laity in the ecumenical movement: redefining the profile

Laity in the Ecumenical Movement Redefining the Profile

Konrad Raiser

The disappearance of an important ecumenical concept “The laity” has almost disappeared from ecumenical discussion. This is all the

more striking because ‘‘laity’’ was an ecumenical keyword only a generation ago. Since then the passionate enthusiasm of the early ecumenical movement - which in several important respects saw itself as a lay movement - has somewhat abated. The laity department of the World Council of Churches was phased out in the 1971 restructuring; the periodical Laity ceased publication even earlier. What became of the “laity”? What caused the remarkable disappearance of this key ecumenical concept?

In looking for an answer, we come first to the inevitable institutionalization and diversification of the ecumenical movement. As a result of institutionalization, many ecumenical initiatives at local, national, regional and international levels, which originally depended on the commitment of lay people, have now been incorporated into permanent church structures. Linked to this was an increasing professionalization of ecumenical work, with many of the posts in the newly created offices, departments and ecumenical bodies being filled by theologically trained specialists, often ordained. At the same time, a process of diversification broke up the collective term “laity” into different groups, each with its own special interests and profile. The most important instance of this is the emergence of an independent women’s movement which of course covers more than half the constituency of the earlier laity movement.

On closer consideration, it is clear that the laity has been the victim of a decisive change of perspective in ecumenical discussion since the second half of the 1960s. This involved a shift away from the viewpoint of the churches and societies of Europe and North America, which had been predominant, to focus on the realities of life and the struggles of the churches and peoples of the South. This had a twofold effect on the profile of the laity. Whereas the framework for the commitment of Christian lay people in their respective social contexts had until then been set by the notion of the “responsible society”, the main emphasis of ecumenical concern now became partici-

0 Konrad Raiser is the general secretary of the World Council of Churches. This article is adapted from his keynote address at the world conference of Christian lay centres and movements. It has been translated from the German by the WCC Language Service.

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pation in the struggle for justice and freedom of the poor and the marginalized. The commitment to fundamental social change became more important than the question of the church’s presence in social structures or efforts for church renewal.

As a counter-move to the emergence of this “secular ecumenism” - and not least because of the active involvement of the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox churches - the ecumenical movement became markedly more ecclesiastical in character. This shift can be seen most clearly in the discussion on church ministries. In the 1960s and early 1970s this discussion was still influenced by the rediscovery of the “ministry of the laity” among the many different ministries and offices in the church, and was therefore also concerned with the renewal of all church ministries. By the time of the Lima text on ministry (1982), the discussion had come to focus almost exclusively on the understanding and mutual recognition of the ordained ministry. Logically enough this discussion led into the key ecumenical question of ecclesiology. Nevertheless, it clearly demonstrates the “churchifying” of the ecumenical movement, which is in danger of finding itself far removed from the real life and questions of faith that concern the majority of lay people.

These initial remarks on the reasons for the disappearance of this central ecumenical concept suggest a closer look at the profile of the laity in the earlier phase of the ecumenical discussion. The emphasis at that time was on the rediscovery of the laity as mature members of the people of God. Important reference points were the two major theological investigations on the subject by Yves Congar and Hendrik Kraemer, both of which appeared in the mid-1950s. Mention must also be made of the work of the WCC laity department, in which Hans-Ruedi Weber was a moving force, and of the ideas expressed by the section on the laity at the WCC’s second assembly (Evanston, 1954).

Without going in detail about the theoretical or practical work of this early ecumenical laity movement, I should like to highlight a few assumptions that strike one on re-reading these older texts today.

1. The texts assume a clear distinction between “church” and “world”. The old synthesis of the corpus christianum has been dissolved by the process of seculariza- tion. The world is in the fullest sense secular, and the church has learned - not least in the church struggle in Germany - what it means to be the church.

2. The laity, as distinct from the clergy or full-time church workers, are understood as the church’s representatives in the secular world. They are witnesses to the gospel, and their witness is related to the different forms of Christian responsibility in the world of work and in society. Programmatically speaking the laity question can thus be summed up in the formula: the Christian and daily work.

