The Ottawa Citizen
23 January 2000
Bob Harvey
Christians across the country begin a week of prayer for Christian unity today in the glow of their greatest unity ever.
“There has never been an era in Christian history like this,” said Ottawa’s Catholic Archbishop Marcel Gervais.
One of the reasons for the new visible unity is the worldwide celebration of the millennium and 2,000 years of Christianity. Another is the leadership of Pope John Paul II in making this a year of reconciliation between Christians.
Last week, the Pope met Archbishop George Carey, the head of the Anglican church, and Metropolitan Athanasios, of the Orthodox Church, and leaders of 20 other Christian groups in the largest gathering with a pope since the 1960s.
“We ask forgiveness from Christ for every time in the history of the Church that His plan for unity was upset,” said the Pope.
And in Canada and other countries around the world, many ordinary Christians are also bridging denominational differences in other special 2000 gatherings.
“I honestly feel the climate is better than it ever has been,” said Archbishop Gervais. He recently appointed Rev. Jacques Faucher to work with other faith groups as his diocese’s first full-time ecumenical representative.
Major world churches have also taken giant leaps forward in the past year in reconciling important theological differences.
In May, the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission published The Gift of Authority, a 40-page document recognizing the need for wider acceptance of the Pope’s leadership, and urging greater co-operation between Anglican and Catholic bishops around the world.
In June, the Lutherans and Catholics eliminated another major theological stumbling block by resolving their differences on justification, the doctrine on reconciliation of sinners to God. That was the issue that launched the Protestant Reformation, but now the two churches have removed the historic condemnations that broke up the Western Christian Church in the 16th century.
Archbishop Gervais said there are still real theological and other differences between the mainline Protestants, Orthodox, evangelical and Catholic Christians, but those differences must be overcome.
“We are united at a very profound level which makes us one in Christ, and that puts an obligation upon us to work together,” said Archbishop Gervais.
Not all Christians would agree.
“We still shy away from ecumenical involvement,” says Rev. Randy Jost, associate pastor of the Metropolitan Bible Church, one of the largest and most conservative evangelical churches in the Ottawa region.
He said many Christian churches seem to be willing to give up their own differences for the sake of greater unity.
“We just don’t think we can be thrown into the same barrel,” he said. “It would give a wrong message, that everybody has the same traditions and those things are negotiable.
“We do not do things because of tradition. We do things because of the Bible, period,” said Mr. Jost.
However, hard-line evangelicals like Mr. Jost are becoming increasingly rare. Last year, even the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada and the Canadian Council of Churches joined hands in a first- ever partnership. They sponsored Together 2000, a last minute attempt to focus more attention on the Christian significance of the millennium.
Janet Somerville, general secretary of the Canadian Council of Churches, said Together 2000 was not a roaring success, but leaders of the council and the Evangelical Fellowship have agreed to keep talking about new ways to overcome the uneasiness between evangelical and mainline denominations. Together the two groups represent 51 churches and the vast majority of Canadian Christians.
Ms. Somerville also represents a new era in ecumenical relations. She is the first Catholic to serve as the council’s general secretary.
Today, at 3 p.m., Christians of all denominations will gather at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian, at Kent and Wellington, for a service marking the beginning of the week of prayer for Christian unity.
Other services of prayer for Christian unity this week include a gathering Wednesday at 10:05 a.m. at Laframboise Hall Chapel at St. Paul University, 249 Main St. in Ottawa; and a liturgy Jan. 30 at 7 p.m. at St-Raymond Church at 35 Boulevard St-Raymond in Hull.
Ms. Somerville was named three years ago when the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops finally became a full member of the council of churches.
Ms. Somerville said another reason for the growing unity among Christian churches is the growing secularization of Canada.
“Churches are being pushed to the side. It’s a cultural process that is so deep-rooted that there is no question of turning it around or going back to where things were two generations ago.
“That gives the churches a sense of fragility they didn’t have two decades ago. It also opens a lot of doors, and one of the doors it opens is the sense of needing each other,” she said.
Ms. Somerville said the vast changes in the Catholic church itself over the last three decades have also given a big boost to the growing Christian unity.
Because of the changes brought in by the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s, Catholics began studying the Bible more, and praying and writing hymns in the language of their own country, instead of Latin. Catholics and Protestants also began borrowing each other’s hymns and choruses and using the same translations of the Bible.
“It gave a common language to people who had been referring to the same thing, but in such different language that they didn’t recognize it as the same thing,” said Ms. Somerville.