what the psalmist is getting at here when we let go of our theological and liturgical quibbles (not an easy thing for most of us to do, myself definitely included) and worship together.
A great way to start, I think, is modeled by the ecumenical community of Taizé in France (http://www.taize.fr/en). I haven't been there myself, but I've been fortunate to pray together with people who have. And I've come to understand something of "the beauty of holiness" through worship that is little more than song and silence--offered by a diverse group who sing in many tongues but with one voice.
Among the many blessings God gives to the world through the work of the ecumenical movement, I'm especially grateful for the gentle but insistent reminder that holiness springs from wholeness.
I am proud of the heritage that comes with being a Christian in the Church of the Brethren tradition. One that includes, as our lovely tagline states, "Continuing the work of Jesus - Peacefully, Simply, Together". But in a lot of ways, I have never understood my faith outside of the reality of ecumenism.
When I was young, and my family moved, we didn't look for a church of a particular communion. We looked for a church that felt like home, and where we felt the spirit moving. That was my first experience of ecumenism.
That feeling was further reinforced with my seminary experience at Wesley Theological Seminary. There is no experience like having your particular tradition located as a bullet point on an outline of a single class of a two semester long course. But that is where the Church of the Brethren fit in my Church History class.
Those are two concrete ways of explaining how I came to see the ecumenical movement. But it is much deeper for me than that. We live in a world that is broken, hurting, and calling out for the children of God to be revealed. And if we, as the church, can't demonstrate what it means to live together in love, we are going to have a hard time convincing the rest of the world to do so.
Ecumenism is about reflecting the diversity of the body of Christ as it exists in the world. And it is in that way that the children of God are revealed.
Since I accepted my call to ministry ten years ago I have been searching, studying, and praying toward what that ministry would look like. I dove into my academic endeavors, thirsty for the critical analysis and concretizing effects of theological reading and reflection. As my studies helped me to articulate the dynamic moving of the Spirit I saw and felt in the world, my vocational pursuits became even more complex. It seemed that accepting the call was the easy part. As I tired to figure out what that call truly meant I became more and more confused. Venturing down the many vocational paths of cross-cultural experiences, mission trips, domestic violence shelters, hospital and college chaplaincies, and congregational ministry I became more and overwhelmed by this call. Where would I find a place to live out my commitment of justice and love for people? Where could we tell our stories, work together and further realize the presence of God in our in one another and creation? How could my ministry hold a global perspective while being a part of a local community?
After my first ecumenical experience I was hooked. This was it. This was the place for pastoral care, education, social justice, and outreach - local involvement with a true global impact. At the New Fire event I kept hearing that ecumenism matters now because the fractured human state is costing lives. Ecumenism matters because creation is already a life giving system of mutual flourishing, yet we’re living out a system of death, pain, injustice, and separation. Ecumenism is about people loving one another hard enough, deep enough, to sit and be together in amidst tremendous confusion and pain. If we look to Jesus, or even to the heroes of our shared stories, we begin to realize that the simplicity of their work was bringing people together. This work brought about the most profound affects. My ministry could be about environmental justice, eradicating domestic violence and sexism, or even strengthening global partnerships, but one doesn’t seem enough for me. I see the web of injustice which links people into systems of oppression. These systems are only the symptoms of our foolish thinking that we are a separated fractured people, rather than the diversely unified creation that we already are.
I choose to see the ways in which we are all unified into body of Christ. Rather than treating only one symptom of our so-called disunity, I instead choose to treat the source of our problem by working toward a deeper awareness and realization of our unity. The ecumenical movement allows for my ministry to be with a local community, while being deeply linked into the larger global community. Ecumenism matters because through our conjoined efforts we can realize the eschatological hope that we are already unified, yet the profundity of that reality has not yet been fully realized. There is so much more out there, and I for one am so excited and humbled to join with you so that together we can help to bring about a kin-dom for all creation.
I am so excited to have been a part of New Fire these days preceding the NCC/CWS General Assembly here in Denver. This has been an amazing experience~ a time of deep sharing, and a time of vulnerability as we invited ourselves to discuss divisive issues and admit our biases and assumptions. For many of us, there is the reality that the church universal has not always been a safe space, and therefore it is more difficult to trust and to build relationships based on sacred trust. As a group, we realized the complex difficulties of eucharistic language for our Roman Catholic Christian and Orthodox Christian sisters and brothers, even that this could be problematic for some of our evangelical brothers and sisters. One of the questions before us, then, is what other theological framework might be more helpful to use as a theological framework for us an ecumenical group? Personally, I found myself feeling extremely convicted in my own assumptions that we would all be similar to myself in social and political location, and this was most certainly NOT the case, for which I felt compelled to apologize for that assumption. Because of that assumption, and because of the courageous voices of caution and more conserving social location, I find myself believing it to be very important to bring more Orthodox Christian and evangelical voices to our conversation for better balance. We need each other; we need everyone at this table. We especially need those who we find make it harder for us to find common ground and, generally, we need to keep at it especially when it is difficult. I don't know how else for us to engage...but to engage.
As for myself, I am a Christian in The Episcopal Church. I was not blessed to be a "cradle" Episcopalian, but rather began my life going to daily mass in the Roman Catholic tradition with my grandfather the first five years of my life until we moved away. After that, I went to a Southern Baptist Church, which is where I grew up, met my husband, and married. When I became a hospital chaplain, I encountered a faith dissonance, which led me on a pilgrimage to find a spiritual home where I could find roots for both my theology and my sacramental needs. This is what led me to The Episcopal Church, which is the perfect place for me. This is my own ecumenical faith experience; in our global society, it is more and more rare to have the "cradle roll" anything. To my present context as a chaplain~ a very ecumenical context~ I bring the gifts of an ecumenical faith development, and the best from all those places. That is the gift that we have to gift to one another; all for the building up of Christ's body, the church. My hope is that we will all work hard to bring others to the table, especially others who are less like us, so that Christ's body, the church, might be made more complete.