Canon Kenneth Kearon, Secretary General in Ireland: Christian Unity

|PIC1|Mark 7.31-37
"He makes even the deaf to hear and the mute to speak"

Some years ago when I was in Parish life, the Parish was involved in a fundraising effort for some worthy cause. Each element of the Parish was asked to raise money in some way which was appropriate, and the children in our Sunday Club, which is our organisation for very young people which met on Sunday mornings in church, decided they would raise money by holding a sponsored silence.

The idea was that while the parents and other parishioners were having coffee after church on the Sunday morning the young people would sit on the stage of the Parochial Hall in absolute silence for a full hour. As you can imagine, it was all very funny at the beginning as the young people made faces with one another.

But gradually, the adults there watching realised that keeping silence for any period of time was really very, very difficult for the children, and eventually by common consensus they agreed that the silence would end after 30 minutes to save the children any further discomfort. Children have a exuberance - they want to talk and engage incessantly and it is almost impossible for them not to speak for any period of time.

That parish situation came back to my mind when I heard today's reading from St Mark's Gospel. The crowds had seen Jesus performed a miracle. A person who is deaf and a mute had now been made to hear and to speak. Despite the fact that Jesus told the crowds, the assembled people, not to say anything, they couldn't hold back. They wanted to tell everyone the wonderful events that they had seen.

Much the same situation is reported in the Gospel on the first Palm Sunday as Jesus arrived into Jerusalem. The crowds couldn't resist hailing him as the Messiah and celebrating his arrival as the King of David.

That's the way faith ought to be for us too. It should be almost impossible not to talk about it or to celebrate and to share the good news of what we have known with those around us. At its very heart, I believe that when Cardinal Kasper used the phrase "ecumenism of life" he was speaking about the common faith that we all share and that bubbles-up within us and which we wish to share with the wider world.

And we do that as Christians together, not simply as members of different Christian traditions. At its very basis, ecumenism today is about sharing the transforming good news of the Gospel of Christ which is power to change the world and change the lives of all of us. From that shared reality as Christians together we witness to a divided world. Today the fact is that denominational differences are becoming far less important than this underlying uniting reality of the faith which we wish to preach to a modern world.

The lived reality of modern ecumenism expressed in this way has struck me in two different ways from the particular role that I exercise within the Anglican Communion.

Firstly, part of my role involves meeting the leaders of other World Communions or Churches on a reasonably regular basis, and it is now quite clear that there are very, very few Churches today which are not committed to working ecumenically. The mode of this shared witness, the way in which it has been expressed, and the structural reality which is given to it, differs from tradition to tradition, but there are very few today who do not recognise the need to work ecumenically in a common witness today. That's very different from when I started my ministry 25 years ago.

Secondly, the nature of ecumenical relationship has changed profoundly. From the very stilted and sometimes artificial opportunities to meet together of say 30 or 40 years ago, we now have a comfortable and easier relationship one with another as we live the reality of recognising one another as brothers and sisters in the body of Christ. Three events which I attended over the last year brought this home to me.

First of all, in November last, as members of the Anglican Communion, we celebrated 40 years of our close relationship with the Roman Catholic Church with members of that Church. Forty years ago, the then Archbishop of Canterbury Archbishop Michael Ramsey visited Pope Paul VI in Rome for a momentous meeting, and out of that meeting came two initiatives.

One, was the setting up of the Anglican Centre in Rome, a permanent presence for Anglicans in their relationships with the Vatican and with the Catholic Church at its very heart.

The second strand from that meeting, was the setting up of what is now called the ARCIC Dialogues - important dialogues between Anglicans and Roman Catholics addressing some of the basic issues which divide us.

Those 40 years were celebrated by a visit by Archbishop Rowan Williams, the current Archbishop of Canterbury to Pope Benedict XVI in November, and the warmth of the welcome and the way in which a formal meeting turned into friendly conversation is a sign of the depth and closeness of relationship between our two Communions which we now share and which cannot be undone.

A second strand involves contacts I have had over the last year with senior figures from the Orthodox community. This isn't a community which has high profile in this country but on a global scale relationships between the Orthodox Church and the Anglican Communion, and the Orthodox Church and many other Communions is extremely important and it is clear in my contacts with that leadership that the relationships between out two Bodies are close and very affirming.

In the specific relationships between Anglican and Orthodox, we have a new Agreement coming out at the end of the month on the Nature of the Church, and while it is unusual for a document such as that to become a best seller or widely read, I do commend it to you, as an extraordinary exploration of the nature of the Church made by two Communions working closely together, and the level of agreement is quite remarkable.

Thirdly, last summer I was invited to represent the Anglican Communion at the World of the Methodist Council and Conference meeting in Korea. As that Conference went through its agenda, it was clear that the issues they were facing are exactly the issues that we as Anglicans were facing, and in conversations and meetings both over meals and at the corridors, it was clear that our two Churches were of one mind as to how these issues should be addressed.

The result of that was a proposal that Anglicans and Methodists meet simply to keep in contact with one another, not for formal dialogue, but for sharing of information and resources as we recognised the common nature of our mission. We recognise that many of the doctrinal and theological questions which many understood to have divided us in the past were simply no longer issues as together in many parts of the world we recognise that by being in Covenant with one another is a more appropriate of living together ecumenically, and that enables us to gain a perspective on our shared understanding of the faith and the relative insignificance of the differences between us.

These relationships with the Roman Catholic Church, with the Orthodox and with the Methodists in my experience during the last year has reinforced for me the extent to which the nature of the relationship and the way in which Christian traditions relate one to another has changed profoundly. Within each of these conversations there is no possibility of us ever breaking relationships or going back on the achievements we had made.

It is clear that the future of Christianity lie together, rooted in our common exuberance in sharing the good news of the transforming power of the Gospel. It is only together the deaf and the mute will hear the good news of Jesus Christ in a world which is hungry for that news. Like the children in the sponsored silence or the crowds who followed Jesus, our joy in the faith will burst out or overflow, and that will be all the more effective if we do it together.


Revd Canon Kenneth Kearon
Secretary General of the Anglican Communion


St Peter's Cathedral Belfast and St Patrick's Cathedral Armagh - January 2007