When Christians Come Together

The County Ecumenical Officer on what it means to come together rather than simply to be together

17-Minute Read

What happens when Christians come together, not what they intend, hope for, or promise in the declarations they sign, but what is already taking place in the very act of gathering itself?

I’ve been mulling that question over as I anticipate the third annual ecumenical service of Churches Together in Norfolk and Waveney (NWCT), to be held on 22^nd November 2026 at Chapelfield Methodist Church in the heart of Norwich - a more intimate and ordinary setting from the cathedral where the Declaration of Commitment for Christian Unity was signed two years ago. 

As I think about this year’s ecumenical service, my mind returns to late 2023 where I remember a meeting room, an empty chair placed slightly apart from the others, and senior leaders from seven Christian traditions gathered around the room. I had only recently been appointed County Ecumenical Officer, a Catholic to serve in this non-denominational role, and it was my first encounter with NWCT — the body that had, in effect, brought me into post. The atmosphere was cautious and curious but, nevertheless, welcoming rather than suspicious. Several of the leaders were themselves relatively new in their roles, and nobody seemed entirely certain what might emerge from the conversations ahead. Looking back, however, I am struck by the sense that something had already begun. Christians from different traditions were learning, tentatively and almost imperceptibly, to inhabit a shared space together.

By November 2024, those same traditions had gathered again, this time in Norwich Cathedral on the Feast of Christ the King for Festal Evensong and the signing of a new Declaration of Commitment for Christian Unity. The original ecumenical covenant for Norfolk and Waveney had endured for more than thirty years, and its first signatories had long since moved on. As the congregation sang Be Still, for the Presence of the Lord, the seven leaders of NWCT stepped forward to sign their names. What had begun quietly in a meeting room now found visible expression in public worship. 

In the presence of the Lord Mayor and His Majesty’s Lord-Lieutenant, and before a congregation drawn from across the county, Christians from different traditions renewed their commitment to walk together in Christ. Theological differences remained, of course, but so too did a growing conviction that those differences need not prevent friendship, prayer, witness, and common service in this wonderful part of East Anglia. 

I was privileged to help prepare the service and to offer a prayer alongside bishops, moderators, and the Salvation Army divisional commander, concluding in a Trinitarian doxology. It was a joyful and uplifting occasion, matched only by the warmth and encouragement I experienced at the ecumenical celebration held the following year in St John the Baptist Catholic Cathedral.

Admittedly, I’m often sceptical about the pace of progress when it comes to Christian unity. Nevertheless, three years on from that first meeting in 2023, I’m happy that a strong commitment for Christian unity remains across Norfolk and Waveney. My sense of how far there is still to go, however, sits alongside that recognition without diminishing it.

It is that combination (achievement and incompleteness held honestly together) that has sent me back to a question I explored in an earlier article on the Most Holy Trinity and the call to Christian unity. That reflection asked what the doctrine of the Trinity means for Christian unity? Here, I'm addressing a different question: what is happening when Christians come together across their divisions, and what might that reveal about the life of the Trinity itself?

Thinking about the journey from that first meeting room to the covenant renewal in Norwich Cathedral a year later, there is an interesting and relevant distinction that I can borrow from the ecumenical theologian William Ingel-Gillis. In The Trinity and Ecumenical Church Thought: The Church Event, he argues that the true life of traditions in the Church lies not primarily in being together but in coming together.

This difference is not merely semantic. Being together suggests a completed state; that is, the point at which conversations have ended, agreements have been secured, and visible unity has finally been achieved. Coming together points to something more dynamic. It describes the Church in motion; namely, an ongoing and never fully completed act of drawing nearer across the divisions of history, theology, and ecclesial life. If Ingel-Gillis is right, the Church is never more itself than when it is engaged in the movement towards reconciliation.

This matters because much of what passes for ecumenism today has oriented itself (perhaps without fully intending it) toward being together as its goal - the agreed statement, shared declaration, and structural convergence - that will one day make the divisions of the past a memory. Clearly, these are not unimportant but, I believe, they can become a way of deferring the question of unity rather than living it; namely, treating the present moment of imperfect togetherness as a waiting room for the real event still to come. Coming together, by contrast, is not a stage on the way to something more real. It is the ecclesial reality itself. The Church is most fully what it is called to be in the faithful, repeated act of drawing near across division.

I want to be clear about what I mean by this. I am not putting forward an argument against the hope of fuller visible unity, nor am I suggesting that the movement of coming together is sufficient in itself. Coming together does not replace the goal of communion (sacramental, structural, fully visible) toward which Christian ecumenism has always aspired. What I am insisting is that the movement toward that goal is itself already a participation in what is being sought. Put another way, the journey is not merely instrumental but belongs to the destination - the end we seek.

