Perspectief 2015-29

2015-29 The Making of an Ecumenical Text 15 Reag eer implications of the struggles of humanity, the meaning and forms of “local churches truly united” and “conciliar fellowship”, primacy and a universal ministry of Christian unity. 25 After the World Conference, the January 1994 Standing Commission meeting renamed the ecclesiology study as “The Church as Koinonia – An Ecumenical Study”. The whole conspectus of Faith and Order study projects for the following three years, including “Apostolicity and Apostolic Faith Today”, “Ministry and Authority”, “Ecumenical Hermeneutics: Interpreting and Communicating the One Faith in Koinonia ”, as well as Faith and Order permanent tasks and cooperation with different areas of the WCC would be articulated to the ecclesiology study. The first step of the new plan for the ecclesiology study would be a “creative harvesting” of ecumenical ecclesiological insights provided by the 1991 statement “The Unity of the Church as Koinonia : Gift and Calling”, the results of the 1993 Compostela World Conference, as well as the results of bilateral dialogues and past Faith and Order work on the Church 26 . In 1994, the drafters of the Ecclesiology study began to produce building blocks for the new text and to struggle with its architecture 27 . They met in Dublin and in Codrington. Drafts were produced in Dublin on catholicity, apostolicity, forms of authority, and the place and mission of the Church as koinonia in the saving purpose of God. A first outline of the future text emerged in the same year in the meeting held in Codrington, Barbados. This first outline of the Ecclesiology text, together with the 1990 Dunblane Plan, will gain momentum at the end of 1996. Like the Dunblane Plan, The Barbados outline includes several topics that will become constitutive of future versions of what will The Church: Towards a Common Vision. It opens with one section on God’s purpose for creation as 25 T. Best & G. Gassmann (eds), On the Way to Fuller Koinonia , Section I Report, par. 34; Section I rec. 8; Section III, rec. 2; Section IV, par. 38, 32; Section III, par. 31; Section II, par. 31.2; Section III, par. 28. Cf. Commission on Faith and Order, Minutes of the Faith and Order Standing Commission 4-11 January 1994, Crêt-Berard, Switzerland, Geneva, WCC, 1994, F&O Paper 167, p. 25. 26 Commission on Faith and Order, Minutes of the Faith and Order Standing Commission 4-11 January 1994, Crêt-Berard, Switzerland, Geneva, WCC, 1994, F&O Paper 167, p. 95-100. 27 During two meetings held in Dublin, May 1994, and in Codrington, November 1994. See Commission on Faith and Order, Minutes of the Meeting of the Faith and Order Commission 5-12 January 1995 Aleppo, Syria , WCC, Geneva, 1995, 30, 31-40, 40-51.