As any long-standing married couple will tell you, living relationships are changing relationships. So after some 55 years of bilateral dialogue, it’s not surprising to see that the Anglican–Roman Catholic international dialogue (ARCIC) has adopted a new approach. Where the first two phases of the dialogue, ARCIC I and II, sought to identify points of agreement, ARCIC III has focused on mutual support and possibilities for learning from one another through use of a methodology called receptive ecumenism. Its first agreed statement, Walking Together on the Way: Learning to be the Church – Local, Regional, Universal (WTW), was published in 2017.
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Like many Canadians, I really like to garden. There’s something about mucking around in the dirt, planting seeds and tending plants, that restores the soul after a long winter or even just at the end of a busy work week. And how rewarding it feels to see your own flowers in bloom or to harvest tasty vegetables from your own garden plot. It represents the fruits, literally, of a lot of hard work, from clearing and tilling soil, to watering and weeding, to pruning and fending off critters – all for the joy of tasting your own tomatoes or savouring the blissful fragrance of your own roses in bloom.
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After 15 months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the churches of Canada have begun to take stock of their experiences and make plans for re-opening in the coming months. In some ways, the shared experience of our churches has drawn us together in ways that have significance for the work of Christian unity. In this blog post, I gather a few insights about the churches’ experience in the pandemic.

Many people have noted that the pandemic has revealed to us the inequities of society. Even with a first-class public health system in Canada, we have discovered that some people have greater difficulties accessing health care than others. Poverty, race, age, disability, gender, culture, education, and immigration status are all factors inhibiting the ability of people to access social support or receive the care they need. Of course, this is not a recent discovery but one that, until it was revealed to us by the stark reality of the pandemic, was rarely heard outside the confines of social services and health care policy. Churches have recognized our social capital in forming public opinion and influencing governments, and we are increasingly working together in these areas. During the pandemic, ecumenical and interfaith groups have begun to engage government on policy related to public health, long-term care, vaccination programs, mental health, and spiritual care.
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We’re all familiar with Gospel accounts of the apostles’ very human seeking for positions of power and greatness and also of Jesus’ clear response: “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you” (Matthew 20: 25-26). In fact, Jesus so reverses concepts of power and greatness that “whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all” (Mark 10: 44-45; cf. Luke 22: 26-27). A similar view of this reversal of secular models of power is found in Paul’s image of the Christian community as the body of Christ, where those that seem to be the weaker are recognized as indispensable and the inferior member is given greater honour (1 Corinthians 12: 12-27). Over time, this new way of being together in the church would find expression in an understanding of authority exercised through structures of synodality.
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The recent (June 2020) ecumenical handbook for Catholic bishops, entitled The Bishop & Christian Unity: An Ecumenical Vademecum, (hereafter Vademecum), presents a brief but important section (paragraphs 11-14) on “ecumenical formation”, i.e., the kind of formation that is needed by anyone who wishes to contribute to the healing ministry of ecumenism in the church.
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Sometimes people ask me, “How did you become an ecumenist?” I try to answer their curiosity with some honesty, but like most people, my own vocational path was only apparent looking back. Once in a while, someone asks, “How can I become an ecumenist?” The simple answer is that all Christians are called to work for the unity of Christ’s church, so becoming an ecumenist is as simple as saying “Amen” to God’s call. Becoming an ecumenist does not require extensive education or credentials. It doesn’t require ordination or commissioning in a particular ministry. To be an ecumenist is to pray and work for the unity that Christ wills in his church.
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Introduced into religious language by the Apostle Paul, the Greek word charisma means free gift, favour. In everyday English usage, “gifted” people may be tempted to think of themselves as a cut above others. For Paul, however, this cannot be valid because “gifted” means receiving a gift. A charism is a gift that has its
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Each year different Christian communities from around the world are invited to prepare resources for our common celebration of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity at the invitation of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches and the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. This year, the task fell to an ecumenical monastic community, the Sisters of Grandchamp, which brings together women from diverse churches and cultures in French-speaking Switzerland. The theme they have chosen – inspired by chapter 15 of John’s Gospel – is born from a lived experience of unity in faith and prayer, and of the oneness at the heart of the monastic journey: “Abide in my love and you shall bear much fruit.”
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A passage that I have returned to repeatedly in my vocational life as an ecumenist comes from Pope St. John Paul II’s encyclical letter Ut Unum Sint (1995). It reads:

