Samir Selmanovic, Andrew Seely (See Andrew’s blog post about the experience) and I participated in the National Council of churches Faith & Order Commission a couple of weeks ago. The three of us participated in the dialogues as representatives of Emergent Village.
The primary goal of the Faith & Order Commission is been to bring together representative theologians from different Christian confessions to work towards the visible unity of the Church. F&O works mainly by the convoking of meetings of theologians and educators from the churches in order to discuss church-dividing issues and church-uniting possibilities.
Currently there are three study groups within the F&O Commission; Andrew was in on the group exploring the Authority of the Church in the World, Samir was in on Justification & Justice, and I participated in the Full Communion study group.
Coming out of the conversation I’ve been asked to prepare a short paper which will seek to offer to the commission Emergent Village’s understanding/practice of full communion.
Full communion is a term used in Christian ecclesiology to describe relations between two or more distinct Christian communities or Churches that, while maintaining some separateness of identity, recognize each other as sharing the same communion and the same essential doctrines. And in practice full communion would mean that an ordained minister of one faith tradition could preside over Eucharist celebration in the another church tradition with whom they share a full communion agreement.
Together with Samir I’m in the process of drafting a three page document seeking to reflect Emergent Village’s perspective on full communion. Obviously this has a number of challenges as Emergent Village does not and likely should not have a formal position on such matters; after all we are a growing, generative friendship among missional Christians seeking to love our world in the Spirit of Jesus Christ. We come together from many streams of Christian tradition.
As soon as Samir and I have a first draft ready we hope to post it on the Emerging Theologians Group site for it to be sharpened to even more fully reflect us and our practices.
If you know of anyone who has done any theological reflection on themes connected to full communion or similar themes from an EV perspective I’d love to get connected.
peace, dwight
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