Professor George"Tink" Tinker of Iliff Seminary in Denver addresses this year's assembly of the National Workshop for Christian Unity (NWCU). The assembly was held in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
One thing I've learned is to pack a couple of nice black clerical shirts and my shiniest collars for this event. This is a generally high-church crowd and I don't want to embarrass anybody. It's one of the relatively few meetings you go to in your life where the water cooler conversation may involve discussion of fourth century heresies or the latest styles in liturgical dress--and did!
The NWCU has two main trajectories. The first and more direct one is that it brings ecumenical representatives together from several major Christian traditions. The event began in 1964, during Vatican II, as a meeting of Roman Catholic diocesan ecumenical officers. Then, in 1974, the event was hosted by the local Roman Catholic and Episcopal diocese. Three years later, the mainline protestants were added in when the local Conference of Churches began participation as local hosts. Exactly when Lutherans began participating is a bit murky, but seems to have been fairly early.
This event is probably the signature annual opportunity for "ecumenists" from a variety of traditions to meet, listen to each other, promote unity, and worship together. Over the years, the quality of presentation has been at a high level. If a person moderately well-informed in American religion were to look over a list of past participants, they would recognize many names from many traditions. This year's keynote speech was given by Diana Butler Bass, best-selling author, and Episcopal laywoman.
The other trajectory is meeting with ecumenical representatives from your own tradition. Each day featured at least one lengthy meeting for the 30 or so Lutherans, for example. These sessions tend to focus on sharing of information, discussion of process in ecumenism, some theological reflections--these are Lutherans, after all--and, of course, various housekeeping items.
The event is both a reaching out, and a reaching in, you might say--reaching out across denomination boundaries, which is surely a mission in service to the Lord, and a reaching in to sort through our own reactions, which is almost always a positive and productive experience in itself.
In seminary, when you learn Greek, your English gets quite a bit better too. In ecumenism, when you "learn" unity, you also "learn" quite a bit about your own particulars. When you meet people whose journey in the faith differs from your own, the experience not only broadens your own perspective, it also inspires you to re-examine your own experience and, hopefully, see it with new light.
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