c. 2000 Religion News Service

LOUISVILLE, Ky. _ The Christian ecumenical movement “needs people who are willing to risk without fear,” as slaves did when they ran from captivity not knowing where they would end up, “risking for freedom” because they knew it was right, a retired United Methodist bishop told the 2000 National Workshop on Christian Unity, meeting this week in Louisville.

“Those who love God must love their brothers and sisters before we can pretend to be a righteous people,” retired Bishop Leontine T. C. Kelly, the first African-American woman to be elected bishop of any denomination, said in her homily during the opening worship service. That means loving “all human beings,” she said.

She said you can’t ask people to believe in the liberating message of Jesus “and expect them to stay in some box that some group of people because they have power expect them to stay in. Nowhere in the world can it happen.”

About 400 participants in the workshop, including Catholics and mainline

Protestants involved professionally in ecumenical work, wrestled during the week with questions about what it means to belong distinctly to a particular religious tradition and also to be ecumenical. They looked at issues from interfaith ministries at the grassroots to the complicated negotiations at the top level of denominations over how closely they want or dare to cooperate.

In those discussions, said the Rev. Michael Kinnamon, it’s important to remember “that Christians are already one.” Kinnamon teaches at Lexington Theological Seminary and is general secretary of the Consulation on Church Union, the effort by nine major Protestant denominations to forge closer ties. Being together “is not an option on which we get to vote,” Kinnamon said during a seminar on the emerging new ecumenical relationship called Churches Uniting In Christ. “Christ has made us his own and he is not divided.”

But he said finding common ground is not easy, noting evangelicals are often not at the broad ecumenical table and even mainline Protestants remain divided among themselves over issues such as baptism and bishops.

Others, however, expressed great hope for the movement.

The Rev. Dr. Ofelia M. Ortega Suarez, head of the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Matanzas and a minister with the Presbyterian Church in Cuba, spoke of what she called an “extraordinary experience” a year ago when 49 Protestant denominations worked together to organize mass worship celebrations in Cuba.

“There were all kinds of questions and doubts,” Suarez said. Many were skeptical, but others were enthusiastic. People prayed “and the spirit of God made these celebrations become reality,” she said. “People learned it is possible day by day to practice ecumenism … because God wants it to be so.”

Workshop participants also wrestled with the question of how, in an increasingly pluralistic world, does one remain distinctive while connecting respectfully with those of other religions.

“In (small) communities of 50,000 or 30,000, we are now experiencing new neighbors,” said the Rev. Dirk Ficca, a Presbyterian pastor who works for the Chicago-based Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions. “It’s no longer going to be the Methodist church around the corner or the synagogue around the corner, but the Muslim mosque or the Buddhist temple or the Sikh Gurdwara,” he said.

Ficca said it’s not enough to just study about other faiths from afar. “We must meet people of other religions face-to-face, in the flesh. Otherwise, they are dehumanized _ they simply exist as Hindus or Hinduism”_ the religion in the abstract.

But, he said, when one gets to know a Hindu personally, “something happens. We can understand each other and our understanding each other is the basis of our relationship” rather than the necessity of religious agreement.

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Kelly spoke to the assembly soon after the May 12 end of the United Methodist General Conference in Cleveland, where contentious debate over abortion and particularly homosexuality made national headlines.

“I have felt the pain of disappointment,” she said. “I have felt the tragedy of brothers and sisters left out, as if God’s table is not big enough to encompass them all.

“As an African-American woman, I don’t think I have any other choice except to stand where people are, wherever they are. I think that’s where God is.”

Some of what happened at the Methodist meeting was characterized “by a kind of fear _ fear and some pretty ugly talk,” Kelly said. “Seeds of suspicion and hostility have been planted.”

But Kelly challenged Christians to put aside fear and suspicion, saying mission is not possible “when we’re spending time and energy second-guessing the motives of everyone.”

She cited the ministry of her father decades ago as an example and told a story of when he served as pastor of the Calvary Methodist Episcopal Church in Cincinnati in a neighborhood in transition. As a 7-year-old girl, she saw the worry on her father’s face as he wondered whether the community would continue to support Christian witness “when the color of people’s skin began to be brown rather than white.”

But one day, playing in the basement of the parsonage, two of her brothers discovered a door opening to a mysterious dark passage. Her father investigated, and that night explained to his children about the secret tunnel between the church and the parsonage seven blocks from the Ohio River and the role it played in the Underground Railroad.

“The witness of this church is not in the beautiful Gothic architecture or the beams imported from Italy or the crystal chandeliers or in its social status,” the pastor told his children, Kelly recalled. “The witness of this church is in its cellar.”

DEA END SCANLON