"ecumenism, the movement or tendency toward worldwide Christian unity or cooperation. The term, of recent origin, emphasizes what is viewed as the universality of the Christian churches.....
The word ecumenism is derived from the Greek words oikoumenē (“the inhabited world”) and oikos (“house”) and can be traced from the commands, promises, and prayers of Jesus. After the International Missionary Conference held at Edinburgh in 1910, Protestants
began to use the term ecumenism to describe the gathering of
missionary, evangelistic, service, and unitive forces. During and after
the second Vatican Council (1962–65), Roman Catholics used ecumenism to refer to the renewal of the whole life of the church, undertaken to make it more responsive to “separated churches” and to the needs of the world.
The ecumenical movement seeks to recover the apostolic sense of the early church
for unity in diversity, and it confronts the frustrations,
difficulties, and ironies of the modern pluralistic world. It is a
lively reassessment of the historical sources and destiny of what
followers perceive to be the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church
of Jesus Christ.
The possibility of an ecumenical approach, in the modern sense, to
Christianity increased, somewhat ironically, in the 17th and 18th
centuries, when English dissenting sects and Pietist
groups on the Continent began to promote evangelistic, revivalistic,
and missionary endeavour. This, along with the simultaneous effect of Enlightenment
thought, broke down many of the traditional foundations that supported
separate church structures. Other breakdowns in the traditional
understandings of church unity led to new possibilities for
experimentation in the 19th century. The separation of church and state
in the United States signalled the need for civility and respect for
religious rights in a land of many religions. The sending of
missionaries at the beginning of the 19th century revealed the
possibilities of cooperation across denominational lines at home and
brought to light the scandal of competition and conflict among Christian
denominations abroad.
Early 20th-century ecumenism derived impetus from the convergence of
three movements: international missionary conferences (Protestant),
beginning with the Edinburgh Conference (1910) and taking shape as an
institution in the International Missionary Council (1921); the Faith
and Order Conferences (on church doctrine and polity), commencing in the
conference at Lausanne (1927); and the Life and Work Conferences (on
social and practical problems), beginning with the Stockholm Conference
(1925). In 1937 at the Oxford Conference of Life and Work, proposals
were drawn up to unite with Faith and Order. The World Council of Churches,
a consultative and conciliar agent of ecumenism, working with national,
denominational, regional, and confessional bodies, was inaugurated in
Amsterdam in 1948. The International Missionary Council joined the World
Council of Churches in 1961.
Protest movements against the developments that led to and continued
in the World Council of Churches have produced an ecumenical
convergence of their own. Most participants in this convergence prefer
to be called “evangelical.” In the United States the National Association of Evangelicals
was formed in 1943, in large part to counter the Federal Council of
Churches, which began in 1908 and reorganized as the National Council of
Churches in 1950. Evangelicals have many organizations that operate on
an international level to channel specific cooperative energies.
In 1961 Pope John XXIII established the Secretariat for the Promotion of Christian Unity, and the Eastern Orthodox
churches created the Pan-Orthodox Conference. Dialogues among the Roman
Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Pentecostal, and
Protestant churches have brought general consensus on such issues as baptism, the Eucharist, and the nature of ministry. The Lutheran churches and the Roman Catholic Church have agreed on a common understanding of the doctrine of justification, even as Lutherans, Episcopalians, and the Reformed churches have attained surprising unanimity on certain theological issues."
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