Two months back it was Christmas - a word everyone knows, but which you won't find in the Bible. So for this month's word, here is a bit of church jargon. Is it a word from the Bible? Well, yes and no.
We can guess that the word electrical has something do do with electricity, that the word mechanical has something to do with machines, but what on earth is an ecumen? Or has someone got the spelling wrong, and should it really be "economical"?
As with all good jargon, it is hard to guess the meaning of the word if you don't know it. In fact, the word from which it comes does not exist in English, but only in Greek. It isn't "an ecumen" but "the oikoumene". As oikein means to dwell (and oikos means a house), the oikoumene means everything that can be dwelt in - the whole inhabited world.
When Jesus foretells that "the gospel will be proclaimed throughout the world" (Matt 24:13), when the Devil shows Jesus "all the kingdoms of the world", when Paul recalls the Psalmist's cry that heaven's words of praise "have gone out to the end of the world" (Ps 19:4, Rom 10:18), when a decree goes out from Caesar Augustus that "all the world should be registered" (Luke 2:1), the word used is oikoumene.
But Caesar Augustus didn't really plan to register the whole of humanity - just his own people. Nor was Demetrius in Ephesus really claiming that "the whole world" was flocking to worship the goddess Diana (Acts 19:27). So "ecumenical" has taken on a slightly narrower meaning: concerned with everyone who loves and serves Jesus as Lord and Saviour - the whole church, the whole body of Christ, the whole household of faith, so to speak.
In the distant past, it was easy to know what was meant by "the whole church". The Emperor Constantine could call the leaders of the whole church to an "ecumenical" Council at Nicæa in 325 to settle the question of whether Christ was "a created being", or "he through whom all things were made". At a time when the Empire was centred in Istanbul, the leader of the church there was respected as "the Ecumenical Patriarch". But with the division of the church into East and West, and with the divisions brought about in the 1500s and later by the Reformation and its aftermath, ecumenism became a distant dream and not a present reality.
For Jesus and the apostles, the church could only be one body, united just as Jesus and the Father are united (John 17:11), by having one Lord, one faith and one baptism (Eph 4:5). But with the Reformation, churches settled into little niches, and if their members prayed for unity, they were often praying that others would recognize the error of their ways and come back to their particular fold.
In the 19th century, churches in the west started to realize that their divisions were harming their witness and their ability to serve others. A number of inter-denominational bodies started - the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) (1844), the Evangelical Alliance (1846), but there was no serious move to unite churches.
The modern ecumenical movement gained momentum with the institution of a week of prayer for Christian unity - an idea which the Evangelical Alliance proposed, and which the Anglican churches and the Roman Catholic church developed in the 1870s. The week moved to its present date (focused in most countries on 25 January) in 1908. The desire for ecumenical cooperation increased between the wars, and led to the formation of the World Council of Churches in 1948.
There is no space to go into the deeper questions of ecumenism here. Is the aim structural unity, as with the formation of the Church of South India in 1947? Is the aim dialogue, getting to see and understand the similarities between different ways of serving and worshipping God, as with the discussions between the Roman Catholic church and the Church of England? Is the aim getting churches to share the sacraments together, as with the Anglican churches and the Old Catholic churches of the Union of Utrecht? Or is it more to work together in specific fields: social work, religious education, outreach, Christian witness in a secular world, as with AKiB, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft christlicher Kirchen in Bern?
And is there common ground to build on? The anonymous saying: "In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity" begs the question of what the essentials are. The literal truth of the Bible? A belief that Jesus is really present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist? A ban on contraception, or on gay relationships, on female clergy?
What is essential is a love for God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and a desire to follow Christ. Only if we have this love within us can we share it with the oikoumene - with the whole inhabited world. For this is the unity that God desires.
HD