3 . With the laity question stated in this way, the church’s task is defined as gathering and equipping the laity for their service of witness in the world. Christian existence between church and world was expressed in this two-way movement of gathering and sending out. This led to specific initiatives for the reform of church structures. These were reflected above all in the major study on the “Missionary Structure of the Congregation” and aimed at setting up special services and projects to promote the preparation and training of lay people for their mission in the world.

4. The ecumenical interest in the vocation and mission of the laity is linked explicitly and implicitly with the concern for the missionary renewal of the church and the integration of church and mission. In the long term this initiative contributed to

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strengthening the institutional presence of the churches in secular society - in other words, to the development of a wide variety of church social institutions and agencies with a specialized professional staff.

There can be no doubt that this rediscovery of the vocation of the laity, combined with the efforts for the missionary renewal of the church, gave an important impetus to inculturation, the process of adjusting Christian witness to the modem, rational, constantly changing world. The laity were understood as the church’s advocates in everyday situations in the world, outposts in the common quest for a Christian presence in society. The same basic intention shaped Action cutholique which, starting in France, had a lasting influence on Catholic lay work, especially in Europe and Latin America. These initiatives then also made themselves felt at the Second Vatican Council, especially in the Pastoral Constitution Guudium et Spes, and led to a rediscovery of the calling of the laity in the Catholic church, too.

What has changed? After an interval of thirty years one is struck by how much this earlier ecumenical

discussion was influenced by the experience and situation of the old traditional churches in Europe and North America. (This is also true of the study on the “Missionary Structure of the Congregation”, which had little application to the situation of churches in Asia, Africa and Latin America.) The change of perspective brought about by increased ecumenical awareness of the very different conditions facing the churches in the countries of the South thus demand a re-examination and redefinition of the profile of the laity.

Even in the churches where the ecumenical discussion on the laity had initially met with a widespread response, we today find a regression to a very much older understanding of the laity as in some sense an inferior status. The laity are the “ordinary” church members, as opposed to: - the specialists and experts - which in the church means the theologians. The laity

are considered incompetent when it comes to specialized theological knowledge. They are recipients of information and the target group for church educational activities;

- the professionals or full-time church workers. The laity, especially the voluntary workers, often find themselves powerless, a presence that disturbs the smooth running of things, in some cases even undesirable rivals of the full-time workers;

- the ordained ministers. The laity cannot claim any legitimation deriving from their office but can only exercise personal authority. As “ordinary” members, the laity stand in contrast to the “real church”, which is

represented as an organization with its full-time staff, especially its theologically qualified office-bearers. In these circumstances the old definition of the laity as the representatives and advocates of the church in the world no longer holds. In view of the growing specialization of church services and areas of work in many churches it is becoming increasingly difficult to find competent lay people to undertake voluntary work and take their share of responsibility.

Against this background we can also see more clearly how much the earlier profile of the laity in the ecumenical discussion was determined by the active, responsible role played by men in professional life and in society. Very few women could ever hope to measure up to this particular definition of the “mature lay person”.

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It would not be particularly helpful as a way out of the dilemma for us now to put a renewed emphasis on the definition of the laity as “advocates” as opposed to their status as “ordinary” members. Of course, lay people can advocate a vision of a future church as against the realism of the experts; they can advocate participation rather than insistence on professional competence; they can advocate autonomy over against authority based on office. Of course, the laity still represent the greatest potential force in any process of ecumenical renewal of the church. Yet this profile remains bound into an elitist approach and does not lead beyond the limits of the earlier concept of the laity.

Furthermore, the traditional church model on which the earlier laity concept depended is now very much beset by doubts. Many sociological investigations of religion and the churches in Europe and North America in the past twenty years have found that the majority of members of the mainstream churches now have only a detached sense of church membership. The traditional forms of church life in the congregation, worship and church groups are disintegrating. Above all, among the coming generation, Christian socialization is increasingly slight and the level of knowledge about the faith is decreasing. These doubts are reinforced by the steady loss of members affecting almost all the mainstream churches. Church structures are under increasing pressure to modernize - to rationalize their finances, administration and staffing - and they find themselves in competition with other religious or social groups offering other products. The churches’ public credit and influence are slowly waning. They too are affected by the loss of credibility suffered by all social institutions, and, within the churches themselves, the sense of cohesion and solidarity is diminishing. The old distinction of church and world has become blurred; the churches are judged by the same criteria as other organizations in society, not only by outsiders, but also by their own members. They have become part of the world and are under pressure to conform.

