Methodist URC Joint Resolution Progress Report

This is the first of a series of excerpts from the Methodist Conference 2011 Ecumenical Report.  This first excerpt covers material relating to relations between the Methodist and United Reformed Churches.

Further report on progress in response to the Joint Resolution of the Methodist Conference and the United Reformed Church Assembly in 2008

1.1 Background to the Joint Resolution

In 2008, the URC Assembly and Methodist Conference approved a joint resolution which had been proposed by the Wolverhampton and Shrewsbury District of the Methodist Church and the West Midlands Synod of the United Reformed Church. Full details of the resolution can be found on the Methodist Church website [2008 Resolution 62/2]. Its main points are as follows:

• to explore further joint working for the sake of shared mission;
• a structure that minimises ecumenical meetings but facilitates diversity;
• exploration of joint structures at synod/district level;
• effective use of resources.

1.2 Joint Meeting of the United Reformed Church Mission Council and the Methodist Council

A report on this first joint meeting can be found in the report of the Methodist Council elsewhere in this Agenda.

This report is buried in the Methodist Council report and so it is reproduced here in full.  These links are to reports of the joint councils meeting, Better Together, on this blog.

One major development in the life and work of the Council this year was the first joint meeting of the Methodist Council and the United Reformed Church Mission Council. For many years there has been, and continues to be, a Methodist-United Reformed Church Liaison Committee. In 2008 the Methodist Conference and the URC Assembly both adopted resolutions committing themselves to closer working together. Following that a Strategic Oversight Group of a few senior staff and officers of both Churches was established. That in turn led to the proposal that the two Councils should meet together.

The joint meeting took place at The Hayes Conference Centre, Swanwick, in October 2010. The normal one day meeting of the Methodist Council was lengthened to a 48 hour meeting to make this possible. During the time the two Councils met separately for a number of sessions to conduct their own business and complete their own formalities. Interspersed among these were nine sessions where the two Councils met together. These included an opening session exploring the history, context and characteristics of the two Churches within a framework of worship; a Bible Study on the need to welcome all people whatever their status into the embrace of the Church; and discussion groups on the key challenges facing Churches both locally and denominationally. There was a presentation on “Fresh Expressions” by Bishop Graham Cray, the Bishop responsible for that work in the Church of England, a work in which the Methodist Church and the United Reformed Church are partners. The General Secretaries of the two Churches gave an outline of the pressing issues and current initiatives in both Churches, which led to the recognition of how many themes were common to both. There was then a series of workshops developed in response to requests from the discussion groups.

The final joint plenary sessions then received presentations and engaged in discussions of a number of issues which led in turn to the making of some shared decisions. The report of a joint Church Buildings Think Tank led to a call for the Strategic Oversight Group to look at the possibility of forming a follow-on group to facilitate the next stage of this work. A document on work with children and young people led to the staff teams being directed to bring plans for joint working to future meetings of the Councils. A paper on Poverty in Britain 2010 led to a commitment to challenge the causes of poverty and inequality inherent in our society. A report on the Review of the Methodist/United Reformed Church National Rural Officer Post led to a commitment to continue the joint post and accept the recommendations made in the report.

During the joint meeting members of the Methodist Council were introduced to the United Reformed Church’s way of making decisions by consensus, and this was tried in a number of cases. In general, the making of decisions prompted interesting reflection. The two Councils do not have exactly equivalent responsibilities, powers or ways of working. In effect the two Councils made separate but parallel decisions in each other’s presence. This will need further attention in any follow-up event. Feedback from the Councils of both Churches has suggested that the joint meeting was worthwhile and worth doing again. A second joint meeting is therefore being planned for autumn 2012.

1.3 Other developments

A senior officer of the Methodist Conference now attends the United Reformed Church Mission Council as a participant observer, and a senior officer of the United Reformed Church attends the Methodist Council in a similar capacity. The Strategic Oversight Group continues to meet regularly.  Its membership is currently: from the United Reformed Church, the General Secretary, the Deputy General Secretary and the Treasurer; and from the Methodist Church, the General Secretary, the Secretary for Team Operations and the Secretary for External Relationships [nb the offices of Treasurer of the United Reformed Church and Secretary for Team Operations in the Methodist Church are currently held by the same person]. Conversations are beginning about how the Methodist-United Reformed Church Liaison Committee’s work can interact productively with that of the Methodist-Anglican Panel for Unity in Mission.

