In this 1989 Leaders’ Conference for Women talk, Kevin Ranaghan talked about the People of Praise’s grassroots ecumenism of personal relationships. He also stressed the importance of members knowing not only the faith and practices of their own church but also the faith and practices of their brothers and sisters who belong to a different church. He then gave some practical tips on how to relate better ecumenically.
Transcript
This document is a direct transcript of an audio recording, and may contain transcription errors and other minor edits for the sake of clarity.
KEVIN: This is a talk on our ecumenism in the People of Praise. And I’d like to call your attention, of course, to paragraph, or number, 16 of the Spirit and Purpose, which I’m sure you’re familiar with. And I’m not going to read through it, but I just want to highlight a few key ideas there that may be helpful for you in zeroing in on some things about our ecumenism.
I’d like us to—I think it’s very good for us to note that we see ecumenism in the world—ecumenism in the churches in the world, beyond what’s going on in the People of Praise, as a sign of the times, and as another evidence among many evidences around us of the action of the Holy Spirit in the churches. That is to say, a lot’s going on ecumenically. A lot’s been going on ecumenically in the last hundred years, in all the churches. This is really a different age in the life of the church in terms of ecumenism. If you were to look at the last hundred years taken together, a lot of progress has been made in terms of building bridges towards Christian unity. And we recognize that as another evidence of the Holy Spirit at work in the church.
Then we point out that the People of Praise has been ecumenical from the beginning. That’s true. When the first group of us came together and made the covenant of the People of Praise in 1971, we were a group of Catholics and Protestants together, making one covenant as a community, with everyone being in the community together without distinction, except that there were Catholics and Protestants. Most of the people were Catholics; a much smaller number were Protestant. But we were ecumenical from the beginning.
And in 1973, as we continued to experience what God was doing with us, we stopped and paused and said, “Is this what’s supposed to be happening to us? Are we supposed to be an ecumenical community?” And we had a communitywide consultation about it, and asked questions like, “Are we supposed to be ecumenical or are we supposed to be a Catholic community? Or are we supposed to be a Catholic community with some non-Catholic members?” And we went through a consultation for a period of time in the summer of 1973, and came out with a clear understanding that it was God’s will for us as the People of Praise to be an ecumenical community. And we have been that way from the beginning.
We also stress at the bottom of the second paragraph that being in this ecumenical community is, we believe, good for us in terms of our life and our own churches. It helps us and it strengthens us in terms of our commitments to our own churches.
I think it’s very interesting, at the beginning of the third paragraph, that we say that we realize that “our communion” together as members of the People of Praise—“our communion” together “will grow.” Our rela- —it’s “communion” in the sense of our relationships and our—the depth of our ability to share our life. Of course, that’s growing right now, because we live out the life of our covenant together. But it will also grow more, as the churches to which we belong grow more and more together. And “as our churches” discover “a proper form of (Christian) unity,” then “our communion will grow” even more deeply. We point out, for example, at the end of that paragraph, that “the highest expression of Christian unity remains a distant summit which our Lord desires for his disciples”—but it is still distant from us. And then we quote a quote from St. Paul about the Eucharist, about the body and blood of the Lord, which in our ecumenical community we cannot share together as a whole community. Okay?
So we point that out as a “distant summit,” which is our desire and our goal and our hope. But we say that in spite of the things that divide us, “we will live our lives together as fully as our churches permit, with hope that we may soon attain a unity of faith in the fullness of Christ.” Then we point out that in the community, we don’t try to solve or resolve doctrinal issues that separate us, but we do try to clarify them. And we approach our ecumenical relationships with “respect” for “one another’s good consciences” and with respect for one another’s “points of view,” while maintaining our own integrity, “the integrity of our (own) personal convictions regarding the truths of our own faith.”
So we recognize, therefore, that there is this “chasm,” there is this hole, there is this divide, “in the ground of our life together,” which is a chasm or a divide in the life of the church. And, as an ecumenical community, we don’t act as if that division, that divide, is not there. We recognize it. We respect one another across it. We live in as much unity as we can. We hope for unity in the future with a great deal of personal integrity in terms of our own commitment and our own faith. And we say that the community “guard(s) each member’s faith-life, and to this end” we try to “provide an adequate means of instruction for each believer,” in an “environment established to support faith and morals.”
