Praying with Jesus for unity

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1.30. 2015 Written By: Alan Kreider and Eleanor Kreider

The difference praying for unity can make in our lives and congregations

Silence, prayer, work, worship. Mennonites living like this? We tried it. Thirty years ago we were guests for 11 weeks of the Community of Grandchamp near Neuchâtel, Switzerland, whose sisters live by the Taizé rule of life as a part of the Swiss Reformed Church.

The sisters’ noon prayer, centered on the Beatitudes, always concluded with Jesus’ own prayer for his followers: “May they all be one” (John 17.21). They want Jesus’ prayer to shape their day and change their world—that there may be unity among Christians.

We were astonished by this daily repetition. After all, we were Mennonites. We thought, Weren’t we the ones committed to do what Jesus taught and did? Unlike other Christians who paid too little attention to the Sermon on the Mount, who fought their enemies and swore oaths, we Mennonites were faithful to Jesus. Yet the Grandchamp sisters also listened to Jesus. Further, they prayed with him, using his very words, that his followers may all be one, as the Father and the Son are one …

 

To read the full article by Bridgefolk participants Alan and Eleanor Kreider, visit The Mennonite.

Liturgical Press and Augsburg Fortress co-publish extraordinary new resource to celebrate Christian unity

MINNEAPOLIS AND COLLEGEVILLE, MINNESOTA (January 2015)—Liturgical Press, the Roman Catholic publishing house of Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, and Augsburg Fortress, Minneapolis, the publishing ministry of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), are pleased to announce the co-publication of One Hope: Re-Membering the Body of Christ, a resource to help Catholic and Lutheran communities walk together, recognizing and nourishing unity at a grassroots level.

In August 2014, six gifted pastoral leaders and scholars—three Lutheran and three Catholic—gathered for six days at a retreat center in the central Minnesota farmlands. Through intense prayer, discussion, debate, laughter, and work, they created a resource to help Catholics, Lutherans, and all Christians prepare for and mark the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in 2017. The result is One Hope: Re-Membering the Body of Christ.

The essays in One Hope explore experiences and activities that Catholics and Lutherans share and that connect to the living of their faith in embodied ways: breathing, eating, singing, forgiving, serving, and dying. One Hope will serve as a welcome resource for adult faith formation and parish discussion groups made up of Catholics, Lutherans, or members of other denominations.

Continue reading “Liturgical Press and Augsburg Fortress co-publish extraordinary new resource to celebrate Christian unity” →

The Ecumenical Review marks 50th anniversary of Second Vatican Council

22 January 2015 – World Council of Churches Press Centre

The current issue of The Ecumenical Review, a quarterly journal of the World Council of Churches (WCC), takes as its theme “Vatican II in Retrospect.” Celebrating a half-century of dialogue emanating from the Second Vatican Council’s decree on ecumenism Unitatis Redintegratio, central topics and operating methods of the council’s sessions are recalled by Martin E. Marty of the University of Chicago, John Gibaut of the WCC commission on Faith and Order, and Oxford-based researcher Donald W. Norwood.

Additional features in The Ecumenical Review suggest further steps toward unity. In an appeal for continued inter-confessional commitment, Ernst M. Conradie advances an overture toward development of a truly ecumenical theology of creation. Member associations of the German East Asia Mission offer an open letter to Christians in Japan and South Korea, “Together on the Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace,” arising from the Just Peace in East Asia conference at Wittenberg, Germany in the autumn of 2014.

The “ecumenical chronicle” section of the journal reproduces a study document on inter-religious dialogue and cooperation that was accepted by the WCC central committee in July 2014: “Who Do We Say That We Are? Christian Identity in a Multi-religious World.” Following a series of consultations exploring Christian self-identity in relation to interactions with a series of other world religions, this major text “seeks to draw together the reflections and work of the last decade.”

For additional resources, visit the World Council of Churches.

Reform, Revival or Reversal: The Reformation 500 Years On

From Toronto School of Theology.

 

With the 500th anniversary of the Reformation at hand in 2017, the question of how to commemorate it is upon us.

Do we celebrate the Reformers’ renewal of the church in light of the gospel? Do we mourn the division of the one, catholic church? Or have events like the globalization of Christianity and the rise of Pentecostalism made the 16th-century debates irrelevant?

Join us as Professor Ephraim Radner and a panel of theologians representing a variety of Christian traditions wrestle through these important questions and more.

Lecture
Dr. Ephraim Radner, Professor of Historical Theology, Wycliffe College. Toronto

Respondents:
Dr. Gill Goulding, Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Director, Advanced Degree Programs, Regis College, Toronto
Rev Michael Stahl, head of communications for the Evangelical Church of North Germany, Hamburg
Dr. John Vissers, Director of Academic Programs and Professor of Historical Theology, Knox College. Toronto
Dr. John Rempel, Director of Toronto Mennonite Theological Centre and previous Professor of Historical Theology and Anabaptist Studies at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS), Indiana

Tuesday, February 24, 2015
4:00 – 6:00 p.m.
Sheraton Hall, Wycliffe College (5 Hoskin Avenue, Toronto)

Reception to follow.

Please let us know you are coming by emailing us at events@wycliffe.utoronto.ca.

Anointing Jesus’ Feet: Mary’s Example

By Elizabeth Soto Albrecht

The Gospel of John serves as a genesis. The writer makes a clear case that Jesus, the Word made flesh, was here from the beginning. The Logos, the Word, was here just as love is before service. The public ministry of Jesus, according to the Gospel of John, reaches its climax with the act of Lazarus’ resurrection. This event instigates the plot to kill Jesus and eliminate Lazarus as the living evidence of Jesus’ power over death. The Gospel of John places this miracle at the end of the first part of the narrative about Jesus’ life.

