Abstract
This presidential address for the 2023 Congress of Societas Liturgica provides an initial exploration of the Congress theme “Liturgy and Ecumenism.” After situating the theme in the context of the history of Societas Liturgica and its continuing commitment to ecumenical dialogue and liturgical practice, it explores recent challenges to the relationship between liturgy and ecumenism. The address then examines three models of this relationship. The first two models, believing together and praying differently, and believing differently and praying together, reflect recent discussions of “reconciled diversity” and the problems that continue from such reconciliation. The third model, believing together and praying together, uses recent discussions of “receptive ecumenism” to explore the ways in which churches might learn from the liturgical and theological gifts of each other.
Introduction
As might be expected of a Methodist liturgical theologian, a hymn text provides the starting point for this address. I turn, however, not to Charles Wesley but to the Reformed theologian and hymn writer Brian Wren. In his hymn “I Come with Joy,” Wren wrote: I come with Christians far and near, to find, as all are fed, the new community of love in Christ's communion bread. As Christ breaks bread and bids us share, each proud division ends. The love that made us makes us one, and strangers now are friends. The Spirit of the risen Christ, unseen, but ever near, is in such friendship better known; alive among us here. Together met, together bound, by all that God has done, we’ll go with joy, to give the world the love that makes us one.
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The search for a conclusion other than “going our different ways” has been part of my own formation and ministry. My theological and liturgical education was distinctively shaped by the theology of Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (BEM), the publication of which coincided with my seminary studies at Yale Divinity School where, week in and week out, we wrestled with how to worship together in the seminary chapel despite our different understandings of worship and sacrament. My first pastoral appointment in the United Methodist Church (UMC) was to a congregation that in the 1970s had joined forces with a United Church of Christ (UCC) and an American Baptist Church (ABC) congregation to replace three buildings requiring repair beyond the financial capacities of any one of the congregations with a new shared building. Sharing a common building had mixed results. On the one hand, sharing a building enabled us to share a Christian education and youth ministry program. On the other hand, the shared building did not result in shared worship. The new building was designed with two worship spaces. One was used solely by the UMC which, as the larger congregation of the three, held two services each Sunday morning; the other was shared by the UCC and ABC congregations, both small congregations holding single services each Sunday. The two worship spaces meant that there were simultaneous worship services occurring each Sunday morning in the same building—UMC and UCC at one hour, UMC and ABC at another—even on some of the festival days. We could share property but not worship. While serving that United Methodist congregation, I also helped draft a local church response to BEM that contributed to the development of the UMC's formal response. (I know of no other American denomination that involved local congregations in their response processes.) After completing my doctoral work, my first teaching position was in a Disciples of Christ seminary which, for an ordained United Methodist, made ecumenical questions about eucharistic practice, sacramental ministry, and ecclesiology more than abstractions. These church and seminary experiences have helped keep questions about the relationship between liturgy and ecumenism, and specifically the relationship between what we believe and how we worship as communities, in the forefront of my research and thinking. What does it mean to believe together but worship differently and/or separately? What does it mean to worship together but to believe differently? Is it too great a hope to think that we might, in the earthly realm, both believe and worship together?
Such questions provided a starting point as I developed a first draft of the statement for this congress of Societas Liturgica. Studia Liturgica (which preceded the Societas) and the Societas Liturgica are both intimately tied to the history of the ecumenical movement, especially through Wiebe Vos’s early leadership in Faith and Order conversations, his role in developing the documents concerning the relationship between worship and ecumenism that resulted from those conversations, and his founding role with both Studia Liturgica and Societas. Vos noted the necessity of this conversation in his editorial for the first issue of Studia Liturgica: The Ecumenical Movement can no longer avoid the study of worship in its widest sense, nor can worship properly be studied without ecumenical co-operation. This is not only felt in the so-called “liturgically-minded” branches of the Church, but also in those branches which did not formerly lay any emphasis on liturgical life.
