During the Sixth World Conference on Faith and Order, themed "Where now for visible unity", Rev. Dr. Susan Durber, a minister in the United Reformed Church in the United Kingdom and the current WCC president from Europe, shared with China Christian Daily her experiences in ecumenical work, insights from the conference, the challenges facing European churches, and her perspectives on unity.
China Christian Daily: As the conference is underway, what have been your main takeaways from this gathering?
Susan Durber: I went to the Fifth World Conference, which took place 32 years ago in Spain, and what struck me so much is the difference between then and now. In this conference, there are more people from Africa, not so many from Latin America, but lots of people from Asia, North America, and Europe. It's striking to see how Christianity has shifted in power and in numerical support from the global North to the global South.
The things we are discussing have also changed. We're still talking about what we have discussed for nearly a century, like how to bring old churches together and heal divisions, but now we're also addressing issues like decolonialism and how to remake the world after the many shifts in geopolitics. We're talking about those who are hungry, those who are in war, and how the church can be a witness to bring healing and hope to people in need.
I've heard extraordinary things that invite us to hope in places where I thought hope was gone. It's been amazing to hear from Christians in the Middle East—to see people with confident, lively faith serving their communities where wars are happening and where life is so fragile. It is hugely encouraging.
China Christian Daily: You served as a previous moderator of the WCC Faith and Order commission from 2014 to 2020. What did you do during that time?
Susan Durber: We had three groups working on different areas. You have to imagine a group of about 60 people, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Reformed, Quaker, Pentecostal, and many other traditions, all working together for eight years on three main things.
One group worked on what it means to be the church, and are there any things that we can do so that, in our understanding of the church, we can work to bring churches together?
Another group focused on what we called "moral discernment." We realized that many of the divisions in churches today are not caused by old theological debates but rather by ethical issues and questions about how we behave. A major one is sexuality. We wanted to find ways to respond to such divisions, both between and within churches. But it was too painful and difficult to address sexuality directly. So we decided to ask instead: How do churches come to a new mind on ethical matters? We studied various case examples, for example, moving from refusing to bury those who took their own lives to offering them proper funerals, or from supporting apartheid to rejecting it as contrary to God's will. Through such studies, we explored how Christians make different moves around particular ethical issues.
The third group asked, instead of focusing on divisions, what we could say together about pressing global issues. They identified ecological change, climate change, and ecological justice as the most urgent. What can we say theologically together about them? We wrote a small booklet called Cultivate Care, which brought together insights from all our traditions.
Each study group had about twenty people. We worked separately and then got together in a large gathering to share and reflect on our findings. One of our big gatherings was held in Nanjing, China, where we visited the seminary and the Amity Foundation, received copies of Bibles printed there, and experienced the life of the church in China. That was a great gift.
China Christian Daily: How has your understanding of Unity evolved over the decades since you first became involved in the ecumenical movement in 1993?
Susan Durber: Yes, I started very young, going to Santiago de Compostela for the last Faith and Order World Conference. I remember that when I first arrived, I didn't quite know what to make of it—people were arguing about things, and my first instinct was to defend what I had come with, to make sure my voice, and the voices like mine, were heard. I wanted to push the process and the decisions in the direction that seemed right to me.
But over the years, I have been humbled and have come to recognize that it's much more important to listen and to learn from others.
There was a time when I was not at all interested in the early church. I thought that was just history. But through my Orthodox friends, I learned that the early church is a living community of saints; they are not dead or merely historical figures. Their teachings and wisdom can become part of my life too.
So now I feel a greater sense of unity not only with the church across the world today but also with the church throughout time. I no longer see unity as everyone becoming like me, nor me becoming like one part of them, but us walking beside one another on a pilgrimage together towards the church that God is creating.
China Christian Daily: Could you please show a few personal moments from your ecumenical journey that have particularly shaped your faith or your leadership?
Susan Durber: I remember in my early days at Faith and Order, there was a bishop with whom I disagreed quite a lot. He disagreed with me, too, and there was real tension between us. He came from a very different part of the church than I did. He was a strong and forceful character, but I came to see that beneath that, he was a very faithful, intelligent, and deeply thoughtful person.
During one of our meetings, we were about to attend a Sunday service together. As we got off the coach to go into a monastery, I said, "I can't go to worship without restoring our fellowship and being at peace." He felt the same way. We shared the peace, and our relationship was much better after that. We began to listen to each other more deeply. He told me that he admired the way I was willing to say publicly that I had changed my mind about some things and that I had learned from other traditions. When the time came to elect a new moderator for Faith and Order, he was one of those who suggested that it should be me—something I never would have predicted from our first encounter. That was a kind of wonderful miracle. We're still in touch, and I treasure that memory.
I can remember in our work a wonderful moment where we finished work on a document called The Church: Towards a Common Vision. It was a text that had been twenty years in the making, with extensive consultation, drafts, and redrafts, sent out to the churches for feedback. Then, in Malaysia, in the basement of a hotel, we finally put the last full stop. We realized this was the final version. We paused for a moment, and then we all sang together Laudate Dominum, a song from the Taizé Community. It was a beautiful and faithful moment that reminded us that we were not merely an academic commission or a group trying to agree on a text, but a fellowship of people seeking the mind of Christ together and working to serve the church.
China Christian Daily: Could you please show about the situation and the challenges of the church in Europe?
Susan Durber: The churches in Europe face several different kinds of challenges. One of them is increasing secularization. In many European countries, surveys show that fewer and fewer people claim to have a religious faith. In Britain, for example, more people now say they have no faith than those who do. Church attendance has declined rapidly in many places, and the pandemic has accelerated this trend. In some ways, this is not entirely negative—it means that those who come to church are not doing so because it is socially expected, but because they genuinely believe and are committed. Still, there remains the challenge of passing on the faith to the next generation and making Christianity appealing, attractive, and resonate with people in Europe today.
There have also been serious challenges in the form of scandals—sexual abuse, financial misconduct, and the like—that have not only led to indifference toward the church in some places but also to active hostility. This is another area where churches must respond: by reforming, putting their house in order, and regaining public trust.
At the same time, there is joy that many people from around the world have moved to Europe who have a Christian faith. In many European cities today, you'll find churches mainly made up of migrants or people whose parents were migrants. The challenge is to promote unity with those churches to make sure they feel welcome in ecumenical gatherings or in the churches that are already there.
Christians in Europe also face all the challenges that people in Europe face: military threats, withdrawal of US support, deindustrialization, inequality, etc. Europe is a place in transition. Not everyone is happy about the amount of migration to Europe, but I hope that many of the churches are encouraged to see diversity in Europe and to welcome people from all over the globe.
China Christian Daily: Could you explain the work of the WCC in Europe?
Susan Durber: There is an organization called the Conference of European Churches, which brings together many churches across Europe (not the Roman Catholic Church) and has its own structures. The WCC works closely with the Conference of European Churches. We prepared for this world conference together. As a WCC president, my role is to represent the WCC to Christians in Europe and to participate anywhere in Europe where I can see Christians coming together seeking unity.
China Christian Daily: Do you have any words for Christians in China?
Susan Durber: I would say, may God bless you richly, and may you find in each other and in your churches the peace and justice of God. I know that in China, you have a very different form of ecumenism from ours, and in a way, you have moved beyond the denominational divisions that have long shaped European church life to discover a new kind of unity. I think you can be a model for us—perhaps you are showing us a kind of future. I know that you live and practice faith in a very different context from Europe, and I pray that you will be given grace to do that faithfully and with courage.