Now, let me step back from the Spirit and Purpose and try to talk more generally and more broadly about the whole topic.
First thing I want to say is that being ecumenical is a part of the nature of the People of Praise. It’s part of the call that God has put on this community. The People of Praise was called into being as an ecumenical community. And that’s God’s call on our life.
Among church groups, or among renewal groups, this makes us somewhat distinctive. Not every renewal group, not every church group, not every community is called to be ecumenical. I mean, I believe that all Christians are called to hunger for Christian unity and to work for Christian unity in some way, but not everyone is called to live out their lives in an ecumenical community. Many other communities, or many other movements, are related to specific churches.
For example, there’s a large community in the Washington, D.C., area in Maryland called the Mother of God Community. It’s an explicitly Roman Catholic community that functions under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Church. Up in Chicago, in Evanston, there is a well-known community that’s been around for over 20 years called the Reba Place Fellowship. The Reba Place Fellowship is intentionally a community that is a part of the Mennonite and Brethren churches, affiliated with those churches, operating under the auspices of those churches, the way any congregation in those churches would operate. They’re—those are church-related communities. We are not that way. We are ecumenical.
And the point I’d like to make is that all of us in the People of Praise, we need to be committed to our ecumenical nature. We need to be committed to what God has called us to be, and we need to help those whom we serve to be committed to it too. We should not want to be other than [what] God has called us to be. And those who are going underway and those who are making the covenant should see and understand our ecumenical nature and understand that it is going to be a permanent part of our life.
Our ecumenism is not an institutional kind of ecumenism. We’re not involved in formally promoting dialogue or relationships between church organizations. Our ecumenism is not on that level. There are other kinds of ecumenism: ecumenical events and ecumenical programs among the churches that are carried on by the appropriate authorities of those churches. That isn’t our work or our type of ecumenism, although we are extremely interested in it and want it to go well. But our ecumenism is a grassroots ecumenism. Or, another way I’d like to put it is, our ecumenism is an ecumenism of personal relationships.
We are Catholics and Protestants, or Catholics and Protestants and Eastern Orthodox, who as Catholics, Protestants, and Eastern Orthodox are covenanted to lay down our lives for one another. And our ecumenism is in those personal relationships. So, just as our covenant is a covenant about personal relationships, just as our spirituality—the way we grow in the life of the Spirit—is by serving God in the context of our covenant to serve one another, so our ecumenism is also an ecumenism in personal relationships. And that’s where we have to look. When we want to sort of “take our temperature” ecumenically and see, “How are we doing ecumenically?” we need to look at the quality of our personal relationships in their ecumenical dimension.
Let me say a few things about what I mean by “ecumenical” as it applies to us in the People of Praise. This will repeat—I’ll repeat a little bit what I said a minute ago, but I’m taking a slightly different look at it, I think. When I say we’re “ecumenical,” I mean that we are not denominational. That is, we are not one-denominational. We, as a community, do not hold to the faith or the practice of one church, nor see ourselves as part of one church—using “church” there in the sense of “denomination.” Is that clear? I mean, we are part of the one church, if you want to talk about the universal church, but I’m talking about it in a church-specific sort of way.
Now, in fact, we do hold a great many things in common. I’m not gonna talk about this much, but I don’t think this should be overlooked. There is a huge body of faith, of truth, of Christian tradition and experience, that we do hold in common, and we have no problem holding in common, even though we come from different churches and denominations. We should not underestimate that. We should not take it lightly. And we should try to understand, not just in a surface way but also with some depth, these truths that we do hold in common.
For example, we all share in the reality of baptism. Our churches call it the “sacrament” of baptism or the “ordinance” of baptism, but we all share in that together. And Scripture is full—particularly the New Testament and St. Paul—is full of explanations of what it means to be baptized into Christ. And all that he says there is part of our common heritage, and is something we experience together. And that is no . . . little . . . thing. Baptism is the basic sacrament of Christian unity. And we are—we have all entered into Christ through that baptism and share a great deal because of it.
Another way we speak about what we hold in common is that we say that we all in the People of Praise hold to the tenets of the Nicene Creed. Now, the Nicene Creed is the creed that in most of our churches is recited, or is one of the options to be recited, during the Sunday service. Okay? And it contains many statements of belief about God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, the nature of the Father, the nature of the Son, the nature of the Spirit, and the work of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. We say that to be part of the People of Praise, to join the People of Praise, a person has to be baptized and has to be able to affirm the tenets of the Nicene Creed. So that’s something we really do share in common.
