Ecumenical Movement. The ecumenical movement is the formal endeavor by Christians to achieve unity in the face of denominational differences. A worldwide phenomenon, it has particularly flourished in the United States, where the wide diversity of competing denominations eventually impelled leaders to promote cooperation and even merger between previously separated church bodies.
Until the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) freed American Catholics for ecumenical activity, most of the movement in the United States was Protestant. An Evangelical Alliance, formed in London in 1846, attracted many Americans, who organized their own version of it in 1867. It promoted allied activities by “evangelicals,” which then meant the mainstream of Protestant churches. The alliance remained largely an effort of clergy leaders and did not grasp the imagination of most lay people.
The International Missionary Conference at Edinburgh, Scotland, presided over by the young American Methodist John R. Mott in 1910, is usually seen as the beginning of modern ecumenism. However, already in 1908 mainstream American Protestants had organized a Federal Council of Churches. Its successor, the
National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., founded in 1950, originally included twenty‐five Protestant and four Orthodox churches. Expanding thereafter, it became a major voice of cooperative moderate‐to‐liberal non–Roman Catholic Christianity.
Meanwhile, state and local councils and federations of churches also engaged in common activities, often including theological discussion. Various denominations, as part of the movement, moved to end longstanding divisions. The twentieth century brought mergers of separate Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, and other bodies. Most notable was a merger of the Congregational Christian and Evangelical and Reformed churches into the United Church of Christ in 1957.
Despite setbacks in formal organization, the ecumenical movement changed the spirit of American mainstream Protestantism. Meanwhile, the more conservative Protestants, through the National Association of Evangelicals after 1942, also expressed an ecumenical spirit, as did Catholics after 1965. By the end of the twentieth century the ecumenical spirit was undimmed, even as leaders looked for new forms by which the movement might express itself.
See also
Lutheranism;
Methodism;
Protestantism;
Religion;
Roman Catholicism.Bibliography
Ruth Rouse et al., eds., A History of the Ecumenical Movement, 2 vols., 1967, 1970.
Russell Richey, ed., Denominationalism, 1977.
Martin E. Marty
