Launch of Christian Churches Together is postponed

Catholic News Service
June 10, 2005
by Jerry Filteau

Founding members of Christian Churches Together in the USA, meeting in early June in Los Altos, Calif., decided to delay the formal launch of the new ecumenical association.

The original plan to have an inaugural worship celebration of the new association this September at the Episcopal Church's National Cathedral in Washington has been postponed to give more churches and national Christian organizations time to join as founding members.

Thirty-one churches and national organizations have already decided to join the ecumenical group.

One major gap in membership is the historic black Protestant churches. None of the African-American Methodist or Baptist denominations have signed on, although several are in the process of studying and deciding on membership.

At the June 1-3 meeting, held at the Jesuit Conference Center in Los Altos, representatives of the member churches and observers from 20 additional denominations that are actively considering joining Christian Churches Together prayed and worshipped together and engaged in intensive dialogue and sharing.

"The gathering at Los Altos brought together a wider, more diverse circle of Christian church leaders than at any of the previous four meetings," said a news release sent out after the meeting by the Rev. Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, chairman of the new ecumenical group's steering committee.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops voted last November to participate in Christian Churches Together. Of the 67 church leaders at the June meeting, 11 were members of the Catholic delegation, which was led by Bishop Stephen E. Blaire of Stockton, Calif., chairman of the USCCB Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs.

The Los Altos meeting was to have been the final organizational meeting, but now at least one more such gathering is anticipated — probably sometime between January and May 2006, said Father Robert B. Flannery, president of the National Association of Diocesan Ecumenical Officers and a member of the Catholic delegation at the meeting.

In a telephone interview Father Flannery told Catholic News Service that the approach to delaying the formal inauguration of the ecumenical forum "was all very positive; things are going ahead like we'd want."

"We didn't want to rush prematurely" to a formal inauguration while other churches are still gathering information about what Christian Churches Together is and what membership in it would entail, he said.

Father Arthur Kennedy, executive director of the bishops' national Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, noted that church bodies have different procedures to go through in deciding on matters like joining a new organization. "It takes time," he said, and some denominations that are considering the issue simply need more time to go through the necessary steps.

From the start the new association has been conceived as a broadly inclusive ecumenical forum for sharing, building relationships and acting jointly in mission and witness where possible, with minimal staff or program structure. A key element has been an effort to bring together substantial representation from the five main Christian families in the United States: Catholic, Orthodox, historic Protestant, historic racial and ethnic, and evangelical and Pentecostal.

The news release said participants at Los Altos "agreed that the next meeting would continue common activities of prayer, biblical reflection, worship and relationship-building as well as wrestle in depth with the issue of poverty in the United States."

It said participants "enthusiastically reaffirmed their commitment to 'grow closer together in Christ in order to strengthen our Christian witness in the world,'" and the decision to delay the association's formal launch was made "to continue the productive and positive conversation with churches and organizations actively considering joining."

Currently the largest national ecumenical body in the United States is the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA, which has encouraged the formation of Christian Churches Together.

While the Catholic Church is a member of similar national councils in a number of other countries, the sheer size of the U.S. Catholic Church has been an obstacle to its membership in the NCC. With some 67 million members, the Catholic Church has about 22 million more adherents than all NCC member denominations combined.