Reconfiguration and ecumenical awareness

Looking back over the past ninety years, it might be observed that the ecumenical movement has been in transition throughout its existence. One may argue that this has been necessary, if the movement as such was not to lag behind the socio-political, cultural-religious and economic developments of its time. Can we discern a process which linked the unity movement of the churches--e.g. their ecumenical endeavour--and the unifying processes in the world on various levels? (1) Such a relationship may be traced, in particular looking at the period Konrad Raiser has served the ecumenical movement in its institutional form; indeed, this link between church and society has had considerable impact on the nature of his service. (2)

The link unifying socio-political processes provided a frame within which the fathers and mothers of the modern ecumenical movement worked with fervour. They were dealing with the broken world after the great war, promoting Christian ethics and the need for church unity as a remedy to the disaster. This also is true for the period of the post-second world war consolidation of ecumenical thought; the churches were bound together in the quest for unity, acting contextually and thus adapting the shape of their approaches within a changing context.

Both these experiences of devastating war increased--in churches, people and political organizations--the desire for unity as a way to overcome divisions and find answers to the growing complexity of the world. For the churches, the reconfiguration of the world became a must, whether by means of "evangelizing the world in this generation" or--in the context of the WCC's founding assembly at Amsterdam in 1948--by insisting that a "coherent and purposeful ordering of society has now become a major necessity. Here governments have responsibilities which they must not shirk." The desire to reconfigure addressed the nature of modern culture: "There is no inescapable necessity for society to submit to undirected developments of technology, and the Christian church has an urgent responsibility today to help men achieve fuller personal lives within technical society."

One may note the conviction that change was to be accompanied by awareness-building, to make the new ecumenical situation understandable throughout the Christian community. Thus, historically, the promotion of ecumenical learning appears within two streams of reflection on the unity of the church. First, it appears in the area of social ethics, where it carried on the educational emphasis of the Stockholm conference on "Life and Work" (1925); this continuity was evident in the educational efforts of the WCC at least until the integration of the World Council of Christian Education in 1971. (3) Secondly, a concern for ecumenical formation was also to be found in Faith and Order, where in the context of the search for unity the question could not be avoided: How was desire for unity to be learned? Thus, one may conclude that ecumenical learning did not come to the fore only when crisis and change in the society at large deemed it necessary for churches, but was evident wherever the renewal of the churches was at stake.

Within the new "qualitative leap forward at the Uppsala assembly towards a real universality", as Konrad Raiser described it, (4) a new goal for the ecumenical movement was envisioned. This goal held that the ecumenical movement could no longer be concerned merely with the unity of the church as an end in itself, but would have to relate itself to developments in the world which were described in terms of the "unity of humankind". At this point, crossing the border from internal reflection to reflections linking the external and the internal (the church and the world it is embedded in), Konrad Raiser set out in the direction that would orient his work and contribution to the ecumenical movement through forty post-Uppsala years of transformation and reconfiguration. The concepts of paradigm shifts and reconfiguration have been prominent features on his agenda. But the prevailing winds have changed since the 1970s, when the intention in ecumenical reflection seemed to promote unity of the church in order to contribute to the renewal of humankind. Today the churches are undertaking a unifying process in response to aspects of globalization, in the context of which they need to find a common and effective response by first renewing themselves and their methods of cooperation.

The dominating forces and economic influences in the contemporary world challenge Christians to revisit their understanding of the unity of the church--as opposed to the unifying process of global society and the people living therein. This "broadening of the ecumenical horizon beyond the Christian community to the whole of humankind, the 'whole inhabited world' was", as Raiser has pointed out, "understood not least as an educational challenge. Christians and churches had to learn to break out of their provincialism and to 'think globally'." (5) A significant effort started within the World Council of Churches' office for education, as well as in member churches, particularly in Germany, where praxis and theory of what soon was termed as ecumenical learning was investigated and pursued. Names like Werner Simpfend6rfer, Paulo Freire, Ulrich Becket, Ernst Lange, Philip Potter and last but not least Konrad Raiser himself stood for various approaches to help the churches and their people to think globally and at the same time act locally.