One of the strong experiences we had here in South Bend over the summer is that one of our brothers died rather suddenly, and he was a member of a Lutheran congregation. And it—there were two things that were kind of striking about his funeral in Holy Trinity Lutheran Church here in South Bend. One was that his pastor and assistant pastor and a couple of other Lutheran pastors that the family tried to contact were out of town. And so the family asked me if I would do the service, and I’m a Catholic deacon. So, as a Catholic deacon, I led the funeral in the Lutheran church, which was filled with Lutheran parishioners and overflowing with People of Praise, piles of whom happened to be Catholics. You know, we—it was—we were 20 minutes late starting the funeral, because we couldn’t get everybody in the church. And one of the things we did together was, out of the Lutheran Book of Worship, we prayed the Nicene Creed together. It was a very striking—a lot of people have commented that that was a very striking, moving, common profession of faith. We realized there, in the concrete, a lot that we have in common. And that was a very worthwhile experience.
So, I’m trying to make two points here, and I’m going to get lost in them. [Laughter.] But that’s okay. You’ll notice that throughout my talk I usually—whenever I get to a new paragraph, I say, “First of all. . . .”? I just never number things right. [Laughter.] Just don’t worry about it. [Laughter.] Okay?
So the point I’m trying to make is we are—in faith and practice, our community is not from one denomination, from one church. But, in fact, there’s a lot that belongs to the theology and the heritage and the history of the great church, the whole church, that we do hold in common. And that is nothing mean. That is very, very significant and very, very rich. And we should promote our mutual understanding of those things we hold in common. Okay, that’s one point.
On the other hand, we are not nondenominational. We’re not nondenominational in a “least common denominator” sort of way. What I mean by this kind of “nondenominational” is an approach that says: “We just agree on a few basics, and the other things is—the other things aren’t important.” We’re not nondenominational in the sense that we don’t sweep the disagreements under the rug. We don’t pretend that it doesn’t matter that there are major differences among the Christian churches or among—in terms of our own faith.
We’re ecumenical, and “ecumenical” in the way I use it means that each member acknowledges his or her own faith, and has his or her own practice, according to the church to which he or she belongs. And those differences are as out in the open as the agreements, and we recognize the differences, and we live out our life in as much unity as possible in the light of these disagreements or differences, as much as we do in the light of our unity and the things that we do agree on. So it’s important for us in the People of Praise that we be ecumenical in the sense that each member is fully committed to his or her own church: to its teaching, to its belief, and its practice. And each member lives under the pastoral care and authority of his or her own church in as far as that is appropriate. Okay?
So, for example, if your church has a specific moral teaching, you ought to live according to the moral teaching of your church. If your church has a specific approach to certain doctrinal issues, you ought to live out your faith according to the teaching of the church to which you are committed. Your church may make certain demands upon you in terms of religious instruction or participation in the life of the local congregation, and you ought to live that out. You ought to be a fully committed member of the church, of the denomination to which you belong.
And each member of the community, furthermore, I think, should be nourished by the spiritual riches of his or her own church tradition. Sometimes we can share these things, and it’s wonderful when we do. But, I mean, it makes a lot of sense for those of us who are from a Presbyterian or Reformed tradition to be nurtured by Calvin’s Institutes. For those of us who are from a Methodist or a Wesleyan tradition to be enriched by reading Wesley’s journals. For those of us who are Roman Catholics to be nurtured, say, by the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius or the spiritual writings of Francis de Sales. I mean, it makes sense for us in our own traditions to be enriched from those traditions. And of course, very often, as I said a minute ago, those are things we can share across denominational lines.
Each member, I think, in our ecumenical community has his or her own personal responsibility to be and to grow and to live as a Lutheran or a Presbyterian or a Roman Catholic. I think it’s important for people to realize that it’s their personal responsibility to be faithful to their own church tradition and to grow in it. Your church, I am sure, is available and ready to help you to do this.
And the community as a whole wants to provide an environment in which each member can grow in his or her own church tradition. We want to support that. The community may, from time to time, offer some concrete help, for example, by offering courses in the Bible or courses in theology, both along ecumenical lines or along spe- —along church-specific lines, in order to help people grow in their own faith and in their own tradition.
