Ecumenical News in the URC

This is a digest of some of the latest news on the ecumenical scene within the URC. We would love to hear stories from around the denomination to include here.

The March 2012 issue of Reform carries the story of the Westminster Abbey service but also of the signing of the Cumbria statement that commits the Church of England, Methodist Church and URC to work for ever closer cooperation in what it is hoped can become an Ecumenical County. The ecumenical canons of the Church of England apply to local ecuemnical partnerships but the hope is that they can be made to work in a county. Bishop James Newcome, the Bishop of Carlisle and one of the signatories was once the Anglican minister of Bar Hill Ecumenical Church, just outside Cambridge, which was one of the early high profile local ecumenical partnerships.

On October 13th in Aberystwyth there will be a gathering of the churches of the Welsh Commision of Covenanted Churches. This gathering will mark a major step in the journey that the churches have committed themselves to in establishing a uniting church in Wales. It will be addressed by Revd Olav Tveit, the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches.

The bilateral dialogue group that has been meeting for the last five years between the URC and the Roman Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales has finished the first phase of its work and has produced a report that is in the process of being finalised before being made widely available. The next five year phase of conversations has been agreed by the Mission Committee and the intention is that I will develop as one of its priorities, the offering of resources to local level dialogue.