What Is Ecumenism, and Should Evangelicals Join In?

Question 09071

The word ecumenism, and the ecumenical movement that carries it, has become one of those terms that generates more heat than light. To some it means everything good about Christians laying down their weapons. To others it means everything bad about churches abandoning the truth in order to be liked. Both reactions contain something real, which is why the question deserves patience rather than a slogan.

The word itself comes from the Greek oikoumene, the inhabited world, and in its earliest Christian use it described councils that spoke for the whole church rather than one region. The modern usage is narrower. It describes the ecumenical movement proper, the organised effort largely from the twentieth century onwards, to draw the separated Christian communions back into visible unity.

What the Ecumenical Movement Actually Is

The modern ecumenical movement is usually traced to the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910, where mission agencies met to address the scandal of competing denominations planting rival churches in the same village. That was a real problem and the impulse to address it was a good one. From that root the ecumenical movement grew, through the Faith and Order movement, the Life and Work movement, and eventually the World Council of Churches in 1948.

The World Council of Churches now includes several hundred member bodies covering Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed, Methodist and many other communions. Rome is not a member, though it participates in Faith and Order and has pursued its own extensive programme of bilateral dialogues since the Second Vatican Council. Alongside these formal structures sits a much looser and more informal ecumenical movement in the pew, expressed in shared services, joint prayer weeks and town centre carol events.

It is important to separate these layers. Praying with the Methodist congregation at the other end of the high street is not the same act as signing a doctrinal accord with a body that teaches a different gospel. Much of the confusion around the ecumenical movement comes from treating every level of cooperation as though it were the same thing.

The Unity Jesus Prayed For

No discussion of this can avoid John 17:20-23. Jesus prays that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. That prayer is not optional reading for people uneasy about ecumenism. It is the Lord’s own request on the night before He died.

But look carefully at what He asks for. The pattern of the unity is the union of the Father and the Son, which is a unity of nature and of purpose, not an administrative arrangement. And the immediate context is truth. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth (John 17:17). Jesus prays for a unity that stands inside the truth of the Father’s word, not one that is achieved by holding the word more loosely.

Paul says something similar in Ephesians 4:3-6. We are to be eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, and the reason given is that there already is one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father. Notice the verb. We maintain a unity; we do not construct one. Everyone who is genuinely in Christ is already joined to every other believer by the Spirit, and no committee created that and no committee can dissolve it.

Where the Ecumenical Movement Went Wrong

If the impulse was good, why the unease about the ecumenical movement? Because in large parts of the ecumenical movement the basis of unity quietly shifted. Organisational union became the objective, and doctrine became the obstacle to be managed rather than the ground to be shared. Where a body includes members who deny the bodily resurrection, the substitutionary death of Jesus, or the authority of Scripture, unity has been purchased at a price that Scripture does not permit us to pay.

The pattern is visible in the way agreed statements are often drafted. Language is chosen that each party can sign while continuing to mean something different by it. That is not reconciliation; it is a truce built on ambiguity. Paul was willing to withstand Peter to his face over exactly this sort of practical compromise when the truth of the gospel was at stake (Galatians 2:11-14).

There is also a drift of subject matter. Considerable energy within the ecumenical movement over recent decades has gone into social and political programmes on which member churches can agree, precisely because doctrinal agreement proved unreachable. Christians should care about justice and poverty, and I do. But a movement that finds it easier to speak about carbon emissions than about the resurrection has told you where its centre of gravity lies.

Gospel, Trinity and Scripture: the Real Basis of Fellowship

My own position is straightforward. The basis for genuine Christian fellowship is the gospel of grace, historic Trinitarian belief, and a high view of Scripture as the word of God. Where those are held, real fellowship is possible even across substantial secondary disagreement. Where any of them is denied, no amount of goodwill can create fellowship, because the thing that fellowship is made of is absent.

This is why I gladly work with believers whose views on baptism, church government, or the gifts differ from my own. I hold my convictions on those matters firmly and teach them clearly, and I do not pretend they are unimportant. But I recognise a brother when I meet one. I have set out the difference between doctrines worth dividing over and doctrines worth discussing in which doctrines to divide over, and it bears directly on this question.

The New Testament word for fellowship is koinonia, a sharing in common. You cannot share what you do not both possess. That is not a hostile observation; it is simply what the word means.

Rome, Orthodoxy and the Limits of the Ecumenical Movement

Here I must be candid. The Roman Catholic Church teaches that justification is infused rather than imputed, that it is increased by sacramental participation and can be lost and regained, and that the Church dispenses saving grace through her sacraments. The Council of Trent pronounced its anathema on the position that a sinner is justified by faith alone, and Trent has never been rescinded. Eastern Orthodoxy differs from Rome at several points but shares a sacramental understanding of salvation that stands at a distance from what Paul argues in Romans 3:21-28.

That is a difference about the gospel itself, and it is why I do not extend formal church fellowship across those boundaries. This is not personal hostility, and I want to be understood carefully here. I have Catholic and Orthodox friends, I engage with them warmly, and I would not presume to say that no individual within those communions has come to personal faith in Jesus. God knows His own. But I evangelise them rather than treat their church as a partner in the gospel, because the message their institution teaches is not the message I preach.

The Evangelicals and Catholics Together statements of the 1990s illustrate the difficulty facing the ecumenical movement at its most sincere. Signatories of real integrity produced documents that spoke of a shared faith while leaving the material question of justification unresolved. Several respected evangelicals declined to sign for that reason, and I think they were right. When you agree to stop evangelising a community whose official teaching contradicts the gospel, you have conceded the point that mattered.