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The conversation between liturgy and ecumenism has not gone unexplored throughout our history as a society. The conversation was taken up in the early issues of Studia Liturgica where colleagues responded to the 1963 Montreal report Worship and the Oneness of Christ's Church, in the issues from the mid- to late 1980s in which colleagues responded to the Lima document Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, and in the conversations that emerged around the Ditchingham report in the 1990s. All of this work was guided by those near and dear to many of us. The work represented in Studia Liturgica bears witness to the ways in which, as Teresa Berger has noted, “the subject of worship has been on the agenda of the ecumenical movement since its beginnings” and the ways in which the concurrent ecumenical and liturgical movements demonstrated “a near-parallel development.” 4
Yet, by the early 2000s, we seemed to have passed from what David Holeton described as the “salad days of ecumenism and liturgical renewal” and began to experience confessional and liturgical backlash. 5 Some, such as Paul Bradshaw, who has frequently reminded us that there is no liturgical “golden age,” suggested that we had emerged from a “golden age” into an “ecumenical winter.” 6 Still others, such as Horace Allen, complained that the publication of Liturgiam Authenticam in 2001 had effectively marked—perhaps prematurely—the death of ecumenical liturgical conversation. 7 And, as Max Johnson has noted, “Although some examples to the contrary may be given, the liturgical renewal itself has not brought about full, visible Christian unity and our churches remain as divided as ever over an increasing multitude of issues, liturgical and otherwise” (as is evident in my own United Methodist Church). 8 Furthermore, we increasingly see denominational bodies divided not only from each other but also within themselves over liturgical and sacramental questions. Such internal divisions seem to be growing rather than diminishing—even as the sharing of liturgical resources across traditions has grown.
The causes of these divisions are many: the changing social contexts of churches deeply influenced by consumerism and individualism, fear of decline and death among the churches of mainline Protestantism—especially in the United States, and a kind of laissez-faire attitude toward local church worship practices that only seemed to grow during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the conclusion to a 2014 essay, Paul Bradshaw identified what he thought were two of the most significant challenges to Christian unity, challenges that I believe remain with us today. The first challenge he named as “the reversion to denominational distinctiveness in some churches.”
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In the United States, the decline of mainline Protestant churches has led many to attempt to redefine or clarify their “brand,” often by contrasting their beliefs and practices with other ecclesial and liturgical traditions. As Konrad Raiser recently wrote, the spirit of ecumenical renewal in the churches seems to have waned, replaced in many places by a renewed defense of institutional identities and traditions. The uniqueness and visibility of one's own profile again seems more important than common witness. Although the continuing separation is lamented as a “scandal” and described as “guilt,” such penitence is followed by no apparent willingness to change.
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The second challenge Bradshaw named as “the loosening or abandoning of traditional liturgical structures altogether in those [traditions] influenced by the charismatic movement.” 11 Bradshaw was, in part, correct but this challenge goes much deeper, as Melanie Ross’s work on American evangelical traditions as well as Lester Ruth and Swee Hong Lim's work on the history of contemporary worship demonstrate. It has been not only a question of “loosening or abandoning structures” but also an acknowledgment of the historical presence of alternate traditions altogether. 12 As Robert Gribben observed rather pointedly some twenty years ago, ecumenical liturgical scholars from the Roman Catholic and classical Reformation churches, which have until recently constituted the larger share of the membership of Societas Liturgica and the North American Academy of Liturgy, have largely practiced an “‘elitist ecumenism’ that ignores [or, I would add, even actively excludes] ‘the less formal, folk-centered, anti-establishment voices’” of the Radical Reformation. 13 Furthermore, in a theological context increasingly framed by questions of decoloniality, globalization, and interculturality, others have suggested that the ecumenical enterprise as a whole has been a sustained practice of “ecclesiological apartheid.” 14 The ecumenical enterprise, they claim, has been so dominated by Eurocentric theologies and traditions that such ecumenical work is not only no longer possible but even “satanic” because of its historic support for the subjugation and colonization of non-white bodies and its inability or unwillingness to account for the practices of growing churches of the global south and Asia. 15
Questions such as these would be enough to make anyone doubt that a new spring could ever emerge after this recent ecumenical winter, if that is what it has been. It would be enough to surrender to our divisions and go our different and separate ways. Nevertheless, I am not one to surrender; I remain optimistic about our ecumenical liturgical work, supported as it has been by your scholarship through the years and by your continuing work in bilateral conversations at national and international levels. Surrendering would be unfaithful to the gospel we proclaim and the hope we have in Christ.
If “together met, together bound by all that God has done” expresses the heart of our hope and our work, how then might we proceed in exploring this relationship between liturgy and ecumenism, a relationship we have more often attended to in our explorations of the relationships between prayer and belief? Assuming that we should not reject outright such a relationship and go our different ways, I propose exploring this relationship in three configurations: believing together and praying differently, believing differently and praying together, and believing and praying together. My aim is perhaps more to “problematize” this relationship than to resolve it.
