On his way to Jerusalem, Jesus tells his disciples of the fate that lies in store for him (Mark 9:31). The disciples cannot get their mind round this - they are more concerned about which of them will have top place in heaven. Jesus sets them straight - service is the key, not prestige. But they still miss the point. "Master," says John. "We found someone casting out devils in your name. We stopped him of course, because he wasn't one of us."
"Don't stop him," replies Jesus. "If he performs great works in my name, he must be on my side."
The churches today seem to have missed the point of this message, too. Only in the last century were the first efforts made by church communities to work together - and we have a long way to go before we all pray together and have real fellowship together.
The history of the Church, even in New Testament times, has been one of debate about what are "the right things to believe." "I hear there are divisions among you," Paul writes to the Corinthians. "Yes, there must be different opinions, so that the genuine Christians among you may be recognized." (1 Cor. 11:19) And the word translated as "opinions" was the word underlying our English word heresy, which soon got for itself a bad name. There was "the right thing to believe" - orthodoxy, and there were "opinions" - heresies.
And so we read in the New Testament of the Galatians listening to people who put more stress on the ritual law than on true faith; of the Corinthians preferring one message that they have heard above another, and laying more stress on speaking in tongues than on the gift of love; of churches claiming that Jesus was a spirit and couldn't possibly have died as a man (2 John 1:7). People who held these views were "cut off", "accursed" - anathema, to use the Greek word.
Over the centuries, a lot of views got condemned. People felt it was important not only to believe, but to understand and be clear about one's beliefs - in many cases rightly so. Often the sects holding "unorthodox" beliefs disappeared, like the Cathars with their idea that matter was evil and procreation was wrong. Others are still with us - people who thought Jesus was not really God, or that he was not really a man (the Armenians and the Copts), people who thought the Bishop of Rome had the ultimate say in what was orthodox, people who denied that people had free will and believed that God had pre-chosen some people to be destroyed in hell (the Calvinists), people who would not commemorate the Lord's Supper (the Quakers, the Salvation Army), who would not baptize children (the Baptists), who declared that Jesus' return was imminent (the Adventists, the Brethren, Jehovah's Witnesses). (This list is not meant to be complete, or authoritative!)
Some of the disputes of past times seem remote from us today. The terms in which people argued about the transubstantiation of bread and wine, about substances, persons and natures in the Trinity, about free will, about the inerrancy and sufficiency of the Bible were conditioned by the way they thought. If we explained some of our beliefs in more up-to-date language, we might find we had more in common than we think.
The ecumenical movement has two main tasks. Firstly, individual churches need to talk to each other, and to try to understand each other's views. Sometimes, as with the series of reports by the Anglican - Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC), this shows our differences are smaller than we think, but still significant. Sometimes, as with the discussions between the Anglicans and Methodists, unity seems nearly in our grasp, but fails on practical grounds. Discussions between the Church of England and the Old Catholics began as early as 1874, and led to the Bonn Statement in 1931 establishing full intercommunion between the two churches. The Porvoo Agreement, with several of the Scandinavian and Baltic Lutheran churches, and the Meissen Agreement, with German evangelical churches, have extended a pool of mutual understanding and intercommunion.
The second task is just as important. The churches need to work together, especially in an unbelieving world. The World Council of Churches, established in 1948, has become a forum where this can be achieved at an international level. This cooperation now takes place at national and at local level too, so there is a Swiss and a Berne Council of Churches (the German word Arbeitsgemeinschaft expresses its task well.)
At St Ursula's, we work with our fellow Christians in several ways: the Carol Service in cooperation with the congregation at the Bruderklaus Church, Berne Kids with the Christian Fellowship, the Willibrord Society with the Old Catholics all promote closer contacts. We need to continue this collaboration (without necessarily adopting other churches' hymns, theological attitudes or methods of organization!). For we are called to "maintain the unity of the body in the bond of peace" (Eph. 4:3). In this way, we can help to play our part in fulfilling our Lord's prayer, "that all may be one."
HD