Perspectief 2015-29

2015-29 The Making of an Ecumenical Text 25 Reag eer less dualistic view of the Church. The third and last chapter, on “Service within the Church and for the World”, deals briefly with the growth in communion in faith and sacramental life and, more extensively, with authority, oversight, conciliarity and primacy in the Church. A new version of the manuscript was extensively discussed in December 2011 in Bossey, near Geneva, in dialogue with executive staff of the WCC Commission on World Mission and Evangelism. In the following weeks, the new version was submitted to four well-known ecumenists who had not been involved with the last stage of the drafting process. Having taken their remarks into account, the drafting group submitted a new version of the text to the Faith and Order Ecclesiology Working in March 2012 in Freising. The Freising text has a different architecture: it keeps the first two chapters of the Gazzada text - on the mission and unity of the Church, and on the Church of the Triune God, and separates the chapter on service within the Church and in the world into two chapters: one on the growth in the elements of unity – including apostolic faith, sacraments and ministry with particular focus on authority, conciliarity and primacy - and the other on the Church in the world: the Church is in the world to proclaim the coming of God’s reign, which means that it must engage contemporary moral and societal issues. The new architecture re-establishes a structural reference to the text as an ecumenical text and comes close to the structure of The Nature and Mission of the Church. The Freising text was then submitted to the Standing Commission on Faith and Order in Penang, in June 2012, when it was again discussed, amended and finally approved 53 . Between Etchmiadzin 2010 and Penang 2012 the ecclesiology text went through at least ten successive versions. The new text 54 has just 69 paragraphs. Its new title avoids the dualist “The nature and…” that marked the title of its previous versions. It drops the subtitle “a stage on the way to a common statement”. According to the Introduction, this is now “a convergence text”, in the sense that it is “much more than an instrument to stimulate further study”. The controversial issues, which had been dealt with in separate boxes, are now included in the body of the text, and texts in italics raise questions to the churches in order to stimulate 53 Commission on faith and Order, Minutes of the Standing Commission on Faith and Order Meeting in Penang, Malaysia 16-23 June 2012 , Geneva, WCC, 2014, F&O Paper 220, 9-12, 19-25, 37-38, 96-127. 54 The Church: Towards a Common Vision , Geneva, WCC, 2013, F&O Paper 214.