Believing Together, Praying Differently
As I begin my exploration of these questions, I am aware that some might argue that our shared belief in and confession of Jesus Christ as Lord is all that is necessary for ecumenical partnership. Because we need nothing more than this, the argument continues, we need not concern ourselves with the different ways in which we live out that belief in prayer, liturgy, and sacramental practice. That is, we may share a common belief but we always have and always will pray differently. The shape and sharing of Christian prayer are consequently non-essential questions. The work of my denominational founder John Wesley is often used as a Protestant reference point for this perspective. All that matters, these readings of Wesley suggest, is that we share a heart for the Lord; common prayer and practice is unnecessary. Such readings of Wesley, however, are incomplete; so let me provide a re-reading of Wesley to begin this consideration of the relationship between liturgy and ecumenism.
Wesley did his most systematic theological work in his published sermons. In two sermons written in 1749, “The Catholic Spirit” and “A Caution against Bigotry,” Wesley used the relationship between belief and prayer as a key example of his understanding of religious and doctrinal diversity.
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In “The Catholic Spirit,” Wesley worked from 2 Kings 10:15 (“Is your heart as true to mine as my mine is to yours? … If it is, give me your hand.” [NRSV]) to make his case for doctrinal diversity—as long as such diversity did not touch upon what he believed were the doctrinal and practical essentials of the Christian faith. For Wesley, these essentials included the commandments, the creeds, and what Wesley called the “ordinary means of grace” that include the Lord's Supper, scripture, and prayer. Early in this sermon, Wesley expresses a heart-warming openness to liturgical diversity: “But although a difference in opinions or modes of worship may prevent an entire external union, yet need it prevent our union in affection? Though we can’t think alike, may we not love alike? May we not be of one heart, though we are not of one opinion? Without all doubt we may. Herein all the children of God may unite, notwithstanding these smaller differences.”
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Wesley returns to the question of liturgical practice midpoint in this sermon. While he believes his “mode of worship”—shaped by the 1662 Book of Common Prayer—is “truly primitive and apostolical,” he would not impose it on another: my belief is no rule for another. I ask not therefore of him with whom I would unite in love, … “Do you join in the same form of prayer wherein I worship God?” … “Do you receive the Supper of the Lord in the same posture and manner that I do?” Nor whether, in the administration of baptism, you agree with me … in the manner of administering it, or the age of those to whom it should be administered. Nay, I ask not of you … whether you allow baptism and the Lord's Supper at all.
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Wesley expressed similar concerns about doctrinal and liturgical indifference in his sermon “A Caution against Bigotry.” There Wesley used Mark 9:38–39, which narrates the disciples’ concern that someone who was not among the disciples was casting out demons in the name of Christ, to argue that, as it is God who does this work—as the Protestant reformers before him argued about the efficacy of the sacraments—it does not matter what ecclesial “party” one belongs to. Here, as in “Catholic Spirit,” Wesley again turned to differences of opinion about worship and sacrament as one example of the openness he is advocating. Whether such a person “objects to that liturgy which we approve of beyond all others,” refrains for conscience's sake from the sacraments, or disagrees about the manner in which and to whom they should be administered, 22 such differences should not prevent us from “readily acknowledging the work of God” and “rejoicing in God's work” being done through this person. 23 Nevertheless, while Wesley encourages us to acknowledge God's work through such persons, he saw these differences as potential barriers to Christian unity, concluding that “the unavoidable consequence of any of these differences will be that he [sic] who thus differs from us must separate himself with regard to those points from our society.” 24
Wesley's conclusions in these two sermons seem ambivalent. On the one hand, he advocates a kind of unity grounded in “shared affection” that lacks both shared doctrines and liturgical practices and which, as I noted earlier, may be more an argument for believing and praying differently. On the other hand, his argument against both doctrinal and liturgical indifference suggests we may believe together even if we pray differently. At best, his understanding of the “catholic spirit” seems to most clearly support what some today call “reconciled diversity” in which we interpret our different doctrinal and liturgical formulations as somehow “compatible within the context of a common core of the faith,” perhaps with a “shared affection” for God in Jesus Christ, and go our different ways. 25 From this perspective, we “settle for peaceful co-existence, with limited cross-fertilization, while [we] proceed on parallel trajectories that will never meet” 26 or for a thinly developed “spiritual ecumenism” that, as Walter Kasper cautions, is often “vague, weak, merely sentimental, irrational, and subjective, that does not take into account the objective Church tradition, or even ignores it.” 27 We share a heart for the Lord but we agree to disagree about worship and belief, all the while also agreeing to get along with each other. Such a solution means that “common decision and action remain ad hoc” and any organic understanding of the unity we are given in Christ—that is, any understanding of unity which would require us to make that unity visible in our ecclesial or liturgical structures—is seen as “theologically both non-essential and non-normative.” 28 As evangelical theologian Peter Leithart rightly states, such reconciled diversity as is found in Protestant “denominationalism … is the institutionalization of division … It enables us to be complacent about defining ourselves not by union with our brothers [and sisters] but by our divisions.” 29 Reconciled diversity seems, therefore, to lead to an inadequate though comfortable response of indifference to one another in matters of doctrine and liturgical practice; it gives up too quickly on the hope for visible unity.
