A “CALL to All Christians” from the Sixth World Conference on Faith and Order, held in Wadi El Natrun, Egypt, has urged a new shared commitment to “faith, mission and unity”. “The visible unity of the Church is not only a theological aspiration but also a gospel imperative — for our own time, as for all times,” it says.
The conference, organised by the World Council of Churches, was held at the Coptic Orthodox Church’s Logos Papal Centre, and involved 400 delegates from the WCC’s 356 member-Churches. It is the first such conference since 1993.
The Call, issued at the end of the conference, on Tuesday, says: “Christian unity cannot be (re-)established solely by agreed texts. Rather, it needs to be lived out in daily Christian life: in shared prayer and study of the Bible, in the constant reception of the heritage and tradition of the Early Church, in personal encounters and meetings.”
The church leaders said that imperative of unity remained “as urgent as ever” in a world in which many faced persecution and suffering, and in which Churches could still transcend their differences and offer witness “to their people, their governments and the whole world”.
“It is often in sharing together in God’s mission that common ground is revealed between apparently incompatible church structures and identities,” the Call says.
“In a world fractured by fragmentation and division, riven by wars, injustice and uncertainties, our faith informs and undergirds our journey not only towards a common vision of the Church but towards shared action.”
The five-day conference marked the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea and drew on the work of five previous ecumenical gatherings at Lausanne (1927), Edinburgh (1937), Lund (1952), Montreal (1963), and Santiago de Compostela (1993). It included a meeting with the Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi.
Opened by the Coptic Orthodox Pope Tawadros II, the conference was addressed by the WCC’s secretary-general, the Revd Dr Jerry Pillay, and the Prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Christian Unity, Cardinal Kurt Koch.
Other keynote speakers included the Most Revd Samy Shehata, the Anglican Archbishop in Alexandria, who recalled the region’s ancient links with St Mark and many of the Early Church’s saints and martyrs.
“Rooted in baptism, expressed in shared prayer, unity begins to be visible when we live together, moving towards mutual sharing of the Eucharist and recognition of each other’s ministries,” a conference statement said.
“Unity also begins to be visible when we live together in ways that embody faith, hope and love: not in isolation, but in solidarity with those who are marginalised by gender, race, poverty, disability or ecological devastation. The Nicene Creed, ancient yet ever new, reminds us that we share a gift and call to full visible unity.”
