What was to be done about it? The 1947 report Catholicity, of which Ramsey was the principal author, argued that all the churches would need to go beyond their own understandings of ecclesiology, bent out of shape as they were by the schisms that had brought the separate churches into being. Few in Britain really felt the tragedy of the schism between east and west in which ‘the seamless robe of Christ received its greatest rent’ the schism had been ‘the parent tragedy of many later tragedies of Christian division.’ All the churches of the West thus inherited a ‘maimed Christendom’ without true wholeness. Why their unity is important (1946) tells us much about his vision of the whole ecumenical cause. Michael Ramsey’s The Church of England and the Eastern Orthodox Church. The sticking point was the nature of the ordained ministry, but to put this into context, our story begins a few years earlier, and with the broader issue of intercommunion. ‘That we Anglicans having already said that the principles of the union are sound, should now say “no” would seem to me to make our Church of England no longer credible.’ For the first time, leadership amongst the churches had, in a highly significant way, passed from the established church. Reflecting on the rejection of the scheme by the Church Assembly in July 1969, Ramsey thought it ‘an event in history of an almost incredible kind’ that one of the Free Churches should have agreed to enter into union on the basis of the historic episcopate. The salient fact for Michael Ramsey was that, more than 30 years after the Church of England had invited the Methodist Church to enter into negotiations, it had been the Church of England that walked away from the table. Visible disunity among the churches placed constraints on co-operation at local level, leading to ‘frustration, impatience and the gradual cessation of effort.’ There was reason too to suppose that the decline in numbers in the churches and in new vocations to ordained ministry was also consequent on the same ‘pattern of incompetence which present in which disunity is a main feature.’ The achievement of unity had taken on immense national and international significance, and the authors of the Scheme were in no doubt as to why. It may be that the most important ecumenical event in twentieth century Britain was the failure of the scheme for reunion between the Church of England and the Methodist Church in 1972. To provide some historical context, what follows is an adapted extract from my 2015 book on Michael Ramsey, in whose time as Archbishop of Canterbury the events of 1969/72 occurred. In both cases, there is a strong sense of the urgency of closer union between the two churches in both cases, the Methodist church, although in a sense relatively indifferent about episcopacy in general, has expressed an historic willingness to take episcopacy into its system (at some cost) in both cases, the Church of England has to decide whether it can live with a short-term compromise in order to accept existing Methodist ministers in both cases the CofE, if it were to reject the scheme, will be repudiating positions which it had already accepted, and told the Methodists that it had accepted. Reading the report, and reactions to it from Anglican Catholic Future and from Richard Peers, I had a very strong sense of deja vu, since the parallels with the failure of the reunion scheme of 1969/1972 are striking. This week the General Synod debates a report on Mission and Ministry in Covenant, on relations with the Methodist Church in England.
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