But I think the responsibility to be a good Catholic is mine. The responsibility for some of you to be good Lutherans or good Menn- —or good Methodists is yours, and we can mutually support that in one another. I have no problem in supporting my Lutheran brothers and sisters in growing in their Lutheran spirituality. And they should have no problem in supporting me in growing in my Catholic faith and spirituality, because we’re mutually committed to one another. So there’s a commitment to support. But the responsibility, I think, really rests with the individual.
Being a member of a specific church is a matter of faith and conviction and conscience. As I said before, we insist on mutual respect, as the Spirit and Purpose points out. It’s rare—on the whole it’s rare—but sometimes members of the People of Praise make a major change in their church membership. For example, a Catholic might decide to stop being a Catholic and to join a Protestant church—say, the Lutheran Church, or an Anglican church, or a Pentecostal church. Or someone who has been a member of a Protestant church or denomination may decide to become a Roman Catholic. Or, someone who is from the Orthodox—the Eastern Orthodox tradition may decide to become a Roman Catholic, or a Protestant, or vice versa. That’s what I mean by “major changes,” okay, in church membership.
We think that such changes are a really serious matter. They’re obviously a matter of some turmoil and soul-searching. They are matters of conscience. They are matters of personal conviction and commitment. And we think they should only be undertaken in that way, and never undertaken trivially or lightly. Because such a change is so profound, we have decided to follow a new policy in regards to the pastoral life of the community when this sort of thing happens.
This is the way we’re going to approach it. We can see that a number of difficulties may arise when a Protestant in the community becomes a Roman Catholic, or when a Roman Catholic in the community becomes a Protestant, or when an Orthodox person is involved in the same sort of thing. When this happens in the future—no reference to what exists now, but when this happens in the future—the person who has made that major change, okay, may not head another member of the community for a minimum of three years. This, of course, does not apply to husbands heading wives. [Laughter.]
When we discussed this, what we were concerned a lot about was the personal stability of the person making such a change. Because it is a huge change. And a person can make such a good cha—such a change for good reason and in good conscience, and with real conviction, and we have to respect that. But, at the same time, we have to realize that the person is going through a very profound change in fundamental aspects of Christian identity. So we want to give that person sufficient time following the change to grow accustomed to his or her new situation before having him or her involved in pastoral care in headship. And that’s why we say we do that for a minimum of three years.
As we were making this decision, we were reminded of the passage in 1 Timothy about recent converts, in 1 Timothy 3:6. We thought that shed some light on it. Where Tim- —where Paul, writing of the new convert, says—writing of the pastor, says the pastor “must not be a recent convert. He may be puffed up with conceit or fall into the condemnation of the devil.” We thought that threw some light on it.
Now let me shift gears a little bit and say again, repeat—I guess I’m repeating what I said at the beginning: we do believe that what’s going on in our ecumenical relationships and the way we are ecumenical is going on in the broader context of ecumenism in the churches. As far as ecumenism in the churches goes, there are lots of signs of hope, but there’s also a lot of frustration. There seem to be times where churches are making real progress towards overcoming big obstacles to unity, and then all of a sudden big roadblocks come up again. Sometimes there’s a lot of progress, sometimes there’s a big stall. But we do want to recognize that what we’re doing is what we think [is a] part of that process on the grassroots level. Perhaps we are offering some models and perhaps our life will offer some hope, an example to the churches, as the churches struggle on the theological level and on the institutional level with the demands of seeking Christian unity.
Now I want to move into a more practical part of the talk. I want to talk about ecumenical sensitivity in the People of Praise. Or, how can we relate better ecumenically?
If we want to improve how we relate ecumenically, I think one of the first things we have to do is watch how we speak about our own faith. Yes, you can speak about your own faith: as a Catholic or a Presbyterian or a Lutheran or a Methodist. You can identify it as your faith. But you have to be careful that when you speak about your faith, you do not imply that everybody should or must believe or practice as you do. You must not talk about your faith, your doctrine, your church practice, which is authentically yours, and which you can share with your brothers and sisters in the right way—you can’t talk about it as if they’re off the beam or second-class or out of it if they don’t believe or practice the same way.
Here are some examples, heard perhaps in some of your community meetings as people share. [Laughter.] Okay? Okay? Now you pick out which are the Catholic and which are the Protestant statements. [Laughter.]