At the same time the rational secularity of the “secular world” is in deep crisis. There is talk of the “end of the modem”, or the “post-modem”; and doubts about the feasibility of progress are widespread. The basic social infrastructure constituted by the family, neighbourly relations and professional associations is disintegrating, causing a crisis of fundamental moral values. Many people feel the tension between increasing individualism (including the privatization of religion) and the quest for meaningful participation in the life of society and credible interpretation of the meaning of life; between the widening of global horizons and the experience of powerlessness; between the rejection of church authority (the church being relegated to the sphere of leisure activity) and the quest for higher legitimation for social, economic and political structures (civil religion).

In this situation - sketched here, of course, only in very rough outline - the influence of the laity in the church and social context of Europe and North America appears to have migrated to the wide variety of movements and initiatives which have developed around the church and in society. The increasing number of evangelical, fundamentalist and charismatic groups and new religious movements are largely supported by “lay people” in the classical sense, but the Christian base communities and the movements critical of society or of the churches which have sprung up around the churches - not least the women’s movement - are also essentially the result of lay initiatives.

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The quest for individual and social guidelines and perspectives for action which these various movements express is taking place against the background of a situation in which globalization of economic and financial processes has meant that ever-larger areas of social and political life are dictated by anonymous centres of power. The traditional forms of settling social conflicts and guaranteeing elementay justice are no longer effective. More and more of the population in different places feel themselves marginalized and excluded from any meaningful participation in the life of their society or cheated of any prospect of shaping their own fate. The gap between the reality of the ever more closely interlocking global system and the everyday world in which people live is increasingly unbridgeable. The “system”, with the determinism dictated by its economic rationality, has “colonized’ the world in which people live their lives. This experience, which was first clearly articulated in relation to the dependent countries of the South, is now increasingly present in analyses of the situation in the old industrialized countries of the North as well.

The old question in the ecumenical discussion on the laity concerning Christian participation in social change has now been overtaken by the ambiguous results of the modernization process. Change has of course brought a measure of freedom for some, as well as new opportunities for the wise use of leisure time; but alongside this we must set the reality of growing alienation, incapacitation and powerlessness for more and more people. It is against this backdrop that we have to look for a new definition of the profile of the laity.

Outlining the new profile of the laity In the 1992 restructuring of the WCC, the question of the laity reappears among

the main emphases in the work of one of the four programme units. The name given to this stream of work is significant: “Lay Participation towards Inclusive Community”. The point of reference is no longer the old distinction between church and world and hence the contrast between clergy and church office-bearers on the one side and the laity on the other. Instead, the main emphasis is now the wider question of participat- ory structures in the church and in society in view of the tendency of the demands of the system to take on a life of their own, with an increase in the faceless power and influence of experts and technocrats. The goal of lay commitment is the rebuilding of viable, non-exclusive social forms that wilI produce a community with a human face in which human dignity is recognized, basic human needs are satisfied and the diversity of cultural identities and human talents are duly recognized. “Inclusive community” was already the central issue in the WCC’s study on “The Community of Women and Men in the Church”, and the project of the Ecumenical Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women will thus be a test-case of the extent to which churches in the ecumenical movement are willing to take seriously the challenge represented by the new profile of the laity.

The quest for the new profile of the laity can thus also be set in the context of the newly emerging social movements of the past twenty years. With all their diversity, these movements indicate the shortcomings of traditional social, political and economic structures and institutional forms for regulating society - in regard to recognition of different cultural identities, control and legitimacy of power and guarantees of elementary justice and respect for human rights. These movements range across a wide spectrum; and we can offer here only a few general descriptive comments:

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In the countries of the South we find above all movements of the marginalized, the poor, people who have lost their social status. The collective term “people’s movements” covers everything from movements of landless peasants and associations of indigenous population groups to trade-union-type movements and cooperatives. In northern industrial countries, where the older labour movement is losing some of its influence, many different new social movements have developed especially among broad sections of the middle classes - notably the peace movement, the environmental movement, the women’s movement and numerous solidarity movements.