Vatican II's Unitatis Redintegratio understood this with notable clarity. The decree’s language about ecumenism is clearly dynamic. It says that unity is not simply possessed or awaited as a distant achievement, but sought, received, and entered into more deeply through conversion, encounter, prayer, and renewal. The decree describes a Church already being drawn, by the work of the Holy Spirit, toward the unity Christ wills. This is a draw that is itself the ecumenical movement and not its precondition. In other words, coming together is not the Church preparing to become what it should be. It is the Church partially and provisionally manifesting what, in its deepest nature, it already is.

One of my favourite thinkers, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, offers a way of understanding why this claim is so significant. In The Human Condition, Arendt argues that the distinctively human capacity is not reason or labour but the power to begin - to initiate something genuinely new that was not there before. She argued that because every human birth introduces a unique individual into the world, we possess the innate freedom to break from past constraints and alter the course of history. She calls this natality and contrasts it with mortality. While mortality signifies the finality and finitude of our lives, natality celebrates infinite potential, action, and radical beginnings.

Arendt insists that natality is always pluralistic. For her, new beginnings arise, not in isolation, but between people in the shared space of genuine encounter. What comes into being in the space between distinct persons, each bringing their own history and their own tradition, is never reducible to what any one of them brought individually.

I find this such a hopeful insight. We can see it reflected in Pentecost, itself the decisive moment of ecclesial beginning. A diverse gathering, speaking different languages and formed by different histories, is drawn by the Holy Spirit into a communion that none of its members could have brought about alone. Something genuinely new comes into being in that moment - the Church emerging as a visible reality in the world. Arendt’s account of natality offers a philosophical grammar for something Christianity has (at least in my view) always known. That the most significant new beginnings are not simply products of human effort, they arise where people become open to one another and, in doing so, create space for the Spirit to work.

The renewal of the Norfolk and Waveney covenant in the form of the Declaration of Commitment for Christian Unity illustrates this well. It was not a creation from nothing. The original covenant had served the churches for many years. Nor was its renewal a mere formality. New leaders, some only recently appointed, came together in a configuration that had not previously existed. From that gathering emerged something none of them could have produced alone: a renewed commitment, shaped by the needs of the present and bearing the distinctive marks of those across a number of traditions who made it.

For Hannah Arendt, this capacity to begin again lies at the heart of what it means to be human. She traces the insight back to Augustine’s phrase, initium ut esset, creatus est homo “that there be a beginning, man was created.” Human beings enter a history they neither initiated nor will complete, yet every generation receives both the freedom and the responsibility to begin again within it. Recommencement is therefore not secondary to the first beginning but one of the defining features of human life.

Given this understanding, the ecumenical journey takes on a deeper significance. The Church was not beginning for the first time in that meeting room in November 2023, any more than it began again in Norwich Cathedral on the Feast of Christ the King the following year. Rather, each gathering represented a fresh beginning within the Church’s continuing life - a moment in which Christians from different traditions received anew the opportunity to respond to the Spirit’s invitation to draw closer to one another. Every ecumenical encounter becomes, in that sense, both an inheritance received and a beginning offered.

That understanding also complements something I argued in my earlier article on the Trinity. There I suggested that because God is communion, the Church is called to communion. In other words, I was describing the goal of ecumenism. Here, as I've already stated, the emphasis is different. The Church is not first a completed reality that occasionally engages in ecumenism; rather, ecumenical coming together is itself one of the principal ways in which the Church becomes visible as the communion to which it is called.

For me, the Christian tradition has never understood the Trinity as a static picture of three divine persons simply existing alongside one another. Rather, the life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is one of perfect relationship, love, and communion. The Trinity is not stillness but living fellowship. If the Church’s unity is grounded in that divine life, as Christians have long believed, then unity is not simply a destination waiting at the end of the ecumenical journey. It is also a reality already being experienced whenever Christians gather together in Christ. Such moments are always partial and incomplete but (surely) they are no less real for that.

This is the insight that Ingel-Gillis shares by drawing on the work of John Zizioulas, whose Orthodox theology of personhood and communion has appeared in my reflections before. For Zizioulas, personhood is fundamentally relational. To be a person, in the fullest theological sense, is to exist in communion with God and with one another, rather than in isolation. The Church is the primary historical expression of this reality; in other words, the place where human beings, gathered by the Spirit, begin to participate in the communion that has its source in the life of the Triune God. Communion is a reality that is gradually learned, embodied, and made visible along the way.

