That They May All Be One

Raised in a village in Yorkshire, England, my earliest encounter with the problems and promises of ecumenism had to do with the sometimes tense relations between Methodists (of whom I was one) and Anglicans (the “parish church” belonged to the Established Church of the land).  Things had eased somewhat by the time I went as an undergraduate to Cambridge University in 1957, and there people from the Church of England and the “Free Churches” got on rather well together.  My experience broadened when I attended graduate school at the Ecumenical Institute of the University of Geneva, where I met not only continental European Protestants but also students from the Eastern Orthodox Churches and even a few Roman Catholics.  My best contacts with Catholics were, in fact, with some young English Benedictine monks who were studying at the University of Fribourg, also in Switzerland; and I have retained a fondness for that monastic order.

My engagement with institutional ecumenism began in 1964, when my mentor Raymond George, the Methodist theologian, invited me to accompany him as a youth delegate to the meeting of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches at Aarhus in Denmark.  When I had gained a bit of seniority, I myself became a member of Faith and Order, and I played an active part in the writing of the document “Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry” that was unanimously adopted by the Commission at Lima in 1982.

For six years (1967-73) I served as a missionary in Cameroon, West Africa, teaching theology at the Protestant Faculty of Theology in Yaoundé which brought together Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans and Baptists from the French-speaking churches along that coast.  At that time I also served as a pastor in the interdenominational English-language congregation in Yaoundé.

Around that time I also became involved with the work of the World Methodist Council.  For two periods I chaired its committee on worship and liturgy.  Then I was placed on its Commission for Dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church, and I have co-chaired that commission since 1986 along with a succession of Catholic bishops.

My ecumenism has always been exercised from within the Methodist tradition, which I love in its more Wesleyan manifestations.  As I wrote in my book “Methodists in Dialogue” (1996), my hope has been to keep “as many Methodists as possible walking with historic Christianity.”  The restoration of full visible unity in Christ’s sadly divided Church will help all Christians to be more faithful to their Lord, who prayed “that they all may be one” (John 17:21).

By Dr. Geoffrey Wainwright, Robert Earl Cushman Professor of Christian Theology, Duke Divinity School