TOP STORY: SEEKING UNITY: Lutherans, Episcopalians on the brink of an historic accord

c. 1996 Religion News Service WHITE HAVEN, Pa. _ Signaling a major turn in the ecumenical movement in the United States, the bishops of the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) began gathering here Thursday (Oct. 3) to consider a plan to bring the denominations into full communion with one another. […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

WHITE HAVEN, Pa. _ Signaling a major turn in the ecumenical movement in the United States, the bishops of the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) began gathering here Thursday (Oct. 3) to consider a plan to bring the denominations into full communion with one another.

The historic, five-day joint meeting of the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s Conference of Bishops is designed to lay the groundwork for approval next year of a”Concordat of Agreement”between the two denominations.


While the ecumenical movement often seems academic and far-removed from the lives of typical Lutherans and Episcopalians, the Concordat, if approved, will have an immediate impact on both denominations.

It will, for example, allow Episcopal priests and Lutheran pastors to officiate in each other’s churches, and allow the two denominations’ nearly 8 million members to take Holy Communion together. It would also permit a Lutheran Church to call an Episcopal priest as its pastor and an Episcopal parish to name a Lutheran as its priest.”This dialogue and the Concordat proposals it has produced is something very special, precious and delicate _ and incredibly important for the ecumenical movement,”said Gunther Gassman, a Lutheran theologian who headed the World Council of Churches Faith and Order Commission.

Gassman will be one of the main presenters at the meeting, along with Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, who has traveled from London to attend as a representative of the worldwide Anglican Communion. Anglicans and Lutherans in Canada, Great Britain and Northern Europe are engaged in similar discussions.

The Concordat seeks to reconcile sharply different approaches to structuring the churches and requires fundamental shifts in understanding such notions as the role of the bishop.

While the bishops will take no formal action on the document during their five days together at a resort hotel near this town in the Pocono Mountains, church officials hope the meeting will make the bishops comfortable with one another and spur support for approval by the denominations’ decision-making bodies.

Despite the fact that more than 30 regional Lutheran and Episcopal bodies in the United States have entered into covenants with one another and more than 50 Lutheran and Episcopal churches now share facilities, there remains a number of obstacles to final approval.

They include apathy and ignorance of the plan among local church members and fears expressed by some that longstanding doctrines will be diluted and the two churches will lose their distinctive identities.”The news isn’t out, souls have not caught fire, and diocesan structures and congregations remain completely unaffected,”Midge Roof, president of the Episcopal Diocesan Ecumenical Officers told a recent meeting of her denomination’s Standing Commission on Ecumenical Relations.”Ignorance and apathy are more dangerous than hostility to the Concordat’s proposals for full communion,”she said.


The Concordat of Agreement, a brief nine-page statement spelling out actions each of the denominations will take if the plan is approved, is the culmination of 25 years of dialogue between Lutheran and Episcopal theologians in the United States.

It comes at a time of great ferment in the ecumenical movement in both the United States and on the international level.

Just a month ago, for example, nine Anglican and Lutheran church leaders from Britain and northern Europe gathered in Trondheim, Norway, for the historic signing of the Porvoo Agreement, named after the Finnish city in which the 1992 agreement was reached. It establishes full communion _ interchangeable ministries and reciprocal Holy Communion. The U.S. agreement is similar but not identical to the Porvoo Agreement.

Although Episcopalians and Lutherans, especially in the United States, share much in the way of theology and beliefs, the distinctive histories of their denominations have led to quite different ways of organizing the church.

Chief among those differences _ and a central obstacle the Concordat has attempted to overcome _ is the the role of the bishop, the so-called”historic episcopate,”and what is calls”apostolic succession.” Apostolic succession is the notion that a single unbroken line can, through the ordination process, be traced back from today’s clergy to the first apostles of Jesus, especially Peter. It is a central feature of Roman Catholicism.

It is also prominent in the Episcopal Church, the U.S. arm of the Anglican Church. Because the 1558″Elizabethan Settlement,”which split the British Catholic Church from Rome and created the Church of England, was limited to one nation and supported by bishops within the apostolic succession, the Anglican Church has been able to maintain the unbroken line.


The 16th-century Lutheran Reformation, however, erupted in many places across Europe _ not always with the support of bishops in the succession. As a result, many Lutheran bodies worked out different understandings of the office and many churches developed governing structures that were not part of the apostolic succession.

In the proposed Concordat, both sides have agreed to make concessions to overcome the difference.

The Episcopal Church, for example, will take what Lutheran theologian Walter Bouman of Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus, Ohio, calls”the unprecedented step”of temporarily suspending a church rule dating back to 1662 that requires all clergy who preside at Holy Communion in Episcopal churches to be ordained by bishops who are part of the historic succession. In practical terms, that means some Lutheran pastors, who in the past were not considered eligible to preside at Communion services, could now do so.”This action is unprecedented in the history of Anglican involvement in ecumenism,”Bouman wrote in the Trinity Seminary Review.”It is important for Lutherans to understand and appreciate the great significance of this action and this aspect of the agreement.” Lutherans, for their part, have agreed that all future ordinations of clergy will be done by bishops and that in the future ordination of Lutheran bishops, at least three Episcopal bishops will lay hands on the newly elected bishops. Thus, over a period of years, Lutherans would gradually have bishops whom Episcopalians would be able to recognize as being in the historic succession.

The White Haven meeting of the two bodies of bishops will be a key testing ground of whether such concessions and compromises made in the name of greater unity are likely to take hold among the churches’ members.

MJP END ANDERSON

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!