Somebody stands up at the community meeting on Sunday and says, “As we all heard at Mass this morning. . . .” [Laughter.] Someone gets up in the community meeting and says, “Since we all know that the Bible is our only rule of faith. . . .” Someone says, “As the pope keeps telling us over and over again. . . .” [Laughter.] Someone says, “Let’s offer up all our sufferings together [laughter] in reparation for our sins.” [Laughter.] Someone says, “You know, the Bible and the church teach clearly that there are only two sacraments in the church.” Okay. Or someone says, “Since we know from the Bible that Jesus had many other children after she had—that Mary had many other children after she had Jesus. . . . ” Now, I bet you can pick out the Catholic and the [laughter] Protestant statements there.
A Cath- —a Protestant position or a Catholic position need not be hidden. Each member should speak out of his or her own conviction, but not as if everyone else is wrong or bad if they don’t agree. So someone can get up and say, “When I was at church this morning, I heard . . . ,” without saying, “As we all heard at Mass this morning . . . ,” for example. Or someone can say, for example, “In our church, our approach is that the Bible is the only source of revelation for us, and I was . . . ,” and then move off into whatever it is they were going to say. That’s fine, but implying that everybody has got to believe that or act that way is the problem. So what I’m talk- —what I’ve been talking about there is the right way to speak about it.
But now I want to say something further. In this regard, I think there is something else that comes into play. It’s what I would call the “rule of charity.” That is to say, it may be legitimate to speak out of your own faith and your own conviction, but you have to ask the question, “Should I do it now? Is it right now? Is it appropriate now? Or should I refrain?”
We are a predominantly Roman Catholic community in terms of our membership. We’re probably close to 90% Roman Catholic in terms of our adult membership, okay? Which means that 10% of our membership are members of different Protestant churches and denominations. Roman Catholic members of the community really need to understand the overwhelming Catholic culture that many of our Protestant brothers and sisters experience and breathe just because they are around so many Roman Catholics, in so many Roman Catholic homes, go to so many Roman Catholic weddings, so many Roman Catholic funerals, etc. Okay? That is to say, Protestants in the People of Praise are constantly faced with something like the challenge of being a minority. Even if no one is saying anything wrong or being insensitive or what have you, it’s just there for them. And many Catholics in the People of Praise trip lightly through the tulips of life without ever being aware of the fact that they are, for example, with Protestant brothers and sisters, or that Protestant brothers and sisters see things a different way, or have a different religious culture. Okay?
For example, I have an old Irish Catholic saying that I’m apt to use from time to time: “Saints in heaven preserve us.” Now, there is a theological issue! [Laughter.] Okay? I grew up with that expression. It was used in my home. Okay? And it—I—it would come very easily to my tongue. But it—in—when I say something like that, I’m drawing a line between myself, and the way I approach things, and my brothers and sisters. And if I use that in a public kind of context, as if everybody can share that kind of an expression and what’s behind it, I’m really putting a burden on my Protestant brothers and sisters.
So, I think, specifically, there’s a heavy burden right now on Catholic members of the community to be careful of overburdening Protestant members of the community with a flood of references to Roman Catholic faith, Roman Catholic practice, and Roman Catholic culture, even if they’re said in the right way. Which—I’m not talking here about saying it in the wrong way; I’m saying, is it charitable to say it at all? And you have to look at the situation in which you’re in [sic]. For example, if two people in an ecumenically put-together women’s group or in an area meeting or in a branch meeting—if two people, suppose, stood up in a meeting and—two Catholics—and shared personally, and even in the right way, they share in the right way, personally, about how important the rosary is to them in their own personal spirituality, then others who have a similar testimony and experience would do well to refrain from getting up and giving their testimony along the same line. Do you understand what I’m saying? Because it just starts to build a huge amount of pressure on the Protestant members.
So, Catholics have to ask themselves the question, not only “Is this a legitimate way to speak?” but “Is this the loving thing to do?” And, of course, I want to maintain the principle that Catholics and Protestants should be able to share out of their own faith. But we have to be careful, in sharing, to love one another. And, of course, everything I just said here can be flip-flopped down in Charlotte. [Laughter.] The numbers go in a completely different way [i.e., the denominational proportions of People of Praise members in the Charlotte, NC mission branch are reversed].
[The recording ends here.]
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