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Our Fellowship in the Gospel

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Our Fellowship in the Gospel OUR FELLOWSHIP IN THE GOSPEL REPORT OF THE JOINT STUDY GROUP BETWEEN THE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND The Council for Christian Unity of the Church of England The Committee on Ecumenical Relations of the Church of Scotland 1 CONTENTS 1 Introduction: The work of the Joint Study Group 2 Who are we? Introducing our Churches to each other 3 Where do we find ourselves today? The context of our fellowship 4 What have we said to each other in ecumenical dialogue? Conversations between the Church of England and the Church of Scotland 1932-1966 5 Living out our common baptism: Being made one 6 Partnership in the gospel: A biblical model 7 Pathways to partnership: Practical steps 2 1 INTRODUCTION: THE WORK OF THE JOINT STUDY GROUP Three major anniversaries have impinged on our thinking as we have been preparing this report for our two Churches. 2009 saw the 500th anniversary of the birth of the Reformer John Calvin. Events north of the Border included a joint Church of Scotland – Roman Catholic conference, hosted by the Archbishop of Glasgow, in which the Scottish Episcopal Church and the Church of England also participated. Calvin’s influence on the religious traditions of England and Wales was the theme of the ‘Calvin Colloquium’ sponsored by Churches Together in England and Churches Together in Britain and Ireland at the University of Exeter, which included participants from the Church of Scotland and the Church of England, among others. 2010 is, of course, the centenary of the Edinburgh International Missionary Conference, which is often seen as the formal start of the ecumenical movement. Edinburgh 1910 was addressed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, and a future Archbishop, William Temple, served in a junior capacity at the conference: it made Temple a lifelong ecumenist. The inseparable biblical connection between mission and unity, that was the motive of Edinburgh 1910, has remained the guiding thread of the ecumenical movement. Conferences at New College, Edinburgh, and at Swanwick, Derbyshire, during 2010 are designed to explore the trajectory of unity and mission over the past century. 2010 has a double significance in Scotland: it is also the 450th anniversary of the start of the Scottish Reformation in 1560. The way that these anniversaries are being marked reveals the complex interconnectedness, the overlapping nature, of the ecumenical movement today. The aim of our report is to strengthen the connection between the Church of Scotland and the Church of England in terms of our common mission. The Church of Scotland and the Church of England are neighbours on either side of the Border. Each of them is a distinctive expression of the Christian Church, and has its own history, traditions, ways of worship and form of governance. But, because both churches belong to the one Church of Jesus Christ, they have a good deal in common and share a number of important features. The Church of England and the Church of Scotland are good neighbours and work well together in the cause of Christ. They consult each other and exchange courtesies and are colleagues in several ecumenical structures. There is already a sense of fellowship, which both churches value, but we believe that this could be strengthened and developed. The purpose of our report is to propose that deepening of our fellowship and to make some modest but concrete suggestions about how it might be put into practice. Our two churches are certainly different in various ways. For one thing, our systems of church government are not the same. The Church of Scotland has a Presbyterian polity with a system of church courts and an annual General Assembly, while the Church of England is both episcopal and synodical, made up of forty-four dioceses (including the Diocese in Europe), each with its bishop and its synod and with a General Synod at the national level, which is made up of bishops, clergy and laity. While the Church of Scotland has its Moderator of the General Assembly, in the Church of England the Archbishops of Canterbury and York are co-presidents of the 3 General Synod (though they do not generally chair the business). Our styles of worship are rather different too, though there is range of worship styles in both our churches, from the quite informal to the very liturgical. The interiors of our churches also look different, those of the Church of Scotland being somewhat plainer. We exist almost entirely in separate territories (though there are some Church of Scotland congregations in England). But our churches also have much in common. We share the faith of the Church through the ages and confess that faith in our worship, teaching and witness. We both treasure the Scriptures as the Word of God; we read and expound them in our worship and seek to be guided by them in the way we order our church affairs. We are both territorial churches with a national mission and ministry and a commitment to bring the ministry of the word, the sacraments of the gospel, and the exercise of pastoral care to every community of the land. We are churches whose centre of gravity is in the parishes and the local community. We are both facing similar challenges in the delivery of our mission and are both influenced by the phenomenon of ‘emerging church’ and ‘fresh expressions of church’. We are both recognised in law, though in different ways: the Church of Scotland describes itself as a national Church, while the Church of England is the established Church in England. Our histories have been intertwined for centuries, though not always in a happy way. The Church of England almost became Presbyterian at one point in its history, during the Commonwealth; and the Church of Scotland was an episcopally-ordered church on several occasions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Since those turbulent times, when passions ran high and blood was shed, our nations have lived side by side in one Kingdom. We are united through Crown and Parliament, notwithstanding the fact that recent steps towards constitutional devolution have seen the creation of a Scottish Parliament. Thanks to the ecumenical movement, a deeper mutual understanding, respect and friendship pertains between many churches, including our own. The ecumenical conversations from the 1930s to the 1960s, which we touch on later in this report, did not achieve their aim of bringing our two churches into a relationship of communion, but they did help us to understand each other better and they laid a theological foundation for closer co-operation. Since those days, both our churches have entered various ecumenical relationships and commitments. The Church of England made the Meissen Agreement in 1991 with the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland (EKD), and the British and Irish Anglican Churches entered into the Porvoo Agreement with the Nordic and Baltic Lutheran Churches in 1996. The Reuilly Agreement between the four Anglican Churches and the French Lutheran and Reformed Churches dates from 1999. The Anglican- Methodist Covenant was signed in 2003. In Meissen, Reuilly and the Covenant, the Anglican Churches concerned recognised the reality and authenticity of the ministries of word, sacrament and oversight of churches that are not ordered in the historic episcopate. The Church of Scotland signed the Leuenberg Agreement of 1973 and is therefore a member of the Community of Protestant Churches in Europe (CPCE) – Leuenberg Church Fellowship, to which some of the Nordic and Baltic Lutheran Churches, together with the French Protestant Churches and the Methodist Church of Great Britain, belong. The Church of England has a regular Faith and Order consultation 4 with the CPCE. This network of overlapping and multi-layered ecumenical relationships provides the context for the present initiative between our two churches. Already each church invites the other to appoint a representative to its governing body, the General Assembly and the General Synod. These representatives are made very welcome and their contributions are appreciated. For some years now there has been a bi-annual bilateral consultation, led on the Anglican side by the Archbishop of York, on a range of matters of common concern, particularly issues of public policy and mission. Alongside this, for the past ten years, a smaller-scale faith and order consultation has taken place between appointed representatives of our two churches. This meeting began on a bi-annual basis and was intended as an opportunity to compare notes on the various faith and order issues that our churches were dealing with at the time, so that we could both understand each other better and learn from each other’s work. These conversations proved so valuable that, several years ago, we decided – with the support of our appointing bodies – to constitute ourselves slightly more formally as a joint study group, taking as our main area of study the Church as a communion. We engaged in Bible study and looked at what international theological dialogues, in which our two world bodies (the Anglican Communion and the World Alliance of Reformed Churches) had been involved, could contribute. We studied the theology of the ‘one baptism’ that we recognise in each other. We deliberately took our cue from St Paul’s words in Philippians 1.5, ‘your fellowship in the gospel’, where Paul refers to the practical expression of the fellowship, communion or partnership (koinonia) that the Philippian Christians had given him in his work of spreading the gospel of Christ.1 We recognised that there is a real, God-given degree of communion between our two churches, one grounded in our confession of the apostolic faith, in a mutually recognised common baptism and in the long-standing practice of inviting each other’s communicants to receive Holy Communion at our own eucharistic services.
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