Praying for unity is not a matter reserved only to those who actually experience the lack of unity among Christians. In the deep personal dialogue, which each of us must carry on with the Lord in prayer, concern for unity cannot be absent. Only in this way, in fact, will that concern fully become part of the reality of our life and of the commitments we have taken on in the Church. It was in order to reaffirm this duty that I set before the faithful of the Catholic Church a model which I consider exemplary, the model of a Trappistine Sister, Blessed Maria Gabriella of Unity, whom I beatified on 25 January 1983. Sister Maria Gabriella, called by her vocation to be apart from the world, devoted her life to meditation and prayer centered on chapter seventeen of Saint John’s Gospel, and offered her life for Christian unity. This is truly the cornerstone of all prayer: the total and unconditional offering of one’s life to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. The example of Sister Maria Gabriella is instructive; it helps us to understand that there are no special times, situations or places of prayer for unity. Christ’s prayer to the Father is offered as a model for everyone, always and everywhere (Ut Unum Sint, 27).

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Introduction In some ways, dialogue, which is essentially talking, seems a very simple thing to do. Yet, we all know there are various ways of talking. There are words that hurt and words that heal. The Epistle of James (3:1-12) clearly names the challenge. The tongue, he says, is “like a fire” and no one
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It is quite common in ordinary Catholic parlance to hear someone refer to him or herself, or to another in the Church, as a “convert.” Typically, this word is used to signify a person initiated (baptized) in one tradition of the Christian family, which they subsequently left before being received into full communion in the Catholic Church through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). The implication is that the person “converted” away from their old (erroneous/incomplete) way of living the Christian faith to a new (true/fuller) Christian life in our Church.
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“Doctrine divides, service unites!”

This was a slogan heard regularly in the early ecumenical movement of the 20th century. The polemics of the Reformation and intervening years had left their toll. For ecumenically-minded Christians, the way forward was not through doctrinal debate but working together in care for the poor, orphans, widows, and prisoners. The earliest ecumenical stirrings led to the World Conference on Evangelism in 1910 where the great mission agencies agreed to coordinate their work in world mission. In 1925, the same year that the United Church of Canada was formed as a union of the Congregationalist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches in Canada as a commitment to the Social Gospel, the “World Conference on Life and Work” in Stockholm gathered churches to work towards further unity in both the life of the churches and in Christ’s work. This stood in some contrast to the 1927 “World Conference on Faith and Order” which was committed to the unity of the church based on a common faith and a reconciled church order.

The division within the ecumenical movement between these three streams – Evangelism, Life and Work, and Faith and Order – continually threatens the faithfulness of this enterprise. In 1952, the newly-formed World Council of Churches (WCC) asked the churches “whether they should not act together in all matters except those in which deep differences of conviction compel them to act separately?”
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“May they all be one . . . that the world may believe that you sent me” (John 17:21). These words from Jesus’ prayer at the Last Supper define the goal of the ecumenical effort among Christians around the world. Insofar as unity among the followers of Jesus witnesses to the credibility of the Gospel, it is not surprising that the 1910 Missionary Conference in Edinburgh is usually identified as the beginning of the 20th century ecumenical movement. Although the Catholic Church did not take part in the 1910 conference, the ecumenical landscape has changed so much over the past 100 years that the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity (PCPCU) was actively involved with the World Council of Churches (WCC) in preparing to celebrate the anniversary and in exploring ways of undertaking mission together.
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Quite often in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and ministry, we are given glimpses into his prayer life. In many instances, we read simply that Jesus went away (by himself or with others) to pray. More rarely we discover the content of Jesus’ prayers, that is, the “what” of his prayers or the actual words that he used in prayer.

One place where the content of Jesus’ prayer is shared with us directly is in the 17th chapter of the Gospel of John. At the end of a rather lengthy section (typically called Jesus’ Farewell or Last Supper Discourse – beginning in chapter 14), Jesus turns his eyes toward heaven and offers his so-called “priestly prayer” for the protection, sanctification, and unity of his disciples. He prays first for those who are his followers at that time, and then he prays for those who will follow him in the future.
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I remember one year when the lectionary texts included 1 Corinthians 12, we sang a processional song by Canadian church composer Andrew Donaldson with the words: “the body is one with many parts, the parts are many the body is one.” The youth of the church had built huge papier-mâché bodies that danced on stilts at the front of the procession. The image of the whole church gathered to sing, worship, and even dance reflects the dynamic character of the church as a living body. This image of the church as a human body comes to us from the Apostle Paul writing to the Corinthians to help them overcome their own divisions. “Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many” (v. 14). We are one body because, in baptism, the Spirit has gathered us into the one body of Christ.
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