Notes Toward an Ecclesiology of Getting a Freaking Grip

Does ecumenism have a future?

Earlier this month, the National Catholic Reporter published a story about the throttling of Spirit of Grace, perhaps the only jointly-worshiping Lutheran (ELCA) and Roman Catholic community in the U.S., by the Archbishop of Portland. Operating since 1986, with the blessing of three of the current archbishop’s predecessors, the congregation sat together for the Service of the Word and then celebrated the Eucharist at different altars. After returning from the pandemic closure, the liturgies alternated by week between Catholic and Lutheran presiders, with members reportedly communing when it was their clergy’s week.

You should read the whole story, which has a lot of little interesting details for people who care about church life in general and the peculiarities of Catholic-Lutheran relations in particular. This detail stuck out to me:

Members of Spirit of Grace told NCR that Sample's ban, communicated just weeks before Christmas, left them surprised and devastated, yet holding out hope the archbishop might amend his position. They said the decision felt abrupt and came without an opportunity to rectify any problems or engage in substantial dialogue — even after they made repeated requests for discourse.

In a letter dated Dec. 5 and sent to the handful of Catholic clergy currently serving Spirit of Grace, Sample said the priests could no longer celebrate Masses at the church following the Dec. 10 Sunday liturgy.

It’s certainly possible there’s more to the story, but as reported it sounds like this happened without warning in a communication directed only to the clergy and not the worshipers. The excerpts of the letter are the kind of boilerplate I’d expect from a church leader who didn’t want to be specific about the problem, but I don’t see a link to the whole letter. Maybe Archbishop Sample got into that somewhere.

Apparently the liberalism of the ELCA and the affirmation of LGBTQ Christians on the congregation’s website drew unhappy comments from some Catholics. In an age where people spend all day on the internet finding things to get mad about, that’s not surprising. I didn’t see any equivalent complaints from ELCA progressives asking why we had a joint mission with a church that doesn’t ordain women or accept LGBTQ people but it wouldn’t surprise me if some were made.¹

It’s a crude pastoral blunder to just take something away from your people without speaking to their faces, let alone giving them the chance to address whatever concerns people are raising. It undermines the reliability of the ecclesial authorities when they revoke, without any kind of process, a license long granted. And it certainly doesn’t feel great to have one’s rainbow-flag liberalism placed beyond the pale while white nationalism gets a lot of “on the other hand” rhetoric. But looking beyond the hauteur and the ecclesial boilerplate, I want to credit the actual concerns the archbishop (presumably) had here. Today the ELCA is a very different church than its predecessor bodies were in 1986, and while we tend not to be the instigator of formal ecumenical ruptures, we should be aware that moving away from points of former consensus will have some kind of reaction. It’s understandable, on some level, that an archdiocese that wants to be super clear that gay people are sinful won’t want to tolerate an end-run around Catholic teaching in the form of an ecumenical community. It’s charitable and wise to take someone at their word when they say they are trying to appropriately weigh “the needs of the Catholic faithful of the Archdiocese, the key principles governing the sacred liturgy, and how best to promote Christian unity.”

On the other side of the balance, however, must be placed the theological imperatives to “give me a break” and “be normal.” Especially because, in a certain sense, it’s never been easier.

The prompt for this image—I promise I am not making this up—was “Lutherans and Catholics worshiping together”

What Was Ecumenism?

I’m not an expert on this subject, but it just so happens that I’ve spent more time than most people I know in the communities and institutions that came out of the “ecumenical movement” of the late 19th and 20th centuries. And from what I can tell, this was an attempt to manage, or even overcome, differences among Christian church bodies along basically every line. Theological traditions cross-fertilized. Dialogues were opened. Bodies to coordinate and speak jointly were convened. It all had the look and feel of international diplomacy. Different sovereign jurisdictions exchanged ambassadors, reached detentes, granted certain kinds of mutual recognition, cooperated on shared interests, or even created free-trade zones in which sacraments and ministries could be exchanged. And where the boundaries met, little free cities or mixed polities sprang up. Ecumenical faculties and theological centers, monastic communities and lay fellowships, joint congregations and the like were not uncommon, especially in the decades after World War II. I don’t know anything about Spirit of Grace’s specific history, but it’s the kind of thing people were doing back then, especially in places where the differences between traditions felt smaller than the scale of the mission field (Oregon) or the peculiarity of the task (ecumenical monastery in East Germany).