Believing Differently, Praying Together
A second option in our exploration of liturgy and ecumenism is to suggest that although we believe differently, we might still pray together. Some of our churches argue that this simply is not possible; where there is no common confession of faith, even among those who profess the Christian faith and are baptized, there can be neither common prayer nor communion. 30 At the far edge of this concern is the question of Christian prayer with non-Christians. In 2001, a Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS) pastor was suspended from his church's clergy roster for participating in the “Prayer for America” held in Yankee Stadium shortly after the 9/11 attacks in the United States. He was accused not only of prayer with non-Christians but also of syncretism, worshiping with non-LCMS clergy, and violating the commandment against worshiping other gods. 31 His experience raises questions about other national interfaith, interreligious, or civic rituals, especially those that emerge in response to national tragedies or disasters. Such interfaith examples are part of our daily lives; moreover, they have been part of the conversation in the North American Academy of Liturgy (NAAL) for many years. 32 Even so, do such examples, as one writer wondered, enable us to gather “to witness to a shared commitment as faithful religious people,” somehow praying together despite our different beliefs, or are we simply praying “alongside one another”? 33
Perhaps closer to heart and home are questions about interconfessional worship as might occur in ecumenical meetings such as this Congress or gatherings of the World Council of Churches. Those responsible for shaping liturgies for contexts in which we pray together despite our differences in belief know how difficult they are to create and to enact. I think particularly of some of the ways this Societas community has responded to the eucharistic celebration that traditionally closes our biannual congress. Given that we are not a church, we are not sure what it means to create and celebrate a eucharistic liturgy that is “truly ecumenical.” We have different understandings about the ordering of ministry and its relationship to sacramental practice as well as the normative character of Word and Sacrament. We disagree about the essentials of eucharistic faith and prayer, are asked to account for different religious practices related to alcohol, and are increasingly asked to account for personal medical needs. Are we simply “praying alongside one another” or is there more at stake?
Our colleagues in the World Council of Churches have worked at these questions for many years, noting both the ambiguity and inadequacy of identifying a worship event as “ecumenical” because doing so may cause “confusion about the ecclesial character of such worship.”
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At the same time, they acknowledge that “at the very heart of every effort toward Christian unity and collaboration is also the reality of prayer,” especially common prayer.
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They propose, therefore, that we distinguish between confessional and interconfessional worship to avoid such confusion. “Confessional common prayer” is the prayer of a confession, a communion, or a denomination within a confession … It is offered as a gift to the gathered community by a particular delegation of the participants, even as it invites all to enter into the spirit of prayer. It is conducted and presided over in accordance with its own understanding and practice.
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In contrast, “interconfessional common prayer” is usually prepared for specific ecumenical events … drawing from the resources of a variety of traditions [and] rooted in the past experience of the ecumenical community as well as in the gifts of the member churches to each other … it does not claim to be the worship of any given member church, or of any kind of a hybrid church or super-church.
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the notion of “interconfessional” worship remains problematic … because of the complexities of presenting “non-ecclesial” worship using rites, language, symbols, images, cultural forms, and leadership that do not cause spiritual, theological, or ecclesiological offense. Even among churches that have established full communion or have statements of agreement, unresolved issues often remain regarding liturgical and sacramental theology and/or worship practices. 39
The weakness of interconfessional prayer, perhaps, is that such liturgies often seem little more than an inoffensive pastiche that satisfies no one.
