ROUND 7 OF CHURCHES’ DIALOGUE
NEW YORK – For more than 40 years, United Methodists and Roman Catholics in the United States have conducted dialogues on topics ranging from public education to Holy Communion.
The topic of the current dialogue, Round 7, combines the religious and the secular: “The Eucharist and Care for God’s Creation.”
Roman Catholic Bishop William Skylstad of Spokane, Washington, and United Methodist Bishop Timothy Whitaker of Lakeland, Florida, are serving as co-chairmen for the new dialogue, which held its first meeting in Washington in December.
The dialogue is facilitated by the United Methodist Commission on Christian Unity and Inter-religious Concerns and the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Environmental concerns have been a topic of conversation among religious leaders around the world, according to Bishop Skylstad. “Stewardship of our environment and ecumenism fit very well together as a project in which we can work together in solidarity and common responsibility,” he said.
“Care for God’s creation has become a central theme in contemporary Christian theology,” the dialogue’s stated rationale said.
“As Methodists and Catholics, we look to our scriptures, our moral teachings, and in a particular way, our worship as important sources for theological reflection on the challenges of environmental responsibility and ecclesial action to address the threats to the global crisis.”
The focus on worship is a new perspective, Bishop Whitaker pointed out. Few people “are looking at Christian responsibility for the natural world in light of Eucharistic worship,” he said. But there is a way to consider the earth “as a sacramental means in which God encounters us”, he added, which calls for an ethical response.
If the desire of Christians to improve the environment is not grounded in such a world view, they are not likely to sustain their stewardship activities or take them far enough. Bishop Whitaker said: “What is really needed is a transformation of people’s consciousness.”
For example, the church has misread the Bible if it believes “the Bible gave us permission to exploit the world”. For the human race to have dominion, he explained, “means to be good stewards” and to care for the world in the same way as God does.
Even the language of the Eucharist has “cosmic dimensions”. A vision of a God whose glory fills heaven and earth “requires us to change our relationship to the world and a lot of our practices”, Bishop Whitaker said.
The dialogues between United Methodists and Roman Catholics in the United States first began in 1966. – United Methodist News Service.
Linda Bloom is a United Methodist News Service news writer based in New York.
New commission to aid Anglican-Methodist relations
NEW YORK – How Methodists and Anglicans relate to one another can vary widely from country to country. The new Anglican-Methodist International Commission for Unity in Mission, which held its first meeting in January in Mexico City, hopes to have an impact on those relationships. According to the Rev W. Douglas Mills, an executive with the United Methodist Commission on Christian Unity and Inter-religious Concerns, the new group “will look for ways to cooperate in mission, in evangelism, in service”, even as the two denominations wrestle with theological divisions.
“The big lesson from this meeting is that Anglican and Methodist relations around the world are very different in different regions,” said the Rev Mills, who attended the meeting.
While the two denominations have established relationships in some countries, such as Britain, Ireland and the United States, that is not the case everywhere. In Mexico, for example, “both are minorities”, he explained. “They are allied in some ways, but they also have very little contact.”
The Rt Rev C. Franklin Brookhart, Episcopal Bishop of Montana, who has been co-Chairman of the official dialogue between The United Methodist Church and US Episcopal Church, said: “In many ways, the commission could be a catalyst for the churches around the world to work more closely together.”
The Rev Dr George Freeman, a commission member and General Secretary of the World Methodist Council, pointed out that unlike the Anglican communion, the structure of Methodist denominations can vary from country to country. “Within the Methodist-Wesleyan family, we have a variety of expressions of how we do church,” he explained. “We’re not uniform in our governance.” – United Methodist News Service.