By Jerry Van Marter
Harare, 5 December (ENI)--Dr Konrad Raiser, general secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC) yesterday, 4 December, has challenged the organisation's eighth assembly to consider the establishment of a "Forum of Christian Churches and Ecumenical Organisations".

The proposed forum could potentially include a large number of churches and organisations that are not members of the WCC, including the Roman Catholic Church and Pentecostal churches.

In his formal report to the assembly, Dr Raiser said the proposal for the forum recognised "the particular responsibility of the WCC to strengthen the one ecumenical movement".

Dr Raiser, a German Protestant theologian and expert on ecumenism, has floated the forum proposal several times over the past two years, but now the idea is taking official form. The assembly, which is held every seven years and is the WCC's highest decision-making body, will be asked first to approve a proposed constitutional amendment expanding the WCC's purposes and functions to ecumenical relationships beyond council member churches and then to consider the proposal for creation of the forum.

The establishment of the forum would be the most recent in a series of steps the WCC has taken in recent years to respond to rapid changes in inter-church and inter-faith relations.

These changes in the ecumenical world, Dr Raiser said, "oblige us to return to the question whether membership as an institutional arrangement ... is in fact the only - or even the most appropriate - form of expressing participation in the ecumenical movement".

Insisting that the WCC would be just one partner among equals in such a forum, Dr Raiser said: "Its purpose would be to create the space where a genuine exchange about the challenges facing the ecumenical movement can take place, and where forms of cooperation can be worked out."

He referred repeatedly in his address to "opening up ecumenical space." Citing "Living in Spaces with Open Doors" - a report from a 1995 consultation, he said the WCC must explore models "which enable people to live in open spaces, accept diversity, broaden horizons and keep hope alive".

Quoting US Presbyterian theologian Lewis Mudge, Dr Raiser said: "The churches exist to hold open a social space in which society's existing structures can be seen for what they are, and in which human community can be articulated in a new way..."

Such opportunities were crucial today, Dr Raiser said, as "globalisation" - which he described as "the dramatically increased interdependence of all parts of the world, particularly in the fields of economy, finance and communication" - created greater opportunities, but also greater disparities of wealth throughout the world.

A primary example of such pressures was the host country of Zimbabwe where, Dr Raiser said, the average annual income was just over US$600 a year, but annual national debt payments to overseas creditors totalled more than US$600 million. Unemployment was 50 per cent, and more than 700 people died in Zimbabwe each week as a result of Aids.

The challenge for churches and the ecumenical movement to respond to such human tragedy, placed them at "a crossroads", Dr Raiser said. "We cannot", he concluded, "after celebrating this jubilee and affirming again that we intend to stay together, simply return home and continue with ecumenical business as usual." [591 words]

Photographs of the assembly are available from Photo Oikoumene

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