A third example of “believing differently but praying together” might be found within parts of the charismatic movement, particularly when charismatic Christians pray with non-Charismatic Christians of their own or another denomination. Deborah Wong, perhaps echoing Wesley's understanding of the “catholic spirit,” has argued that “charismatic worship is best understood not as a tradition unto itself but in terms of a piety that transcends worship traditions.” 40 Charismatics, she suggests, have no distinctive liturgical character and are therefore “able to worship comfortably in nearly any tradition.” 41 Such comfort is possible, Wong argues, because a charismatic attitude toward worship and openness to the Holy Spirit, an attitude “that the presence of God is immanent and immediately available … through the Holy Spirit, regardless of the circumstances or the acts of worship,” transcends doctrinal and liturgical traditions. 42 I wonder, however, whether this emphasis on individual piety and indifference to both liturgical and doctrinal structures, concerns I noted in my reading of Wesley, contributes to or further hinders the work of Christian unity.
These few examples suggest some of the ways to believe differently yet pray together, even if we may be praying only “alongside” one another. I have named some of the difficulties and problems with such practices—enacting a liturgy that is an unsatisfying ecumenical pastiche, minimizing unresolved issues even among those participating in bilateral agreements, failing to engage, much less to receive, one another as brothers and sisters in Christ, and indifference to liturgy and doctrine. Nevertheless, the strength of “interconfessional worship,” as the WCC report suggests, is that we are provided “an opportunity to express together those things which we have in common, and to rejoice that ‘what unites us is stronger that what divides us’.” 43
Believing Together, Praying Together
When we backtrack to the starting vision of Societas, as I did at the beginning of this address, we are confronted with the hope articulated by Wiebe Vos that the shared academic work undertaken by Societas Liturgica and similar regional bodies to explore our various liturgical traditions would more easily lead to ecumenical agreement about what we believe. At the very least, such shared exploration and movement toward agreement has led to a fuller sharing of our liturgical traditions, practices, and resources, as is evident in the worship books and hymnals developed by many of our churches over the past fifty years. (I enjoy telling my Methodist students that the psalm tones included in The United Methodist Hymnal in 1989 were first published in the Lutheran Book of Worship in 1978.)
What we have also discovered throughout the years, however, is that common exploration and understanding of prayer, important and interesting as it is, is not enough. Too often we talk together and then “go our different ways,” having reconciled ourselves to our differences rather than pressing forward—even in unofficial ways. We fail or refuse to enrich what Durheim and Turnbloom call “strategic ecumenism”—the ecumenism of formal agreements—with what we learn from practices of “tactical ecumenism”—the ecumenism practiced in unofficial, perhaps even unauthorized, ways in local communities. 44 Common exploration, like the ecumenical agreements we have sought, requires common action, just as our shared resources require actual and regular use. If we believe together, if we desire to believe together, we can and must pray together on more than an occasional basis. Common prayer cannot be limited to the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity (which seems to have disappeared from the consciousness of North American Protestant churches, coinciding as it often does with commemorations of Martin Luther King) or to occasional ecumenical meetings. Unless we pray together on more than an occasional basis, the unity we seek will remain a “theoretical ecumenism” 45 or what Durheim and Turnbloom call a “concept-church” in which “the particular lives of Christians go unseen and are replaced by an ideologized concept” that fails to touch the lives of those we teach and serve. 46 Moreover, if we believe, as I have argued throughout much of my own writing, that our liturgical practices form us in belief and understanding, even as they have the potential to “deform” us, 47 then we should also be able to believe that regular practices of common worship, the inhabiting of shared liturgical patterns and practices, whether those patterns and practices are officially authorized or not, can lead us to and help us embody common beliefs. There is some truth to the old saying that “the family that dines together stays together.” Such seems to be the continuing promise of places such as the Ecumenical Institute at Bossey which, through encounter, dialogue, and common prayer within a multicultural and multi-confessional community, seeks to prepare people “to be agents of reconciliation, mutual respect and unity among Christians and with all God's people.” 48 Such, too, has been the hope in many of our denominational seminaries. Unfortunately, we now often find that as ecumenical diversity grows in the student body—at least in the United States—students increasingly contest unifying practices, reinforce differences in both doctrine and piety, and reject the unity offered through common prayer and sacramental practice.