In John 12, Jesus and Lazarus are not taking the main roles, though. That role belongs to Mary; she has center stage. Her anointing of Jesus is an act, as some have stated, of “pure extravagance.” But for Judas it is “a waste, and could have been used for the poor.” In reality the writer wants the reader not to guess what is behind Judas’ comments. He wants the reader to see Judas’ hunger for money and his desire for attention.

But Judas forgets that it is a poor woman performing this prophetic act. She gives all she has as an act of gratitude. For Mary, it is an act of solidarity—“acompañamiento,” as Central Americans would say. The writer gives us the theological meaning of “anticipation of Jesus’ death.”

 

The full column, parts of which are adapted from Albrecht’s presentation at the 2014 Bridgefolk conference, can be read at Mennonite Church USA.

Signs of that peace: peacemaking is everybody’s business

by Gerald W. Schlabach
America magazine, 22-29 December 2014

 

ROOTED IN FAITH. Israel’s President Shimon Peres, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (partially hidden), Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople in the Vatican gardens on June 8.
ROOTED IN FAITH. Israel’s President Shimon Peres, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (partially hidden), Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople in the Vatican gardens on June 8.

For decades now, popes and episcopal conferences have been insisting that to work for peace is the vocation of all Christians. Too often, however, peacemaking seems the domain of special vocations or technical specialists. This is certainly not the church’s hope. As Pope John Paul II proclaimed in his World Day of Peace message at the opening of Jubilee Year 2000: “The church vividly remembers her Lord and intends to confirm her vocation and mission to be in Christ a ‘sacrament’ or sign and instrument of peace in the world and for the world. For the church, to carry out her evangelizing mission means to work for peace…. For the Catholic faithful, the commitment to build peace and justice is not secondary but essential” (No. 20).

Yet peace often seems an activity only for those who are “into that sort of thing.” Many associate peacemaking mainly with protesting war and injustice. If they know a little more, they may think policymaking. If they know even more, they may think of on-the-ground practitioners in the developing field of peace-building. But even if all these associations are positive, peacemaking can still seem like other people’s business. Protest requires a certain disposition. Policymaking requires expertise. Peace-building practitioners need training in techniques like conflict resolution.

Pope Francis would change this by widening our focus in a way that places every vocation, technique or tactic in the wider context of God’s overarching strategy in history.  Continue reading “Signs of that peace: peacemaking is everybody’s business” →

Vatican and Lutheran World Federation to prepare common liturgies for 2017 commemoration of Protestant reformation

Mennonite – Lutheran reconciliation service in 2010 provided inspiration

 

(LWI) – Rev. Martin Junge, General Secretary of The Lutheran World Federation (LWF) says relations between the Lutheran and Catholic churches have reached an epoch-making turning-point.

Speaking during a panel discussion, held 18 December, in the Lutheran church in Rome, Junge emphasized that the relationship between Lutherans and Catholics was being transformed “from conflict to communion.” Precisely in a world “in which religion and faith are regularly portrayed and perceived as trouble makers,” he said it was a phenomenal testimony that the Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches continued to move “towards a profound communion that frees us to serve God and the world.” Continue reading “Vatican and Lutheran World Federation to prepare common liturgies for 2017 commemoration of Protestant reformation” →

Ecumenical friendship calls for solidarity with ancient Christian communities in Middle East

Christians gather for Evening Prayer outside St. Joseph’s Church in Erbil. (photo: Don Duncan, CNEWA)
Christians gather for Evening Prayer outside St. Joseph’s Church in Erbil. (photo: Don Duncan, CNEWA)

Ecumenical friendship is not only about theological dialogue and common causes–it is also about solidarity in suffering, our calling to “bear one another’s burdens” in the body of Christ so that we might “fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal 6:2). The Catholic Near East Welfare Agency (CNEWA) is a Vatican agency that provides humanitarian and pastoral support for the Eastern Catholic churches. CNEWA works in Eastern Europe, Northeast Africa and throughout the Middle East.  A key area of CNEWAs work has been supporting seminaries and training catechists in some of the oldest Christian communities that are struggling to survive in challenging conditions.

This year the church marks Advent and Christmas while many thousands of Catholic Christians have been displaced by expanding war in northern Iraq. They are waiting and wondering whether they will ever be able to return home. Their story is told in an article titled “Exodus” in the magazine ONE, published by CNEWA.  Here’s a brief sample:

At night, above this landscape of abjection reigns a scattering of glimmering crosses. On the feast of the Triumph of the Cross, celebrated on 14 September, Iraqi Christians erect illuminated crosses on top of their buildings and leave them there for several weeks. The crosses they left behind in Qaraqosh and Bartella have most likely been taken down or destroyed, but crosses seem to have redoubled across the recently overpopulated Christian enclaves of Iraqi Kurdistan.

While the presence of the crosses certainly brings hope to the faithful, the harsh reality grinds on: It has been months since their expulsion and they are still languishing in churches, tents, abandoned basements, unfinished buildings, repurposed schools and social centers.”

For the full story click here

On the bridge between Mennonite and Catholic shores

Bridgefolk couple Laura Funk and Gilbert Detillieux share their story in the Nov. 10 issue of The Canadian Mennonite:

Even if we grow up hearing stories of the Good Samaritan and the Woman at the Well, we may be more hesitant to seek out those who are different from us in real life. And that may be true all the more if we have grown up in a community where everyone knows everyone else and they all have a lot in common. (This can be true in faith communities, too, unfortunately. Sometimes we become educated beyond our faithfulness.)

But if we are to be true to the ways of Jesus, it may be important to look across the river, and get to know our neighbour on the other side. Sometimes surprising things happen when we venture out and stretch our comfort zones. Our story is one of those examples.

The full story is available here.