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VOLUME ELEVEN |
NUMBER TWO | SUMMER 2003 |
What is the significance of interchurch families, in which Christians of different traditions and communities (often a Roman Catholic and a Christian of another communion) try to live out their lives as couples and families within both their churches? It is simply, as Pope John Paul II said to them, that they ‘live in their marriages the hopes and difficulties of the path to Christian unity’.
They are dealing with all the big issues that face the churches as they grow
together towards that unity which Christ willed, but they are doing so on the
scale of a single human family, one domestic church. Because they are small-scale
communities, it is often easier for them to put into practice agreements and
initiatives that the churches are still talking about. The spouses do this as
equals in marriage, putting into practice as best they can the ‘par cum
pari’ of the Vatican II Decree on Ecumenism (9).
Much of this issue deals with Christian initiation in interchurch families.
It includes a preparatory paper for the annual conference of the British Association
of Interchurch Families, which is to focus on this theme (see pp.8-12).
For a long time there have been remarkable instances of shared celebrations of infant baptism in interchurch families, documented by the Association of Interchurch Families. May we not hope that the churches will increasingly share together in the celebration of the one baptism?
This number breaks new ground in showing how a few interchurch families are beginning to cope with a situation in which the traditions of infant baptism and believers’ baptism co-exist within a single family. Are not interchurch families, as Bishop Crispian Hollis says, ‘at the cutting edge of the ecumenical enterprise’? (p.13) If families can begin to find a way forward together, does it not allow us to hope that the churches will be able to hold both traditions together as well?
Vol 11 No2 2003 P 1
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