06021
Jan. 18, 2006

Affirming the common faith

Worshippers at WCC Assembly
will praise God, pray for Christian unity

Editor’s note: This is the sixth in a series of background articles leading up to the 9th Assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC), which starts on Feb. 14 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Two PC(USA) journalists will help cover the Assembly: Eva Stimson, editor of Presbyterians Today, will serve on the WCC staff as co-editor of the daily Assembly newspaper, and Jerry L. Van Marter, coordinator of the Presbyterian News Service, will serve as a reporter for Ecumenical News International, a Geneva-based religious news agency.

by K.M. George

KERALA, India — The large worship tent at next month’s 9th Assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in Brazil will be a unique space, one of the main features of Assembly life. About 3,700 participants from churches from all over the world will gather twice a day under its white ceiling to celebrate faith, hope and fellowship in Jesus Christ, and to pray for greater unity.

        The Assembly, the largest gathering of Christian churches from around the world, will be a praying Assembly. Its theme is itself a prayer: “God, in your grace, transform the world.” Its deliberations and discussions, its policies and programs, all will be shaped by the spirit of prayer to the triune God, the Creator, Sustainer and Savior of all.

        The worship tent will symbolize the declared goal of the WCC to be a space where churches call one another to unity in one faith and one communion to worship the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

        Yet the Christians who gather there will painfully admit that they remain divided for reasons of history, belief, cultural practices and institutional structures. All will be sadly aware that they cannot yet hold a common Eucharistic celebration, any sacramental worship or even an “ecumenical liturgy.” But this won’t prevent them from expressing their prayerful hope for unity in Christ, or from affirming their common faith and trust in the power of the Holy Spirit.

         As the participants come together in prayer and song, some questions will be on their minds:

        What is it that prevents Christians from perfecting and celebrating our faith and communion in Christ, our common Lord?

        What are the doctrinal and historical obstacles that keep our churches divided?

        What should we do now to witness to Christ crucified and risen as one united body of Christ?

        In its search for answers to these questions, the Assembly will seek insightand inspirations from these times of prayer and worship together.

The beauty of diversity

        The great diversity of cultures and spiritual traditions represented in the daily prayers may amaze those who are attending such a global event for the first time.

        Diversity is God’s gift to humanity, and the WCC Assembly and its worship will bring out its beauty in many ways. Prayers and hymns, signs and symbols, rites and rituals drawn from various streams of Christian tradition will find their appropriate place in the worship life.

        Care will be taken not to mix them in inappropriate ways, and as far as possible, every tradition will be represented with integrity.

        To this end, the Assembly Worship Committee has given much thought to the recommendation of the Special Commission on Orthodox Participation that the Assembly’s prayer life be organized as inter-confessional or confessional services.

        Whereas inter-confessional common prayer in the mornings will draw on the liturgical resources of many traditions, evening services will mostly be in the form of what the commission described as “confessional common prayer,” each planned by a family or tradition for the Assembly as a whole.

        However, one confessional family can invite another to lead a service jointly. For example, the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) has invited the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) to join in the service it has planned.

        “By inviting our Reformed brothers and sisters to lead with us this evening prayer, prepared following a Lutheran liturgy, we wanted to give a tangible expression to our broader ecumenical witness and to our commitment to the ecumenical movement,” said the Rev. Ishmael Noko, general secretary of the Lutheran federation.

                                         Repentance and thanksgiving

        The Assembly fellowship in prayer is conceived in a wide framework of repentance, celebration and sharing. True to the calling of the church, the Assembly will carry in its prayer the whole world with its pain and suffering, its hope and joy. This will be an act of spirituality, offering the whole creation back to its creator in repentance and joyful thanksgiving, that the world may be transformed.

        Transformation — of people, of sociopolitical structures, of our own churches and institutions in view of the Kingdom of God — is central to the Assembly’s theme and to the ecumenical movement. The Assembly will pray with one voice for the reign of God in the daily life of our world.

        In many ways, worship during the Assembly will anticipate our hope in the essential unity of God’s world, in spite of the present divisions and divergences. The Christian unity to which the WCC member churches aspire is not for the sake of the council or even the ecumenical movement, but for the unity of all humankind.