WCC president uses own church to show need for unity

ATLANTA (UMNS) -- When the Rev. Kathryn Bannister told her Kansas parishioners she would be attending the annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of the World Council of Churches, one church member advised her, "You need to talk about us."

That is exactly what Bannister did, describing to the representatives of the various communions in the United States and Canada what is like to be the pastor of four small churches and to work daily on issues of reconciliation, the theme of the WCC meeting.

Bannister deals daily in her ministry with divisiveness, both within the congregations and in the lives of members, but there are successes too.

"We had a lot of antagonism to overcome for the cooperative parish to take place," she said.  "A year later, we have a parish-wide Bible study."

It was during the Bible study that she was admonished to "talk about us.  "She had just told the group that the theme of the WCC meeting would be reconciliation.  "In being together," the church member said, "we begin to know each other, and now we trust each other."

Such "everyday stories of brokenness and healing speak ... about the small places where reconciliation has to begin," Bannister said during the opening worship service in Atlanta.  "It is God's gift extended to us in Jesus Christ ... which gives us a new identity and then leads us to be reconcilers ourselves."

Just minutes before she delivered her meditation, Bannister was installed as the moderator of the WCC's U.S. Conference.  A year ago, she was elected as the youngest of eight regional WCC presidents at the organization's Eighth Assembly in Harare, Zimbabwe.

The 29-year-old clergywoman, wife and mother is equally poised and articulate whether she is in Kansas talking with church members about the council's mission or attending a high-level ecumenical meeting and discussing rural church life.

She's been involved in the ecumenical movement longer than she's been a pastor.  She attended the WCC assembly in 1991 in Canberra, Australia, as a young adult delegate when she was an undergraduate student at American University in Washington.  At that meeting, she was elected to the Central Committee, the council's governing body.

While she "cares passionately" about the young adult constituency, she wants to make a substantive contribution to the overall issues facing people of faith rather than being "called on constantly to talk about what it is to be a young adult."

She is grateful to the United Methodist Church and the WCC's U.S. Conference for being deliberate about including youth and young adults in the ecumenical movement.

"We have a young adult intern in the U.S. office, the third one we've had," she said.  "We've tried in the last five or six years at the annual meeting to develop an ecumenical formation experience for young people, to try to invite them to the meeting.  It changes the tune and flow of the meeting when there's not a noticeable number of young people."

A colloquium for seminary students followed this year's annual meeting Dec. 9-11 in Atlanta.

While some WCC member communions do not allow women leaders, overall Bannister's found a "fairly accepting environment" in the ecumenical organization.  "There are always going to be those who just ignore you because of who you are," she said.

She believes the WCC's declaration of 2001-2010 as the "Ecumenical Decade to Overcome Violence" can be a force for unity and peace in a divided and hostile world.

"I can think of no greater way for the WCC to choose to make an impact ... than to help us as churches speak together about what we offer to the world around us, about another way of being in the world," she said.

And yet, she cautioned, "we have a lot of hard work to do before we can ever begin, to attend to our own needs for reconciliation within the communions that we come from. ... We have a long and patient history of working toward Christian unity ... but there's not going to be reconciliation among us if there is not reconciliation within us."

The United Methodist Church, she said, is struggling with its denominational identity and different ways of reading and interpreting Scriptures.  "Both of these things then factor into how it is we discuss the social issues that divide us."

What is needed, she said, is "patient sitting down at the table to talk again and again and again.  That helps keep us together.  When we become polarized from each other and live only by stereotypes of each other, instead of understanding the very real fears and concerns that people share around conflicted issues, then it's easy to see where we become divided."

She expressed appreciation for the denominational conversations on controversial issues, sponsored by the United Methodist Commission on Christian Unity and Interreligious Concerns, which have brought together people with differing viewpoints.

While churches in other parts of the world have used ecumenical settings as arenas to discuss common internal problems, that has not happened in the United States.  "The Presbyterians and Episcopalians are dealing with the same issues as United Methodists, but we haven't addressed them significantly in an ecumenical way," Bannister said.

On the horizon, she hopes, are discussions in the various regions of the world about how churches can address issues and causes of violence.

"Certainly churches are already doing many things to address issues of violence," she said.  "Hopefully the decade will help us find each other and learn from each other and be a stronger witness together than we could be independently."

* Smith is executive director of the Georgia United Methodist Communications Council.