Most of the social movements are primarily defensive, in other words, aimed at preserving the elementary basis of life and averting acute threats, rather than at radical change in society or even the struggle for political power. Taking shape in response to quite specific problems which are directly perceived as life-threatening, they come and go with concern about different issues, and are not designed to have institutional continuity.

In recent years network structures have been built up among different social movements, but it is difficult to deploy these strategically for political or social goals, since they do not operate by the instrumental logic of weighing costs and benefits and maximizing efficiency. Rather, the most important thing for them is solidarity and the concern for mutual empowerment.

One of the consequences of the defensive nature of most of the social movements is that they can be altogether ambivalent in their effect. They may work for change or then again they may defend the status quo. The broad spectrum of social movements includes fundamentalist and nationalist movements as well as initiatives for basic democracy and for the defence of justice and human rights.

Recently, the emergence of the new social movements has been linked with the renewed interest in the ‘‘civil society” - a similarly ambiguous concept. In any event, social movements and networks should not simply be equated with the civil society. Rather, the concept of the civil society is an open, tentative concept intended to enhance our ability to perceive social reality in the tension between the global system and the actual world in which people live their lives. In the context of this search for the outlines of the civil society, the new social movements can be seen as the advocates of the life-world, the practical everyday wisdom and living reality of ordinary people - not just of the socially degraded and marginalized but of everyone who feels powerless and condemned to silence in face of the global threats to survival. This new understanding of advocacy in the sense of defending the independence of the life-world and practical everyday knowledge could thus be an important element in the new profile of the laity in the ecumenical movement.

In the ecumenical setting it was above all the conciliar process for justice, peace and the integrity of creation which demonstrated the significance of base church movements as the embodiment of the new profile of the laity. Justice, peace and creation signify the crucial dimensions of the threat to people’s lives from the dynamic of global processes. At the same time they embody prospects of hope and confidence in the ability of the forgotten wisdom of the ordinary everyday world to provide its own, peaceful forms of settling conflicts, experiences of sharing resources without calculations of costs and benefits and the inclusion of more human living conditions in the wider household of life.

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The conciliar discussion on justice, peace and the integrity of creation also reminded us afresh that the biblical social order of the covenant and of shalom applies to this sphere of everyday life which lies below the institutional controls of economic and political macro-systems. The ultimate goals of a culture of non-violence, solidarity and respect for the integrity of creation seek to give new life to this order of shalom - an order of peace and justice for the whole creation. Here the ancient rule of the sabbath, the sabbath year and its continuation in the Jubilee year, expressing the periodic relinquishing of power, takes on new significance from the social, political and ecological point of view. The covenants which were made as part of the conciliar process represent one form of active, deliberate networking for the goals of mutual empowerment, sharing of hope and experiences and the rebuilding of human communities in which hope can be experienced and fortified.

The laity as agents of the ecumenical learning process In the earlier laity discussion lay people were described as the church’s advocates

in the world. Then came a second phase, in which they were considered primarily as agents of initiatives for church renewal. As a new form of ecumenical lay movement, the conciliar process has led to lay people being identified as the agents of ecumenical learning processes, a search for a new direction, an effort to find a new language to express the perception of reality in the tension between system and life-world. Ecumenical learning understood as the process of finding a new language is also a form of fighting back against the disempowerment of ordinary people and their pragmatic knowledge and experience by the domination of experts.

In his studies on the new laity discussion Fritz Erich Anhelm distinguishes between discursive learning and conciliar learning. “Discourse” here means the undirected form of public debate as a means of examining and evolving fundamental social options and moral guidelines. Here discourse stands for the most radically democratic form of decision-making. In an open social discourse it is important to succeed in making the link between everyday pragmatic wisdom and the knowledge of experts and specialists, in order to allow mutual correction in the respective perceptions of reality. Both the blindness of the experts and the particular nature of everyday wisdom based on experience need to be overcome and called in question. The important thing is not reaching rapid and complete agreement, social consensus, but formulating new questions which lead beyond the status quo and make it possible to expand the perception of the problems. Examples of successful social discourse are the continuing broad debate on the benefits and dangers of using nuclear energy, or the replacement of a narrow understanding of security by a wider, cooperative definition of security as “common security”.