Seen in this light, NWCT’s Declaration of Commitment for Christian Unity takes on a deeper significance. It is easy to read this document simply as an institutional statement or expression of goodwill but, I believe, it would be wrong to do so.  It is better understood as a sign of a deeper ecclesial reality. Signed in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the declaration places each tradition’s commitment to one another within the life of the Triune God itself. Even its threefold title (Together in Christ, Bound by Love, Serving as One) reinforces this. I do not suggest that it was consciously designed as a statement of Trinitarian theology, but it nevertheless resonates with a distinctly Trinitarian pattern; that is,  Christ gathers, the Spirit binds, and the Church’s common service is ultimately directed towards the Father. 

More important still, the declaration’s commitments are not statements of achievement or descriptions of a task completed. They are promises, intentions, and orientations towards a future that remains unfinished. In this sense, they also reinforce the point that Christian unity is not simply an end point waiting to be reached, but a direction of travel in a continuing movement of faithfulness and discipleship that is sustained by the Spirit and lived out within history.

If coming together is more than a human achievement but, in some sense, a participation in the life of the Trinity itself, then what we bring to ecumenical encounter matters in a way that goes deeper than either strategy or goodwill. This is where two of my other recent ecumenical reflections are helpful in pointing towards the steps we can take to further our collective participation in the Trinity.

In Alien and at Home, I reflected on the experience of entering a Pentecostal service for the first time and argued, drawing on the French thinker Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that the discomfort of inhabiting an unfamiliar grammar of prayer is not a failure of openness but a sign that something real is being encountered.

In The Face of the Other, drawing on the Jewish thinker Emmanuel Levinas, I explored the experience of holiness received through the face of another denomination’s church leader, and suggested that the face of the Other makes a claim upon us before dialogue has even begun.

Taken together, these point towards three related disciplines to progress the desire for unity. The first is the philosopher Iris Murdoch’s discipline of unselfing: the willingness to loosen the grip of our own assumptions. The second is the discipline of attention to the face of the Other; namely, learning to receive the person before judging the position. My reflection here adds the third; that is, the discipline of new beginnings, or borrowing Arendt's language, natality, which is the willingness to remain open to the possibility that the Trinity may bring into being something that none of us could have planned alone.

As the third NWCT annual ecumenical service approaches, I keep returning to that first meeting room: the separate chair, cautious atmosphere, and uncertainty on every side about what might be possible. Looking back, that tentative beginning was precisely what it seemed to be: something had begun that none of those present could yet discern clearly enough to plan. The Declaration of Commitment for Christian Unity followed, then the cathedral ecumenical services, and then the annual rhythm of gathering. Within that rhythm, new beginnings continue to emerge, prepared by the same Spirit, who was present in the meeting room (as surely as in the cathedral) and who remains present still.

What happens when Christians come together, of course, is never entirely in their own hands but, even so, that is not a reason for passivity or timidity. Rather, at least for me, it is a reason to keep showing up with the humility to loosen the grip of my own assumptions, the attentiveness to receive the other before judging them, and the openness to believe that the Trinity may yet bring into being something none of us could have planned alone. 

The Trinity, in whose name every ecumenical covenant is signed, is not merely the destination towards which Christians travel, it is already active in the journey itself.  The Spirit of God draws Christians towards one another through countless acts of prayer, conversation, friendship, patience, and renewed commitment. Long before unity is complete, and long before every division is healed, something real is taking place.
 
References

• Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Augustine of Hippo (1998) The City of God Against the Pagans. Translated by R.W. Dyson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Greggs, T. (2009) Review of Ingel-Gillis, The Trinity and Ecumenical Church Thought. Journal of Reformed Theology, 3, pp.355-357.
• Ingel-Gillis, W.C. (2007) The Trinity and Ecumenical Church Thought: The Church Event. Aldershot: Ashgate.
• John Paul II (1995) Ut Unum Sint: On Commitment to Ecumenism. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
• Levinas, E. (1969) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
• Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002) Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by C. Smith. London: Routledge. (Original work published 1945).
• Murdoch, I. (1970) The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Second Vatican Council (1964) Unitatis Redintegratio: Decree on Ecumenism. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
• Zizioulas, J.D. (1985) Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. London: Darton, Longman and Todd.

 

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Concept and article by Dr. Ian Watson, whose lay views are his alone. He serves as County Ecumenical Officer with responsibilities to promote, support, and provide guidance on Christian Unity throughout Norfolk and Waveney. The purpose of Ian's regular reflections is to build on the standard arguments for Church unity in order to generate fresh intellectual and pastoral energy by offering conceptual frameworks that re-describe unity in ways that feel both rigorous and surprising.
 
Image created with the help of OpenAI.
 

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