The multidenominational Christian Churches Together in the USA has just about got it together—enough at least for a small celebration. From Catholic and Orthodox bishops to Protestant and Pentecostal clergy, representatives of 36 church bodies meeting in California lit candles and one by one signed a document indicating their commitment to advance a common Christian witness.
The February 7 ceremony before 250 worshipers took place at Pasadena Presbyterian Church, a site that symbolized an earlier era of ecumenism. That congregation’s pastor in the early 1950s was Eugene Carson Blake, who later became a top executive of the “northern” branch of Presbyterians and then of the World Council of Churches. A Blake sermon in 1960 calling for a merger of Protestant churches marked a high-spirited moment in the ecumenical movement in the U.S., though the merger he envisioned never took place.