These communities did something good by pushing the limits of the sovereignties under which they lived as far as they could possibly go. A joint “service of the word” with separate eucharistic celebrations was the limit, as everyone understood it at the time, and experiencing both the allowed unity (preaching and prayer) and the pain of regulated separation (sacrament) is good for people. I imagine the idea was to make us want to find a way to overcome the separation, to work out some form or understanding that might allow people who sang and prayed and ladled soup and made up budgets together to share the Body and Blood of their Savior together, too, without simply ignoring the cause for the internal distinction.

Whether this was ever plausible is up for debate. When I attended the National Workshop on Christian Unity in 2005, the joint (non-sacramental) liturgy used the Nicene Creed (because the Orthodox don’t use the Apostles’ Creed) without the filioque (because that was the original wording and the Orthodox rejected the alteration) and still a number of participants shouted “and the Son” when we got to that line. These are weight-bearing differences and I don’t want to minimize them, but the hard truth is that we enjoy them, too.² But whether this ecumenical hope was ever capable of fulfillment, it wasn’t fulfilled. The era that produced the Centers for Evangelical³ and Catholic Reconciliation and the rest has long receded. The next phase of “dialogue” was dominated by conservative Catholics and evangelicals⁴ making common cause over abortion and gay marriage, leaving theology per se completely out of it.

But that’s all the more reason to be disappointed and angry when the stranded bits of ecumenical flotsam get tossed back into the sea. Fifty years ago, there may have been a plausible threat to the stability of the boundaries that were being negotiated and crossed. Now, the survivors are just witnesses to a possible future—feared or hoped for—that never came to pass, blueprints for cities that were never built. Everyone should leave them be.

Getting a Grip

The reasons for the failure of the ecumenical movement are numerous, but the most important one for my purposes is the decline of the sovereignty model of Christian traditions. One recurring theme in Roman Catholic engagement in ecumenism is that the Protestant churches 1) aren’t “church” in the proper sense and, partly as a consequence, 2) can’t authoritatively make binding, church-to-church doctrinal commitments. The first claim is false but the second is true. The old official churches had the kind of stability and effective control proper to a public bureaucracy, but American churches never had that, and as the 20th century went on, our simulacra of authority got less and less convincing. “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it!” was the response of everyone who was against, or even just indifferent to, the wave of church-reconciliation documents drawn up by staffs and theologians appointed by central offices. A lot of effort went into the ELCA’s full-communion agreement with the Episcopal Church, and its biggest effect by far was to give cause for some restive congregations to bolt and form the Lutheran Congregations Who Want to be Baptist. A lot of effort went into the Lutheran World Federation’s Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification with the Catholic Church and since then, both groups have mostly pretended it didn’t happen.

And the rickety relationship between the administrative center and the ecclesial hinterlands wasn’t just a Protestant problem. The post-Vatican II consensus in the Catholic Church was more frail than it appeared to be to many of us on the outside, and after the death of John Paul II, something seems to have ruptured. Benedict XVI’s licensing of the Extraordinary Form, deliberately or not, seems to have institutionalized a parallel church within the Roman Catholic communion that has, at best, an ambivalent relationship with the authority of the Curia. Francis’s revocation of that same license seems to have acknowledged that reality.

One way to deal with restive provinces is to put more effort into policing borders. It doesn’t work, but it presumably feels good to try. If the ecumenical movement had any effect on the trajectory of Western churches, it can only have been to accelerate defections from the bodies that participated in it.

Another possible reaction, however, would be to acknowledge that the sovereignty model doesn’t describe anything real any more, if it ever made sense at all.⁵ And to the extent that ecumenical things are happening today, they happen not because the administrative centers have worked out all the fine print allowing us to transcend our lines of demarcation, but because people in the provinces have decided to ignore them.

This week, the organization formerly known as Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services launched a re-brand as Global Refuge. A stated (and good) reason for the change is orienting the name away from the people who founded the organization (Lutherans, whatever that is) and toward the people who receive its work. Another reason is that local affiliates of the organization are already ecumenical and interfaith affairs, relying heavily on the support and labor of people who are not Lutheran, Christian, or even any religion in particular. Clint Schneckloth has good thoughts on this if you’re interested (and I say this as someone who disagrees with Clint not infrequently over the content of the Lutheran brand and IP). When you’re trying to meet a need or solve a problem, you don’t need to map out all your areas of consensus and points of confession. And the more Christian mission and witness is broken down into needs and problems, the easier it is to create the local and occasional forms of organization that are fundamentally not answerable to a person at the head office who is protecting “the key principles governing the sacred liturgy.”

