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"The Commission affirmed the function of the WCC as a necessary instrument in facing social and ethical issues. Taking seriously that such issues arise out of the life of the churches, and that, at the churches' request, the WCC speaks on their behalf rather than in their place, the Commission affirmed that consensus methodology in WCC governing bodies would address many of the concerns raised on social and ethical issues" said the final press release from the plenary meeting of the Special Commission on Orthodox Participation in the World Council of Churches (WCC), held in November 2001 in Berekfürdö, Hungary.

In this brief paragraph, the Special Commission makes two points. It affirms the prophetic role of the WCC; at the same time, it identifies the consensus method as the appropriate instrument for decision-making on social and ethical issues. This implies that consensus methodology and prophetic witness go hand-in-hand.

Part 1 of this feature series was about the Special Commission's work on the consensus method. The two contributions below deal with the prophetic role of the WCC.

Janice Love of the Methodist Church in the United States describes her childhood and youth in a family in Alabama working actively against racial oppression, and isolated in its local community because of its anti-racist stance. In her article, entitled "To speak truth to power", Love also tells of the world-wide embrace of Christian solidarity which her family experienced through the ecumenical movement: "We felt surrounded and upheld by the prayers, statements, activism, resources, and encouragement of those in the wider denomination and in ecumenical bodies who understood racial justice to be at the heart of the gospel... Their accompaniment in our little struggle in our little place strengthened our resolve, gave us courage, and helped us to overcome the loneliness of the isolation immediately surrounding us." Love's article constitutes a plea for the prophetic role of the WCC.

In this plea she is joined by Father Georges Tsetsis of the Ecumenical Patriarchate who points out the inner coherence of "right belief" with "right action" and the deep Orthodox conviction "that faith must be expressed in our daily life and in all aspects of society as 'orthopraxia', as a 'right action' that aims at the transformation of our faith and our Christian hope into practical actions of solidarity with those in spiritual or material need."

To speak truth to power

The prophetic role of the ecumenical movement Janice Love

The agenda of the Special Commission on Orthodox Participation in the World Council of Churches (WCC) includes an examination of the prophetic role of the church and the ecumenical movement. For many Orthodox and non-Orthodox alike, the mandate to speak truth to power, the essence of the prophetic role, lies at the heart of who we understand ourselves as Christians and our churches to be. Moreover, many involved in the ecumenical movement take this matter very personally, as do I.

The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) burned a cross in front of the parsonage where my family lived in southern Alabama in 1959. I was six years old, and the sight and shock of this incident made quite a deep impression on me. My father along with a small group of pastors had become active in civil rights work. Most served in small rural congregations, and they all suffered similar co-ordinated KKK attacks. Having acted in faithfulness to the Gospel as they understood it, these men and their families knew that their work would be controversial in the context of entrenched racial oppression in the deep south. Nonetheless, the sharp reactions that their fairly small efforts provoked startled many. The pastors' activism had been encouraged by one of the church leaders, yet the church hierarchy in Alabama rejected such engagement, and punished members of the group for being so bold. Consequently, throughout my childhood and into my adult years, our family and the others who continued their witness for racial justice frequently moved from parish to parish, often branded as "difficult" by the hierarchy and as misfits in our local communities.

Meanwhile, in the 1950s, the National Council of Churches in the USA began its own important and controversial work to promote civil rights in the country, particularly in the south. The larger Methodist Church in the US, having entrenched racial subjugation within its own structures in earlier decades, began to work in the 1960s toward eliminating its segregated administrative apparatus, the goal of which was only finally formally accomplished in 1972. Then as a teenager in 1970, I learned of a yet another organization of Christian churches that boldly proclaimed racial injustice to be against the will of God, backing up its proclamations with deliberately provocative grants of aid to groups of the racially oppressed. This, of course, was the World Council of Churches and its Programme to Combat Racism. All of these efforts took place in the context of the wider struggles undertaken by movements for social change in the United States and abroad, and affected our family deeply.

The gospel: a powerful, liberating news to those who suffer violence and oppression

Therefore, in my most formative years, I knew that, out of the depths of our faith, my family stood for a wonderful and joyful truth about the fullness of life in Christ that those most immediately around us rejected. Our isolation within some parts of Methodism and in the communities where we lived, however, stood in sharp contrast to the warm but distant embrace of those whom we knew to be our Christian companions in this struggle. We felt surrounded and upheld by the prayers, statements, activism, resources, and encouragement of those in the wider denomination and in ecumenical bodies who understood racial justice to be at the heart of the gospel. For me, being one of their number constituted a high honour. Their accompaniment in our little struggle in our little place strengthened our resolve, gave us courage, and helped us to overcome the loneliness of the isolation immediately surrounding us.

Although characterized by a particular context, my experience represents one of tens of thousands of similar stories where Christians face a deeply compromised and divided church and hostile social circumstances. They need the solidarity of other faithful people who understand the gospel to be powerful, liberating news to those who suffer poverty, oppression, violence or hatred. Furthermore, those on the outside need, as a matter of their own integrity, to hold themselves accountable to a basic standard articulated in the New Testament: when one suffers, we all suffer.