Cooperation Without Compromise

None of this means retreating into a bunker. There is a great deal that Bible believing churches can and should do together, and much of it is being neglected while we argue about the ecumenical movement. Joint evangelistic missions, shared prayer for a town, cooperation in relief work, common witness on the value of unborn life and the nature of marriage, mutual support when one congregation is under pressure.

The test I apply is simple enough to use in a meeting. Does this activity require me to say something I do not believe, or to leave unsaid something the gospel requires me to say? Serving soup alongside Catholics does not require either. Signing a statement that the sacraments convey saving grace does. Preaching at a united mission where the gospel is preached plainly is one thing; preaching where I have agreed in advance not to mention conversion is another.

Parachurch bodies deserve a word here, since much practical cooperation happens through them. I regard them as supplements to the local church rather than replacements for it, and I have written more fully on that in what parachurch ministry is for. Mission agencies occupy a slightly different place, since their work is the planting of local churches elsewhere, and on that basis they deserve the support of the wider body.

The Coming Religious Unity

There is a prophetic dimension to the ecumenical movement that I do not think Christians should ignore, though it must be handled without sensationalism. Revelation 17 describes a religious system riding the beast, a counterfeit unity of enormous reach that is finally destroyed by the very power it rode. Scripture anticipates a great convergence of religion at the end of the age, and it is not a convergence God commends.

I want to be careful. I am not identifying any particular current organisation with that figure, and anyone who claims to know the timetable has departed from what the text permits. Date-setting is forbidden, and speculative identifications have embarrassed the church repeatedly. But the general shape of the expectation should make us thoughtful about a unity built on lowest common denominators.

It also cuts the other way. Because I expect the church age to end with the Lord’s return for His people rather than with the gradual improvement of the religious landscape, I am not under pressure to achieve institutional unity before He comes. The church is not building the kingdom. It is proclaiming the King until He arrives, and it can do that faithfully in fellowship with everyone who preaches the same King.

What Real Unity Looks Like on the Ground

In my experience the most genuine unity is local, personal and unglamorous. Ministers who pray together monthly and mean it. Congregations that lend each other buildings and people. Believers from different churches who work together on a holiday club and discover they love the same Saviour. None of that generates a press release, and all of it is more durable than an accord.

Real unity also survives disagreement. I can differ with a paedobaptist brother about the proper recipients of baptism, argue the case honestly, and still ask him to pray for me when I am struggling. If our unity depended on my winning that argument it would not be worth much. If it depends on Christ and His finished work, it can carry a good deal of weight.

The measure I keep returning to is whether a partnership makes the gospel clearer or blurrier in the town where I serve. Ordinary people watching from outside are not tracking our committee structures. They are asking whether we believe what we say. Clarity is a form of love towards them.

Counting the Cost of Ambiguity

One further concern about the ecumenical movement deserves stating, because it is the one that troubles me pastorally rather than academically. Ambiguity is expensive, and the people who pay for it are usually not the ones who drafted it. A carefully balanced statement that allows two incompatible readings may keep a commission together, but the believer in the pew hears only that the difference did not matter after all.

I have sat with people genuinely bewildered by this. They had been taught that justification by faith alone was worth dying for, and then watched their leaders sign an accord which implied it was a matter of emphasis. The result was not warmer feeling towards other communions. The result was a quiet suspicion that nothing their minister said was firmly meant, and that suspicion spreads to everything else he teaches.

There is a related cost in evangelism. If the ecumenical movement’s practical effect in a town is to suggest that all the churches are saying roughly the same thing, then the unconverted neighbour has no reason to look further than the nearest building with a spire. Clarity about what we believe is not unkindness towards other Christians. It is the minimum courtesy we owe to people who are trying to work out whether any of this is true.

None of that means the ecumenical movement has produced nothing of value. Honest bilateral conversations have removed genuine misunderstandings, and I would rather Christians talked than shouted. But conversation and communion are different things, and the moment a dialogue starts issuing joint declarations about the gospel, it has crossed from the first into the second.

So, now what?

If you are in a congregation involved in local ecumenical arrangements, do not simply withdraw in irritation, and do not sign up uncritically either. Ask what the basis of the partnership actually is, in writing if necessary, and ask whether the gospel can be preached plainly within it. Those two questions will sort most situations.

If you are wary of the whole subject, examine whether your caution has quietly become coldness towards believers who differ from you on secondary matters. That is its own failure and it is not more spiritual than the compromise it fears. Reading whether unity can exist without doctrinal agreement and the difference between Catholic and Protestant teaching will help you locate the real dividing lines rather than imagined ones.

And pray the prayer of John 17 as Jesus prayed it, for a unity in the truth that makes the world believe the Father sent Him. Which of the two errors, compromise or coldness, is the one you are more likely to fall into?

I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.

John 17:20-21 (ESV)

For Further Study

For the biblical doctrine of the church and its unity, Charles Ryrie’s Basic Theology and Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic Theology set out the dispensational framework within which the church is understood as a distinct body formed at Pentecost. Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology gives a careful evangelical treatment of the marks of the church and the limits of fellowship. J. Dwight Pentecost’s Things to Come remains the standard dispensational treatment of the prophetic material in Revelation 17, and Arnold Fruchtenbaum’s The Footsteps of the Messiah covers the same ground with attention to Israel. For the historical development of the modern movement, read the primary documents of the World Council of Churches alongside the Council of Trent’s sixth session, since comparing what each body actually says is more useful than reading summaries of either.