Methodist Council, April 2011

Methodist Council met in April and considered a few issues to do with Methodist URC relations.  (I'm having some technical problems and so I'm afraid this post falls short of my usual standards.  I'll update it later when the problems are resolved.)  Here they are:

United Reformed Church and Methodist Buildings

Council members agreed the terms of reference for a follow-up group on joint work on the use of United Reformed Church and Methodist Buildings and approved in principle 50% funding for a three-year post of Executive Officer to support the group (the other 50% to be met by the URC). This will now be taken to the URC Mission Council for their consideration.

Joint meeting with the United Reformed Mission Council

 The Council agreed to another joint meeting with the United Reformed Mission Council. This will take place in Autumn 2012.

Model Constitution for a Methodist / United Reformed Church United Area Association

The Council appointed a group to scrutinise the document and approve it on the Council’s behalf.  There will be a post about this once it has been approved.

Where Might we get to Ecumenically?

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Ken Howcroft, the Connexional Ecumenical Officer, made a presentation at a meeting of the Connexional Team's Strategic Leaders and Cluster Heads on 16 December 2010.  An outline follows.  It is a useful summary of Connexional ecumenical activity.

The (other) Lord’s Prayer
“May they all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me… I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me… May they be with me where I am to see my glory” John 17:21-4

Priorities for the Methodist Church
In partnership with others wherever possible, the Methodist Church will concentrate its prayers, resources, imagination and commitments on this priority:

• to proclaim and affirm its conviction of God’s love in Christ, for us and for all the world; and
• to renew confidence in God’s presence and action in the world and in the Church

Lund Principle 1952
Churches should act together in all matters except those in which deep differences of conviction compel them to act separately.


Ecumenical Vision 

• All together in each place
• Worship and Mission
• Holy Church, wholly Church, not the whole of the Church
• Conference 2009

Ecumenical Identity: Church Identity

See Ken's post on 29 October 2010 

Current Situation and Future Scenarios

• Anglican Methodist Covenant
• United Reformed Church (URC) - Methodist joint resolution.  See eight posts about the consultation held in April 2010 starting here and two posts about the October joint meeting of Methodist Council and URC Mission Council
• EMU and Welsh Covenant
• Church of England, Methodist, URC - more about this later
• Baptist
• Roman Catholic
• European
• New Churches and Movements

Questions
 
What does ecumenical working mean in:

• inter-religious contexts?
• inter-confessional contexts?
• within our confessional context?

If you have answers to these questions or other questions or views, please comment below.

Related articles

• Ecumenical Vision Statement (ecumenicalissues.blogspot.com)
• Vatican II Conference (ecumenicalissues.blogspot.com)
• Archbishop of Canterbury at Methodist Conference 3 (ecumenicalissues.blogspot.com)
• Methodist URC Liaison Committee, November 2010 (ecumenicalissues.blogspot.com)
• Joint Councils Catch Up (ecumenicalissues.blogspot.com)
• Ecumenical Identity (ecumenicalissues.blogspot.com)

Ecumenical Identity

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Two intersecting circles illustrate Ken's point.

The following is a post prepared by Revd Ken Howcroft, Connexional Ecumenical Officer:

The word “identity” has kept cropping up at ecumenical meetings and discussions recently. Thinking about it, it strikes me that there has been a shift over the years.

At one time we looked for areas where the circles of our various Churches’ identities overlapped, and we thought of that area as our common Christian identity or the identity of the universal Church of Christ that we share in common. We then sought to do everything that we could to expand that area of overlap, seeing the things in it as the essence of our identity as parts of Christ’s Church and the things outside it as secondary. It led to us talking of “the coming great church” and “visible organic unity”.

There are great strengths in that. But there are also some potential problems. One is that the giving and receiving of gifts (“receptive ecumenism”) could come to be seen as a matter of exchanging luxuries or ephemera rather than essentials (rather like Christmas presents for people who have got everything they think they want!). Another is that Churches (particularly but not exclusively large and powerful ones) can tend to assume that their secondary markers of identity will remain and that other Churches will just accommodate to them.

A third problem is that it works best with a conciliar view of ecumenism (in which ecumenical Councils of Churches are seen as prototypical governance bodies of a single united Church that is coming into being). So the shift towards a Churches Together way of working has been accompanied by a radical shift in the model.