Some suggest that, while our shared liturgical and ecumenical work has succeeded in bridging many doctrinal disagreements, such work has neither prepared us for nor is capable of bridging the prevalent forms of political sectarianism found within as well as between our various traditions or those forms of sectarianism shaped by “cultural stances about ethics and aesthetics.” 49 This certainly seems true among Protestants in the United States. Others suggest that questions of unity are no longer primarily about doctrinal differences, of Methodists and Baptists and Lutherans getting along with each other within one social context, but of how global expressions of Christian faith can “live together and do mutual enrichment and correction.” 50 It becomes a question, as Paul Murray, Kim Belcher, and others have argued, not only of how we receive one another as kindred in Christ doing God's work—as Wesley's understanding of the “catholic spirit” and argument against bigotry encourage—but also of how we receive each other's traditions as part of a shared heritage and, in doing so, are offered “a basis for renewal, recognition, and inculturation.” 51
As scholars, we are trained to receive the intellectual gifts each of us brings to the table and to understand that we need each other's gifts as they enrich and contribute to our flourishing. Too often, however, we stumble when we cross the threshold between places of academic discourse and places of prayer, closing ourselves off from each other's gifts, preferring to have things our own way. We fail to discern, as Paul Murray argues we must, that we are on holy ground in each other's company; … that [we] are called to be fed there by the real ecclesial presence of Christ in the other so that the particular ecclesial presence of Christ in our [own] traditions may be expanded and enriched;… that [we] come to each other in need;… that, for all the undoubted gifts in [our] respective ecclesial traditions, [we] all fall short of the glory of God.
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Kimberly Belcher argues that we can only begin to address such failures when we practice ecclesial humility and magnanimity. Toward the conclusion of her book Eucharist and Receptive Ecumenism, Belcher draws on work by Ladislas Örsy to describe what is needed. Humility, she writes, requires that we resist the temptation to “trust only in [our own] tradition's strengths rather than in the guidance of Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit.” 53 Of course, we often find comfort and safety in the known and familiar, but it is a temptation that can easily lead to isolation and impoverishment. Rather, as Örsy makes clear, we must acknowledge our impoverishment, our limitations, and our incompleteness. 54 As our Benedictine brothers and sisters know well, such humility is the foundation of the spiritual life and of life in community.
Magnanimity, Belcher argues, can emerge only in partnership with humility; it requires not that we be indifferent to one another but that we be more generous and big-hearted with one another. Such generosity enables us to see the good in each other's practices—in John Wesley's words, to “readily acknowledge the work of God” and to “rejoice in God's work” being done through our brothers and sisters. Humility and magnanimity neither require uniformity in practice nor, as Belcher argues, that “we eliminate diversities in each tradition or subject one tradition to the criteria established by another, but … that practices and theology be continuously subjected to ecumenical scrutiny” 55 and what Wesley would have called “Christian conversation.” They leave little room for indifference to either doctrine or liturgy. Rather, the two practices of humility and magnanimity enable us to move from “reconciled” to “receptive” diversity. When practiced together, Örsy argues, we become better agents for and deepen the unity we seek. 56
Each of us can point to occasions of resistance, rejection, and the pain caused by such rejection, even as we can point to examples of such reception of one another's liturgical gifts and the resultant deepening in our own traditions. For example, Paul Murray notes how the 2006 Roman Catholic–Methodist document The Grace Given You in Christ contributes to such deepening by seeking to “identify the particular gifts that each tradition can fruitfully receive from the other … to both aid the flourishing of each tradition separately and ease their joint path to future reconciliation.” 57 The continuing Roman Catholic–Methodist conversation resulted in the 2020 document Catholics and United Methodists Together: We Believe, We Pray, We Act—a joint commentary on the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the “love commandment” created for study groups and educational programs in parish churches. This recent document concludes by stating that “our common embrace of the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and God's overwhelming love unite us as followers of Jesus. Despite our divisions, United Methodists and Catholics together share in these living springs, gifts that enrich and nourish our faith.” 58 That is, common belief, common prayer, and a common experience of God's grace lead us ever more toward the unity we are given in Jesus Christ.
I am convinced that we can believe and pray together and that doing so need not wait until we are gathered at the eschatological banquet. The scattered grains that we now are will yet be made into one loaf to be broken open for the sake of the world. I am also convinced that as we continue to learn to receive each other in study and prayer, Word and sacrament, we continue to learn to receive Christ, through whom we are brought into communion with one another and with the Triune God. There are signs of such receptiveness small and large all around us, embodied in this Congress. The challenge nevertheless remains: if we meet and are bound together “by all that God has done,” as Brian Wren wrote, then we can no longer be content with going our different ways, indifferent to one another or reconciled to our separateness; we must “go with joy to give the world the love that makes us one.” 59
