The ecumenical movement
From the Edinburgh missionary conference of 1910 to the World Council of Churches in 1948 and the Catholic-Lutheran agreement of 1999, divided churches seek to work and pray together.
- About the WCC — World Council of Churches, World Council of Churches
- The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries — Brian Stanley, Apollos (1990)
- A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years — Diarmaid MacCulloch, Allen Lane (2009)
Missionaries meeting at Edinburgh in 1910 lamented that their divisions confused new Christians abroad. Their movement led, in 1948 in Amsterdam, to the founding of the World Council of Churches, which today unites several hundred Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox churches. Some churches merged, as in the Church of South India (1947) and the United Church of Canada (1925). Evangelicals formed their own global network, marked by the Lausanne Congress of 1974. And in 1999 Lutherans and Catholics signed a joint declaration agreeing on the core of Luther’s teaching on justification.
- About the WCC — World Council of Churches, World Council of Churches
- A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years — Diarmaid MacCulloch, Allen Lane (2009)
Why it matters today
Many Protestants now worship, study and serve alongside Christians of other churches as a matter of course, and some once-rival denominations have merged. But unity remains elusive, and many evangelicals and Pentecostals are wary of institutional ecumenism, preferring their own networks.