Understanding discourse as part of the ecumenical learning process means inten- tionally using the opportunities available to the churches and church groups to promote, organize and structure the discourse. Global, analytical descriptions of the problems by experts must always be set against the practical, everyday line of action of movements at the base. The churches, whose ecumenical network encompasses the whole range from global structural issues to the smallest situation affecting people’s daily lives, have the opportunity to offer places and furnish a framework in which to organize and sustain the necessary discourse. Academies and lay centres, church meetings and public action by the churches to raise awareness of the hidden

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contradictions and repressed conflicts in society make an important contribution to promoting this learning process.

The notion of “conciliar learning” draws on an understanding of conciliarity as the specific form of dealing with conflicts and reaching decisions within the churches. The distinction between conciliar and discursive learning is thus analogous to the earlier distinction between church and world. Now, however, it is no longer a question of the distinctness and inter-relatedness of two opposite spheres, but rather of two dimensions of the one reality. Conciliar learning aims constantly to link the biblical knowledge of faith and hope afresh with human empirical knowledge. As I have already stressed, justice, peace and the integrity of creation are at one and the same time the focal points of the real, global, daily threats to life and central expressions of biblical perspectives of hope. Conciliar learning describes the process of projecting the all-embracing vision of justice, peace and the integrity of creation onto everyday reality. It is a question of detecting points of intersection where the perspective of hope springs to life in the midst of threat. This can also be described as a process of “literacy training”, in other words, discerning and spelling out the signs of the times, in order to open up afresh the forces of hope contained in the tradition of the faith.

Ultimately the aim of conciliar learning is a new confession of our hope in the face of resignation and fatalism, but also therefore resistance to and rejection of the powers and structures which disempower people and condemn them to silence. The most important example of a largely unstructured process of conciliar learning is the unanimous condemnation of racism as sin and of the use of religious or theological arguments to justify it as actual heresy. Processes of conciliar learning likewise need places, criteria and rules. Like open discourse they too need to be protected from being used one-sidedly for church or political purposes.

To summarize these thoughts on the new ecumenical laity movement as a movement of discursive and conciliar learning:

The willingness to enter actively into this process of ecumenical learning as a movement in search of viable and empowering forms of human community can be taken as the criterion for the ecumenical laity movement. This willingness is constantly endangered and challenged because the learning process is rejected in the church and in society both by those defending the interests of the institutional status quo and by those defending an exclusive and fundamentalist understanding of truth.

The new laity movement which is outlined in profile here is of crucial importance for the future of the ecumenical movement. In contrast to the tendency of fundamentalism it insists that truth - and hence also human reality - can only be recognized in community. Any consensus reached through discourse, any conciliar formulation of the confession of hope depends on the reception it is given. The ecumenical fellowship and the belonging together of Christians and churches is not grounded in the same mentality, the same doctrine or the same order, but in their partaking and sharing in the all-encompassing reality of God, the source of life and hope.

Through their practice of active networking in the form of covenants the new laity movement opens up a specific experience of catholicity for the ecumenical fellowship, that is to say, the presence of the whole and the universal in each particular day-to-day reality, which does not depend on the efficient functioning of global structures. With this, the inter-relatedness of all living things, which has been

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rediscovered above all in the women’s movement, is linked with the specifically Christian confession of the Holy Spirit as the giver of life and bond of unity who creates the one body of the worldwide church of Christ out of the many differences.

NOTE

‘Yves Congar, Jalons pour une thkologie du laicat (Eng. tr. Lay People in the Church, London, Bloomsbury, 1957); Hendrik Kraemer, A Theology of the Laity, London, Luttenvorth, 1958.

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laity in the ecumenical movement: redefining the profile

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