By Stephen Brown
Harare, 7 December (ENI)--The World Council of Churches (WCC) assembly - which is meeting in Harare - has been warned by a representative of the Russian Orthodox Church that unless there are radical reforms of the WCC, more Orthodox churches will quit the organisation.

Dr Hilarion Alfeyev, leader of the Russian Orthodox delegation to the WCC assembly, told delegates during a debate yesterday 6 December about the future direction of the WCC, that "two Orthodox churches have already left the WCC [and] some other Orthodox churches have decided to send reduced delegations to Harare".

"If the structure of the WCC is not radically changed, other Orthodox churches will also leave the WCC," Dr Alfeyev said. He denied that his remarks were "a threat or blackmail", but rather "an outcry of pain" and stressed that the Russian Orthodox Church - which is the WCC's biggest member church - did not want to leave the WCC but preferred to "continue our journey together".

"We want the WCC to be radically reformed so it becomes a true home for Orthodox in the 21st century," Dr Alfayev said, during a debate on a document entitled "Towards a Common Understanding and Vision of the WCC (CUV)".

The CUV document is intended to focus and give direction to the work of the WCC in the years ahead. It has also provided the basis for a major restructuring at the WCC's headquarters in Geneva. However, many Orthodox church representatives have said they would like to see more thoroughgoing reforms, to transform the WCC so that it becomes representative of the main church "families" rather than of individual churches as it is at present.

Last year the Georgian Orthodox Church announced its withdrawal from the WCC, blaming the WCC's "failure to take interests of Orthodox churches fully into account". Since then the Bulgarian Orthodox Church has also announced that it will leave the WCC, although the WCC has yet to receive official notification. There has also been strong pressure within a number of other Orthodox churches, including the Serbian and the Russian churches, to quit the WCC, most of whose 339 member churches come from Anglican and Protestant traditions.

The issue of Orthodox participation in the WCC has emerged as a major issue in the WCC's assembly, which opened in Zimbabwe's capital on 3 December. In a written message sent to the assembly, Bartholomeos I, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, who holds the position of "first among equals" among Orthodox leaders, warned that since the WCC's last assembly, held in 1991 in Canberra, "a series of liberal, theological and moral positions [had been] adopted and brought into the life of the council by a variety of member churches, mainly of the Northern hemisphere".

In his speech, Dr Alfeyev, who is an official of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, warned that Orthodox churches and churches of Protestant tradition were "developing in the opposite direction".

Orthodox churches were maintaining "traditional Christian values", he said, whereas many Protestant churches were "adopting Western liberal values and throwing out traditional Christian values, one after the other".

Dr Alafeyev's speech to the eighth assembly was the first by a representative of the Russian Orthodox Church. Discontent with WCC policies has been growing in the Russian church in recent years, particularly in past months. The Russian church drastically cut the size of its assembly delegation which, unusually, includes no senior church leaders.

"The Orthodox cannot affect the agenda of the WCC because they are a minority," Dr Alfeyev said. "What about the veneration of the Virgin Mary, the veneration of icons and the veneration of the saints? These [Orthodox practices] cannot be discussed because they are divisive. But what about inclusive language and the ordination of women?" he said, referring to subjects that are frequently mentioned by liberal Protestants. "Are these not divisive?"

Among other Orthodox speakers during the debate, Leonid Kishkovsky, of the Orthodox Church in America (which is linked to the Russian Orthodox Church), said that the WCC had been formed primarily to deal with questions linked to the 16th-century Protestant Reformation.

"The churches of the East were not and are not part of this story. The Reformation is not our story," Kishkovsky said. "Its theological debates and presuppositions are not our theological debates and presuppositions."

But the assembly gathering was also electrified by a staunch defence of ecumenism by Rose Hudson-Wilkin, a priest of the Church of England, who said that the debate was "really about power" being "wrapped up in theological and ecclesiological language".

Referring to Kishkovsky's remarks, she said that at the Decade Festival of the Ecumenical Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women, which preceded the assembly, "we said just the opposite: Your story is my story.

"If we're going to listen to each other, we cannot do it from a distance. That means walking side by side with me, even if you are uncomfortable." [841 words]

Photographs of the assembly are available from Photo Oikoumene

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WCC Assembly Web Site

Photo Oikoumene

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