The idea of separate Churches working together in a way that leads to visible communion (rather than merger into an homogenous, single institution) means that what defines each Church’s identity becomes not what it shares in common with others but the special attributes and emphases or particular combinations of them which distinguish it from others.

The danger then, however, is that things which seemed to be second-order or non-essential issues forty years ago now take on first-order importance (a phenomenon noted by the Archbishop of Canterbury in a speech in Rome last year). In this model the common essence of what it means to be Christ’s Church tends to vanish out of sight, or at best be subsumed into the things which differentiate that Church from others.

Moreover receptive ecumenism now becomes a giving and receiving of gifts that is akin to trading in essentials, with all the power-brokering that that entails. In other words it becomes even more difficult to do, particularly where the essentials are in tension with each other: for example (and admittedly to caricature the point in order to make it), “I will receive the gift of the historic episcopate from you provided that you receive from me the gift of the primary locus of oversight being the local congregation with which nobody else can interfere”.

I would like to think that there was another way forward. Identities are not suits of clothes that you can simply put on and take off. Even an actor who takes on the outward markers and even the intellectual and emotional mindset of a whole range of different characters has to find an integrity of performance, and that means recognising how the identity being assumed as an actor connects with the essential identity of the actor as a person.

Who we are as individuals and as Churches develops and changes over time. It gets expressed and re-expressed in different contexts. There are continuities and discontinuities in those forms of expression. But unless there is some underlying continuity in the development the result is dis-ease, a lack of wholeness and, dare I say it, a deficiency of holiness.

Thus my identity includes the fact that I am a son, to which I have added that of being a husband and being a father. But I would be a dysfunctional father if I forgot what it is to be a son. Similarly when St Paul says “To the Jews I became as a Jew… to the Greeks I became as a Greek… etc” in 1 Corinthians 9, he is not talking of a complete identity transplant. The one who becomes as a Jew and as a Greek remains the same Christian-Pharisaic-Jew or Jewish-Pharisaic-Christian. But that identity changes and develops as it is expressed in the different contexts.

To personalise it all, although I have not lived there for many years I am shaped by the fact that I come from a particular sort of setting in Lancashire. Similarly I shall always be shaped by the fact that I am a Methodist. But just as I can be a Lancastrian and live in other parts of the world, and be an ordained minister in the Church rather than a coal-miner, so I can be a Methodist within a wider expression of the Church. I admit that I am helped in that by the fact that Methodism’s origins (which set the parameters for its identity) were in being a movement inside another Church.

I therefore believe that a move into visible communion where what marks the Church of Christ is at least the highest common factor of our authentic identities as separate Churches (rather than the lowest common denominator of overlapping identity as in the first model above) and hopefully (in the theological sense of that term) more, and which can contain our differing identities in relationships which enrich us all, is possible.

So what is stopping us? At the recent joint meeting of the Methodist Council and the URC Mission Council people kept saying that there were things preventing them working together in worship and mission in local situations. When we asked them to say what they were, we had to keep saying “But you can already do that!”.

So is what is stopping us either a lack of confidence in our common identity as the Church of Christ, or our separate identities as Churches in Christ, or is it a lack of will?

Related articles

• The Ecumenical Landscape (ecumenicalissues.blogspot.com)
• Christ's Body in Corinth (ecumenicalissues.blogspot.com)
• Ecumenical Stakeholders Group (ecumenicalissues.blogspot.com)

Closer Working: A local response to the 2008 Joint Resolution

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'Closer Working: A local response to the 2008 Joint Resolution' took place between Thursday 29th April and Friday 30th April 2010 at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre, Birmingham.  About 50 people from URC Methodist Local Ecumenical Partnerships, United Areas and other local collaborations took part, with ecumenical observers from the Church of England and Society of Friends.

In 2008, the URC Assembly and Methodist Conference approved a joint resolution which had been proposed by Wolverhampton and Shrewsbury District and the West Midlands Synod.  The main points are as follows:

• To explore further joint working for the sake of shared mission.
• A structure that minimises ecumenical meetings but facilitates diversity
• Exploration of joint structures at Synod / District level
• Effective use of resources.

The leaders of the two churches established a Strategic Oversight Group (SOG) to oversee the work under the joint resolution and have agreed to a joint URC Mission Council and Methodist Council in the autumn of 2010.