Those needs and problems, I am increasingly convinced, include or will shortly include “how do we make Word and Sacrament ministry possible in a de-churched environment?” And there, I think, is the end case for just chilling out a bit when it comes to irregular worshiping communities. Consider the bigger picture. A close-watched border wall is useless when the provinces behind it are being abandoned. We might cherish these experiments as witnesses to an era when people thought that big things were possible, and as a goad to try big things ourselves. We might rephrase borders as arguments to be made and heard, and exchange prohibitions for virtues we wish to cultivate. We might think about what is best in our traditions that needs elaboration for the sake of the whole, rather than as something to be protected at a boundary the world has forgotten is even there.

I need to work on this myself. I care about the rules and I believe they come from a good place. But even I have to acknowledge that the rules were made for humanity and not humanity for the rules, and that means taking a moment to get a grip every now and then and ask what is really at stake.

I’m writing this at the beginning of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. I used to participate in an “ecumenical service” in the small town where I served this week, each year having to tell people what “ecumenical” meant. The worship was nice (I got to tell a story once about my oldest kid chucking an old wooden fence slat playfully at a Jesuit friend of ours and telling him “that only works on vampires, not on Jesuits”), and I think it helped that we had these connections when it came time to do something really urgent in the community. But it’s years since I’ve done anything like that, and I can’t say I miss it. So this year, I’m going to hold a Week of Being Normal for Christian Unity as a personal devotion. No fights (being off Twitter helps a lot for that), no disparagement, no hassle. I invite any bishops who are catching flak for having irregular joint worship in their dioceses to join me in casting a big yawn in the direction of anyone who complains.

In Other News

I wrote about the denouement of The Crown:

By the same token, the elegiac final scene left me wanting Animal House-style postscripts: After attaining his goal of winning a third general election, Tony Blair was forced out of office by his own party, which has not won an election since. He started a think-tank funded by Saudi Arabia. Harry moved to California and recorded some episodes of a podcast. Charles ascended to the throne in 2022. The internet was worried about his oddly swollen hands.

Playing up the smallness of all these once-grand figures would have broken the spell of a rather heavy-handed, though effective, last episode. But the faint imprint of gravitas on these people and institutions is itself a delusion, a trick of nostalgia. The Crown gave us a queen who was interesting for her role but whose views of, say, the National Health Service or Brexit could hardly be imagined to exist, let alone be worth hearing out.

And on this Sunday’s Gospel passage:

It became customary in Christian iconography to show John pointing to Jesus, as if his role were confined to announcing a person and not calling the masses to a messianic age. But in Mark’s Gospel, when Jesus starts proclaiming that the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near, he is not stepping into an open space John has humbly left for him. He is not following John’s warm-up act. He’s picking up the mantle of a fallen hero and carrying it forward in a new way. It’s not part of anyone’s plan but God’s.

I also wrote about what Paul means by sexual sin in 1 Corinthians:

The term “fornication,” in the NRSV translation, has a legalistic and formal connotation in recent English usage that comes from our own history of trying to enforce sexual and cultural hygiene; “fornication” sounds like the word a 1950s preacher would use to scold or frighten teenagers. What Paul seems to be talking about is less the seniors at Corinth High fumbling around in the backseats of their parents’ cars, violating a prohibition on sexual intercourse outside the bounds of legally solemnized wedlock, and more about things we would categorize with such (admittedly loaded and sometimes vague) terms as “adultery,” “promiscuity,” or even “sex addiction” today.

And if you’ve ever wondered, “how is Jesus of Nazareth different from the grifter character in Nightmare Alley?” I’ve got that covered:

The difference between prophetic insight, as Jesus proclaims it to Nathanael, and a confidence game is not just that Jesus is honest in his motives or that he is drawing on divine knowledge rather than extrapolating from clues. It’s a question of the stakes. The Jesus of John’s Gospel is equipped to be the world’s greatest and most celebrated mountebank or, less cynically, a healer of profound insight and sensitivity. But he doesn’t settle for knowledge. You will see much greater things than this flash of insight, he tells Nathanael. You will see heaven open and the angels ascending and descending upon the Son of man. Falling for a con game and experiencing true faith may feel the same, but their object differs.

1. In case it needs to be said, anyone who would object on confessional grounds is long gone from the ELCA.

2. In the 1990s, the ELCA signed a bunch of agreements with Reformed churches that said “our differences no longer need to be church-dividing” but then we went on having separate churches for no reason other than we prefer it that way.

3. In the old sense

4. in the new sense

5. I don’t think it did.