Receptive Ecumenism Lecture Draws Attentive Audience to St Christopher's Church Avonhead

23 Aug 2012

Professor Paul Murray proposes a fresh strategy for ecumenical engagement: Receptive Ecumenism. He suggests that this strategy meets the challenges of our contemporary context, as well as having already been internationally recognised as making a distinctive and important new contribution to ecumenical thought and practice.

A central tenet of Receptive Ecumenism is an adaptation of John F. Kennedy's famous challenge: "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country". Prof. Murray contends that we must make a fundamental, counter-instinctual shift from the traditional thinking that "the other [denomination] should become more like us", to the more radical "what can we, what must we, learn from the other"?

An extension of this idea is summed up in the adage: "We cannot change others, we can only change ourselves; but changing ourselves will enable change in others".

While acknowledging the importance of working together in the community and the world, he argues that this "life and works ecumenism" is insufficient for a Spirit-led Christian witness. Our progress toward an ecumenical goal is much more than a merely human project that we can control and possess; it is at its core the work of God who is calling us and drawing us into it.

Prof. Murray also offered some hope that the problems and differences which we presently see as insurmountable may not always remain so.

He offered an challenging real-life metaphor for our participation in Receptive Ecumenism. Many of us have experienced a wind so strong that we could actually lean forward and be supported by it, even though we would normally have lost our balance by leaning that far out. Prof. Murray believes that we must "lean into" the promise of God's purpose and the presence of the Holy Spirit, and ask what it would mean for us to practice this kind of dependence in our present.

Paul Murray is a Professor at the University of Durham and Director of the Centre for Catholic Studies there. Among many interests and commitments he is a member of the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC). He has been invited to lecture in the New Zealand at the invitation of Archbishop David Moxon of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia.