Walking an ecumenical path

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This article was published 17/10/2020 (2059 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When Brita Chell walks to church Sunday morning, she’s also retracing the steps of an ecumenical journey begun five decades ago.

“I was a youngster when we walked over and joined up with St. Bede,” she says of the Oct. 18, 1970 walk from the building at 2140 Ness Ave., then owned by St. Stephen’s Lutheran Church.

The entire Lutheran congregation walked the 300 metres to St. Bede’s Anglican Church at 99 Turner Ave. as its first step in a 50-year ecumenical journey between Lutherans and Anglicans in Winnipeg.

That walk will be commemorated on Sunday, Oct. 18, starting at 10:30 a.m. from the parking lot of the former Lutheran church building, now owned by the Silver Heights Seventh Day Adventist Church. Led by Bishop Jason Zinko, the Lutherans will head over to The Church of St. Stephen and St. Bede in groups of 10 for the 11:15 a.m. worship service.

Depending on the level of restrictions due to COVID-19, the congregation of about 50 will worship in person as well as livestreaming their service.

“We had very visionary pastors,” says Chell, who sat on the Joint Anglican Lutheran Commission for nine years.

“Win Motts and Michael Peers had this vision by joining together, you can have a stronger witness in the neighbourhood.”

Motts, the Lutheran pastor and Peers, the Anglican priest — later to become Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada from 1986 to 2004 — brought their congregations together under one roof.

Initially they co-occupied the A-frame brick building constructed by Anglicans in 1964, staggering their Sunday morning worship and sharing the attached hall, renamed the Mount Royal Christian Centre, recalls Chell, now 57, and undertaking joint programs.

More than two decades into the arrangement, the two congregations moved into occasional joint worship services, and then developed a combined liturgy to become one congregation in 2004.

“We had one worship service and we had one liturgy with elements of both,” says Chell, who wrote a history of the ecumenical journey for the church’s website.

“We finally became one in all aspects of our Christian life.”

The sanctuary still bears some hints of their separate histories, with the original banners from St. Stephen’s Lutheran and St. Bede’s Anglican still hanging near the front. A glass cabinet at the rear contains silver communion ware originally from the Lutheran church, and stacks of hymnals from each denomination testify to their shared worship style.

“The question of identity, of whether they are Anglican or Lutheran, is not as strong here as the sense they are part of one Christian congregation,” says Rev. Murray Still, an Anglican priest hired in 2014, who also serves at St. James the Assiniboine Anglican Church.

Their walk toward ecumenism started well before the Anglican Church of Canada and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada moved to a full communion agreement under the Waterloo Declaration, signed in 2001.

Full communion means sharing the Eucharist, worship liturgies, and leadership, with a leader ordained in one tradition able to work in the other.

The Church of St. Stephen and St. Bede was the first joint Lutheran-Anglican church in Manitoba, and it remains only one of four churches in full communion in the province, says Chell, who spearheaded the Waterloo Ministries Directory, which lists the extent of co-operation between the two groups.

She believes that the global coronavirus pandemic will result in more collaboration between denominations, as congregations regroup after months, or even years of shutdown or limited programming because of restrictions meant to prevent the transmission of COVID-19.

“Congregations everywhere are shrinking in and this is the way to keep the light shining brightly and still accomplish the mission of doing God’s work,” she says of working together across the denominational divide.

A congregation like St. Stephen and St. Bede also sets an example for a shared vision of mission and ministry, says Bishop Geoffrey Woodcroft of the Diocese of Rupert’s Land.

“While our respective polity books may vary from one another, it is our full communion that allows us to discern more fully God’s call for disciples in the Body of Christ to reach into neighbourhoods with compassion and care,” he wrote in an email message.

And five decades into the arrangement, the congregation acts as a living laboratory for how Christians can work together, explains intern minister Andrea Grozli, who is studying for the ministry at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon.

“I couldn’t have asked for a better congregation to learn about the Anglican piece,” says the former nurse, who is open to a placement in either denomination.

“I now have that experience of walking into an Anglican church and knowing what morning prayer is and to know how to lead it is a gift.”

brenda@suderman.com

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