The consultation identified issues from a local perspective. The report will go to the SOG and some of its findings will be discussed at the joint councils meeting. The Methodist URC Liaison Committee will follow up items the joint councils are unable to accommodate.

The Consultation aimed to:

• Identify existing good practice and share the problems that become hurdles in working together
• Evaluate why some individual churches work well together and have been successful as united churches
• Develop a set of good practices that can be used by churches when considering a united church building/fellowship
• Progress the Joint Resolution in a way that helps our Churches go forward together in greater mission

There was little input to the consultation prepared in advance.  Participants agreed topics for consideration, worked in groups and reported to a final plenary.  The topics listed therefore represent the interests and concerns of the people present.

This post will be followed by with several others.  These will report on the findings of the groups that met during the consultation.  Please follow and comment on them if you are interested.  We will read all comments and where appropriate pass them onto the Strategic Oversight Group and / or the autumn Joint Councils meeting. 

I would also like to encourage general comments about between the Methodist and United Reformed Churches relations.  The list below is of the groups at the consultation and will give you some idea of the topics they covered.  If you have comments on a particular topic, you might like to wait for the post that covers it.  If you have other concerns, comment on this post.

Most of the work of the consultation was done in groups focused around specific themes. Questions regarding:

• LEPs and constitutions;
• organic unity; (This report is being reviewed and I will post about it when it is ready.)
• ministry;
• ethos;
• finances;
• United Areas (this group reviewed the current situation and had nothing to report).

Please note I'm on leave and will respond to comments on or soon after Tuesday 24 August 2010.

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• EMU Statement of Partnership for Scotland (ecumenicalissues.blogspot.com)

Methodist URC Joint Resolution Report to Conference

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The following report was received by Methodist Conference 2010. For more information about relationships between the Methodist and United Reformed Churches, visit this page on the Methodist Church website.

Progress in response to the Joint Resolution of the Methodist Conference and the United Reformed Church Assembly in 2008.

1.1 Background to the Joint Resolution

In 2008, the URC Assembly and Methodist Conference approved a joint resolution which had been proposed by the Wolverhampton and Shrewsbury District of the Methodist Church and the West Midlands Synod of the United Reformed Church. Full details of the resolution can be found on the Methodist Church website [2008 Resolution 62/2] (or by following the above link). Its main points are as follows:

• to explore further joint working for the sake of shared mission;
• a structure that minimises ecumenical meetings but facilitates diversity;
• exploration of joint structures at synod/district level;
• effective use of resources.

1.2 Strategic Oversight Group

A group has been formed to bring further proposals to the Governance bodies of both Churches. The membership of this Strategic Oversight Group is currently: from the United Reformed Church, the General Secretary, the Deputy General Secretary and the Treasurer; and from the Methodist Church, the General Secretary, the Secretary for Team Operations and the Secretary for External Relationships [n.b. the offi ces of Treasurer of the United Reformed Church and Secretary for Team Operations in the Methodist Church are currently held by the same person].

1.3 Observers at Methodist Council and URC Mission Council

The Methodist Council, responding to Resolution 62/2 of the 2008 Conference, has invited a representative of the United Reformed Church to be a regular observer at its meetings and appointed a Methodist observer to attend the Mission Council of the United Reformed Church.

1.4 Joint Councils Meeting

The Methodist Council and the Mission Council have agreed to hold a joint meeting from 13–15 October 2010.

1.5 Closer Working Consultation

The Closer Working Consultation was a local response to the 2008 Joint Resolution for those engaged in ecumenical work in the Methodist and United Reformed Churches. It was a consultation, held at the end of April 2010, for members of URC Methodist Local Ecumenical Partnerships, United Areas and other local collaborations.

1.6 United Areas Model Constitution

The new charities legislation means United Areas will have to register as charities and so the Methodist and United Reformed Churches have collaborated in the writing of a model constitution for United Areas. This is the fi rst time United Areas have had a standard format for their constitutions and it means the approval process for United Areas will be much simpler.

1.7 How to Make it Work

‘How to Make it Work’ documents most of the details of the relationships between Methodist and United Reformed Churches. This site includes a service for the induction and welcome of ministers, a checklist for church stewards and elders, orientation for incoming ministers to Methodist and URC Local Ecumenical Partnerships, a model declaration of intent for a Single Congregation partnership and a paper about Baptists in Local Ecumenical Partnerships with the Methodist and United Reformed Churches. It is available through both websites.