Recently, I came across a most interesting ecumenical prayer composed early in the ecumenical movement by the Federal Council of Churches, U.S.A. It is entitled: “Prayer of Thanksgiving for the Gifts of the Various Christian Churches.” The full text of this prayer is provided here and can be found in the
New St. Joseph People's Prayer Book. I have not seen other ecumenical prayers expressing the same level of enthusiasm for the diversity within Christianity. It makes me wonder how Christian ecumenism has developed from that time until now.
Let us give thanks for the gifts and graces of each great division of Christendom:
For the Roman Catholic Church: its glorious traditions, its disciplines in holiness, its worship, rich with the religious passion of the centuries; its noble company of martyrs, doctors, and saints;
We thank you, O Lord, and bless your holy name. For the Eastern Orthodox Church: its secret treasure of mystic experience; its marvelous liturgy; its regard for the collective life and its common will as a source of authority;
We thank you, O Lord, and bless your holy name. For the great Protestant communions; We thank you, O Lord, and bless your holy name. For the Congregationalist jealousy for the rightful independence of the soul and of the group;
We thank you, O Lord, and bless your holy name. For the stress in the Baptist Churches upon personal regeneration and upon the conscious relation of the mature soul to its Lord;
We thank you, O Lord, and bless your holy name. For the power of the Methodists to awaken the conscience of Christians to our social evils; and for their emphasis upon the witness of personal experience, and upon the power of the disciplined life;
We thank you, O Lord, and bless your holy name. For the Presbyterian reverence for the sovereignty of God and their confidence in his faithfulness to his covenant; for their sense of the moral law, expressing itself in constitutional government;
We thank you, O Lord, and bless your holy name. For the witness to the perpetual real presence of the inner light in every human soul borne by the Religious Society of Friends and for their faithful continuance of a free prophetic ministry;
We thank you, O Lord, and bless your holy name. For the Lutheran Church: its devotion to the grace of God and the word of God, enshrined in the ministry of the word and sacraments;
We thank you, O Lord, and bless your holy name. For the Anglican Church: its reverent and temperate ways, through its Catholic heritage and its Protestant conscience; its yearning concern over the divisions of Christendom, and its longing to be used as a house of reconciliation.
We thank you, O Lord, and bless your holy name. Amen.
I came across the following ecumenical pryer for the local church in David du Plessis' book The Spirit Bade Me Go (pgs. 177-178). The prayer was originally published by the World Council of Churches and drafted by the Commission on Faith and Order for the week of prayer for Christian unity in 1960. The theme for the prayer is the unity of the local congregation in the unity of the universal Church based on 1 Corinthians 12:27-28. This prayer is very unique. I found it quite interesting.
