United We Stand

Fifteen years ago no one expected this week would ever happen.

Strong feelings and differences of tradition held the two wings of the Reformed family apart, but many churches were members of both organizations.

“It started with very small steps,” says Pieter Holtrop, executive member from 1989 to 1997 and vice president from 1997 to 2004. “But we had to take small steps in the beginning. There was no programme initially.

 

“Before 1998, the two white South African churches, suspended from WARC membership in 1982 for their support for apartheid, remained active members of REC [Reformed Ecumenical Council]. It wasn’t really until the largest Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa met the requirements set by the World Alliance of Reformed Churches to resume active membership in 1998, that things really began to move forward.

 

“There had been extended discussions between the DRC in South Africa and WARC and its member churches in the nineties to help them understand what was needed. Once they had taken the necessary steps, we were able to explore further the possibilities of closer relations with REC.”

 

Californian Jane Dempsey Douglass, WARC President from 1990 to 1997, takes up the story.

 

“Other foundations for Reformed cooperation were being laid. Lukas Vischer had taken the initiative to organize the Mission in Unity programme at the John Knox Reformed Centre in Geneva in the eighties. The Centre was independently governed but collaborated with WARC. It became clear that the seminars, on a variety of topics there, where people invited from both organizations and also unaffiliated Reformed churches, could get together, were beginning to overcome the feelings of distrust that some people held.

 

“Research was done then to produce a handbook of all the known Reformed churches, many of which were still not affiliated with either WARC or REC. The Mission in Unity programme brought together a variety of Reformed churches from the same country to explore a common mission. In the nineties the WARC executive committee was also concerned to bring about a union of WARC and REC.”

 

“After 1998, the groundwork had been done. The lifting of the suspension of the DRC made the way free to try to get the unification on a more structured basis,” says Holtrop. “Of course, personalities among office bearers played a major role. Milan Opočenský, WARC General Secretary, worked energetically on this process.

 

“There was still some mistrust of course – the REC had concerns about some ethical and scriptural issues (Holtrop’s own denomination, the Reformed Churches of the Netherlands, had recently been on the verge of being suspended over its liberal views on scripture and sexuality), but the first real talks among three people from WARC and three from REC, including Richard Van Houten, took place in Amsterdam in 1998. I was part of that meeting and it certainly gave us lots of things to think about.

 

“After the report had been put to the separate organizations in 1998, there was an intention to continue, not with an actual union at that point, but with an ongoing conversation instead.”

 

Other meetings in Geneva, Switzerland, and Hendersonville, United States, followed, the members changing, but the direction remaining the same.

 

“These three meetings were crucial in establishing trust,” says Holtrop. “Finally, at WARC’s General Council in Accra in 2004 and REC’s Assembly meeting in Utrecht in 2005, there was an official programme for the process of growing together.

 

“When I stand here today, looking at the delegates from both organizations, talking, laughing, relaxing and working to solve problems together, it makes me very, very happy. WARC brings decades of advocacy for social justice to the table, complementing REC’s concentration on communion and its confessional heritage. Together the two strands are acting both as a challenge and as a binding force for the churches.”

 

Douglass nods. “We have a strong sense of being a Reformed people. There are delegates here from very diverse traditions, and yet we are able to say that what we have in common compels us to stay together, even when we disagree.”

 

“This has been a wonderful conference,” Holtrop says. “The ecumenical experience of meeting with others from all over the world – some whose churches are suffering intense pressure and are in desperate situations – is incredibly valuable, and this union is really deepened and widened by this experience. We are all comforted and strengthened by the knowledge that millions around the world are praying for us. We are seeing the faces, learning the names and becoming part of each other’s life.”

 

Douglass concludes. “Yes, it’s the friendship we find here that will change our lives. Sharing our joys and sorrows draws us together as family. But we must also find ways to work together, to confront the powers of injustice from which the suffering comes.”

By Jackie Macadam, UGC correspondent