A patriarch proposed a League of Churches alongside the League of Nations
In 1920, just as world governments formed the League of Nations, Patriarch Germanus V of Constantinople wrote an open letter to every Christian church, wherever it might be. He urged separated believers to cooperate and proposed a League of Churches. The idea fed a movement that now gathers hundreds of denominations.
Ecumenism is the effort to bring Christians of different traditions closer together. Its name comes from the Greek oikoumene, the whole inhabited world, a word once used for the Roman Empire. The oldest sense survives in the seven ecumenical councils, gatherings of bishops from across the empire, backed by the emperor, that both Catholics and Eastern Orthodox accept. The modern sense is about cooperation between churches that have split apart, as distinct from interfaith dialogue with other religions such as Hinduism or Shinto.
Christianity has never been a single uniform body, not even in the first century, and divisions have come through schisms, some healed and many hardened into today's denominations. The oldest lasting split dates to fifth-century arguments over the nature of Christ, sharpened by differences of language, philosophy, culture and politics. Counting denominations is surprisingly slippery. The Catholic Church, one communion of 24 self-governing churches, can be tallied separately in every country, while a lone megachurch may count as a denomination of its own, and the Shakers survive as a distinct denomination with only two full members.
Leaders of mainstream churches resolved in 1937 to form the World Council of Churches, which now lists 348 member churches with more than half a billion members. Together with the Catholic Church's 1.25 billion people, that means about 349 bodies cover nearly 80 percent of all Christians. Supporters point to Jesus's prayer in John's Gospel that his followers may all be one, and treat shared Trinitarian baptism as the foundation. The writer A. W. Tozer put it this way: unity in Christ is not something to be achieved but something to be recognised.
In practice, much ecumenism is local and modest. Congregations run soup kitchens together, share Bible studies, hold joint Stations of the Cross in Lent and mark the annual Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Some religious communities, the Taizé Community among them, bring believers of several denominations to live and pray under one rule. The long-term hope is full communion, including sharing the Eucharist, though churches disagree about what that unity should look like.
Source: Ecumenism
