Faith and Order Papers Digital Edition

The Faith and Order Papers have their origins in the American east coast in the beginning of the 20th century.

The first leaders of the movement on Faith and Order were then mobilizing churches in the USA and worldwide around the idea of calling a world conference on matters of doctrine and church order that kept the churches apart, with a view to helping them to achieve visible unity.

Publication of official and unofficial texts directly related to the meaning, aims, and activities of the movement soon became one of their priorities. As early as 1913, a report on the work in progress of the movement included one of the first lists of “Faith and Order Papers” (see document wccfops1.027, p. 21-22).

The Faith and Order Papers constitute today a unique century-old library that documents not only progress in modern ecumenical theology but also the circumstances in which this progress has taken place. They give access not only to final reports of studies or of world conferences, but also to detailed records of plans and the implementation of plans that led to those results and to the documentation about the churches’ movement from separation to reunion.

This collection is in fact a collection of collections. Several successive “papers” record, for instance:

•    the fast-growing appointment of commissions on faith and order throughout the world during the 1910s and 1920s;

•    a small series was dedicated to frequently asked questions about the Movement on Faith and Order before the 1927 World Conference;

•    another sub-collection includes reports of church union negotiations throughout the world from the 1950s to 2006;

•    the many minutes of the meetings of the different Faith and Order governing bodies provide rich information about ecumenical theological work in progress;

•    two publications, of 1963 and 1993, constitute together a comprehensive documentary history of Faith and Order;

•    a series of “papers” published in the 1980s gathered together the churches responses to the landmark document Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry.

The library is numbered in two series. The papers published by the movement on Faith and Order belong to series 1, which ended when the movement became the Commission on Faith and Order, following the establishment of the World Council of Churches in 1948. Ever since, the publications are numbered as series 2. For the sake of accurate documentation, this distinction was kept when each document received its new digital ID.

As we welcome you to the library, we rejoice in the privilege of protecting and sharing the memory of the work accomplished and, by so doing, assisting Christians and churches as they call each other to visible communion.

Odair Pedroso Mateus     

Editor, Faith and Order Papers Digital Edition

This project was made possible with financial support from the Otto per Mille fund (OPM) of the Waldensian Church in Italy.

For more information, please contact:

Dr Andrej Jeftic
Director of the Faith and Order Commission
email: [email protected]
phone: +41 22 791 61 30