The Receptive Ecumenism initiative

Durham University’s Centre for Catholic Studies has been the driving force behind the Receptive Ecumenism initiative since its founding almost a decade ago. This week I attended the Third International Receptive Ecumenism conference, meeting for the first time in North America at Fairfield University in Connecticut. Six continents were represented in the gathering, including support and comments from the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Jesuit Provincial for East Africa, the World Council of Churches, and the Australian Catholic University, in addition to many others. It was widely covered by global print and electronic media, including The Tablet, Commonweal, and Vatican Radio.
Each day we met in academic, liturgical, and social settings to learn from one another’s traditions and to foster the hope of eventual visible unity of Christ’s church. (There was also an open bar each evening, so many of the most memorable moments occurred well after midnight. Theologians across traditions appreciate liquor and Irish folk songs).
The self-critical and yet constructive movement of RE seeks to build bridges between various Christian denominations by asking not what each tradition can teach one another, but rather what each can receive from an encounter with various “others,” particularly so in relation to the respective organizational cultures of the denominations and their associated ecclesiologies.
The conference intended to examine how Receptive Ecumenism appropriately adapts and transmutes itself in relation to various global contexts, each with their own cultural, religious, economic, and other specificities. More a “virtual virus” than a uniform “brand,” scholars and theologians from around the world gathered to take stock of how the initiative has already spread to contexts around the world (e.g. Australia and Canada), to explore how it might also potentially apply to other fresh contexts (e.g. in Asia and Africa), and to reflect on how its framework can tackle wider issues (e.g. gender, war and peace, immigration and human trafficking).
In the opening session of the conference, the stage was set by my colleague, collaborator and friend, Paul Murray, the figure most associated with RE, who offered an image of the many-stranded rope of ecumenism:
“There is the ‘Life and Works’ cord of praying and pursuing mission together that is of such abiding importance: if I were to give this strand a liturgical color, I would give it the green of Ordinary Time. Not that it is mundane in any way, but rather it is how we experience the extraordinary in the ordinary; how we live, work, and interact with one another day in and day out.”
There is the classic bilateral “Faith and Order” cord of seeking to overcome disagreements and misunderstandings through the reconciliation of memories and traditions: if I were to give this cord a liturgical color, it would be the purple of Advent and Lent, drawing us into always-deeper repentance, reconciliation, and hopeful expectation of what is to come.
These two cords of Life and Works and Faith and Order ecumenism have been very important – and continue to be important – but they are not all there is to the ecumenical rope. There is another that is always, at least in part, also woven-in; to the point, perhaps, of being taken for granted and so has not been developed as much as it might be but which is now essential to any real further progress. This is the cord calling us to conversion, growth and deeper learning about the Lord’s call to us before the face of the other. This is not learning more about the other but really learning from them in ways that can speak to our own needs; Receptive Ecumenism draws this third cord out and gives it focus and prominence.
If I were to give this cord liturgical colors, and could be indulged a bit, I would give it a braided pair of red and gold: red for the Spirit enlivening the church in this time of Pentecost, for RE is a movement and call of the Spirit among us; red also for witness; gold for the transfiguration and the resurrection, where wounds are not erased and forgotten but transformed; and gold also for the ecumenical golden highway, the surest route to our own receptive flourishing and to mutual recognition in the communion of the Trinity.
If we in turn move creatively from visual imagery to aural and musical imagery – from cords to chords – we could also say that whilst the ecumenical symphony must necessarily contain many chords, RE perhaps now represents the dominant chord to provide the key in which ecumenism in our day can be properly and beneficially performed.”
As the movement continues to gain momentum and spread across the globe, through the work of people such as Murray, Paul Lakeland and Fairfield President Jeffrey von Arx, S.J., the hope was expressed that the next gathering will be in Australia. More information is available in “Receptive Ecumenism and the Call to Catholic Learning” published by Oxford University Press or by contacting me at Durham’s CCS (Michael.Canaris@durham.ac.uk).

Michael M. Canaris, Ph.D., of Collingswood, is a Research Associate at Durham University’s Centre for Catholic Studies in Northeast England.