The social and ethical issues that face churches and the ecumenical movement now seem at times to be much more complex than those of the civil rights movement and other social justice causes of years past. I believe, however, that this perspective dangerously romanticizes and distorts the tough realities of the history many of us experienced. Furthermore, we sometimes conveniently forget how deep the divisions among Christians were at the time. For those who made the choice then to play a prophetic role, the answers were not always obvious, the way forward was not always clear, and the burdens were not always bearable. Nonetheless, as best they knew how, Christians waded into the controversies praying that they might "find a way out of no way," as many African Americans put it.

We face the same fundamental challenge today of the need to do our best in speaking truth to power and in witnessing prophetically in situations permeated by death and destruction. Even when offered in the most loving and joyful way possible, obedience has always been and will always be costly. Christ promised nothing less.

Placing the matter of the prophetic role of the church and the ecumenical movement on the agenda of the Special Commission offers an opportunity for examining the different approaches, if any, that Orthodox, Anglicans, Old Catholics, Protestants, Quakers and other Christian traditions take in speaking truth to power.

In addition, the Commission can add it insights into how ecumenical mechanisms can be strengthened for supporting Christians and churches that want to proclaim the gospel's good news of justice, peace and love in situations of death, destruction and despair.

What we do together is much more powerful than what we do alone, a lesson I learned as a child in Alabama.

The author, Dr Janice Love, teaches religion and international studies at the University of South Carolina in the USA. She is a member of the Special Commission and the moderator of the Decade to Overcome Violence reference group. Janice Love is a member of the United Methodist Church in the USA and served on the WCC Central Committee 1975-1998.

The prophetic voice of the World Council of Churches - an Orthodox perspective

Georges Tsetsis

The prophetic role and voice of the WCC was one of the major issues debated at the third plenary session of the Special Commission on Orthodox Participation in the World Council of Churches (WCC), in Berekfürdö, Hungary, 15-20 November 2001. In response to a question as to whether the WCC is entrusted with such a role or not, the Commission stated clearly that whenever the WCC, inspired by the word of God, truthfully describes and reacts to situations affecting the world, it indeed speaks and acts in a "prophetic" way.

To speak with a prophetic voice on ethical, moral or socio-political issues that jeopardize the dignity and even the very life of human beings, created in the image and likeness of God, is a Christian duty stemming from the Holy Scripture. As St Paul says, "Those who prophesy speak to other people for their up-building and encouragement and consolation" (1 Corinthians 14:3). It was on the basis of this biblical affirmation that the Special Commission pointed out that prophecy is not merely a matter of rebuking, but also of building up, of encouraging and of comforting.

Since its foundation in 1948, the WCC, while trying to promote Christian unity through theological research and dialogue, has also been concerned with the destiny of humankind. It raised its prophetic voice whenever dehumanizing attitudes and policies threatened the human community. Issues related to poverty, human rights, racism, development, peace and justice that, in the 1960's and 70's, became (sometimes controversial) programmatic highlights were already on the agenda of the WCC's inaugural assembly in Amsterdam. And churches engaged in the WCC and in the ecumenical movement in general frequently committed themselves to combat whatever oppresses, enslaves and distorts the "image of God" - the men and women who inhabit the oikoumene.

To talk about the prophetic voice or action of the WCC, as the Special Commission did last November, is nothing new for the Orthodox. Already in a 1973 declaration issued on the occasion of the WCC's 25th anniversary, the Ecumenical Patriarchate explicitly highlighted the prophetic role played by the WCC in meeting the manifold needs of humankind. The declaration further encouraged this "privileged instrument" of the churches - engaged not only in theological dialogue but also in mutual solidarity with one another - to persist in its efforts towards a broader encounter with suffering human beings so that, "by visible and invisible means, through words and deeds, through decisions and actions, wherever and whenever fitting, it may proclaim Christ".

Right belief - right action

Such encouragement from the First See of world Orthodoxy was not a surprise. After all, the very term "Orthodoxia", namely "right belief", is intimately linked with the notion of "orthopraxia", that is to say "right action". The exhortation was quite natural since the notion that faith must be expressed in daily life and in all aspects of society as "orthopraxia" - as a "right action" that aims at the transformation of our faith and our Christian hope into practical actions of solidarity with those in spiritual or material need - is a firm Orthodox belief.

It goes without saying that, when we refer to "prophetic voices and actions" in the context of our cooperation within the WCC, we mean primarily the multitude of challenging initiatives that try to sensitize us on moral, ethical, social, economic and other related issues that closely affect people's lives and eventually find their way onto the WCC agenda for reflection and appropriate action.

One thing, however, needs to be clarified in order to avoid misunderstandings, to be both in conformity with the churches' new understanding and vision of the WCC, and in line with the WCC's reformulated Constitution. Namely, that this "prophetic voice" by no means belongs to the "institution" itself but to the fellowship which constitutes the institution. That is to say, to the churches, committed to seek within the WCC a "koinonia" in faith and life, witness and service, in order to fulfil their common calling and advance towards their unity.

The author, Rev. Father Georges Tsetsis, served on the Special Commission on Orthodox Participation in the WCC until the end of 2001. Father Tsetsis was the permanent representative of the Ecumenical Patriarchate to the WCC from 1985-99. He had previously served as the Middle East secretary in the WCC Commission on Inter-Church Aid and Refugee Service (CICARWS), and later as its deputy director.

Photos to accompany the Feature are to be found on the WCC web site

Special Commission homepage on this site.