THE Week of Prayer for Christian Unity begins today — celebrating a centenary. Like its precursor, the Church Unity Octave, launched in 1908, it begins on the feast of St Peter’s Chair (in the Roman Rite) and ends on the feast of the Conversion of St Paul.
The prayers issued by the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the Roman Catholic Church for this week were initially drafted at the Graymoor Ecumenical and Interreligious Institute, New York, where the Church Unity Octave began as an Anglican initiative.
The Revd Lewis Wattson, an Episcopalian priest, had founded a religious order to pray for Catholic reunion. He and his community held that unity must find its centre in the papal see. Soon afterwards, they were received into the Roman Catholic Church.
The general secretary of Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, the Revd Bob Fyffe, said last week that the goal of the ecumenical movement was still full visible unity, but he rejected as outdated the idea of a Church that seeks to speak with one voice: God was addressing modern ecumenists differently. Those who asked the Churches to speak “with a single voice” did not understand modern ecumenism.
The WCC, like the former British Council of Churches, still tried to speak with a single voice; but that failed to recognise the complexities of Churches Together, which “struggled” with such a vision.
“Churches Together in Britain and Ireland have indicated a radical departure from this traditional understanding of ecumenism, and a new way of relationships. It is not just what unites us, and what we have in common, but what is now visionary is the way we acknowledge and accept diversity — to create a space in which we can listen to our differences and the giftedness of the other tradition,” he said.
“Rather than speak with one voice, we want to give voice to different voices. We can speak with similar voices, but not on behalf of the Churches. . . God meets people differently in different generations. Our prayer for unity will meet different people in different generations and in different ways.”
To mark the centenary, Churches Together in England has produced a booklet, “One Light: One World”, intended to “re-establish the scriptural basis for our ecumenical calling”.
Leigh Hatts explores the origins of the Week of Prayer feature
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