Wittenberg Witness
A Common Statement of The World Communion of Reformed Churches and The Lutheran World Federation
5 July 2017
Preamble
Today, in the city of Martin Luther and in the church where he used to preach, we gather to respond to the unique opportunities for continuing renewal which the 500th anniversary of the Reformation offers to the Church. On this momentous occasion, the World Communion of Reformed Churches and the Lutheran World Federation, in the presence of representatives of the whole church, make a common witness. This Wittenberg Witness builds upon the steps towards unity taken by our member churches around the world and upon decades of theological dialogues, whose fruits we now claim.
1. Together, we give thanks to God and rejoice in the unity already ours in Christ, which we do not create and cannot destroy, since the Church is the work of the Triune God, the creation of Word and Spirit. The gift of unity does not require uniformity but can be found and celebrated also in diversity. The diversity of our confessional traditions and our churches are a legitimate refl ection of our particular contexts, so that we are united, not divided by such diversity.
2. Together, we celebrate that we are one in Christ, sharing a common Reformation heritage and a common faith. We are united in confessing the gospel of Jesus Christ. We rejoice that there is no longer any need for our separation; our differences are not church dividing. We give thanks for the examples of those Lutheran and Reformed churches that have already declared church communion and now bear common witness together by sharing in worship, witness, and work for the world.
3. Together, we acknowledge, confess and lament that divisions still obscure our unity and hamper our witness. We regret that through our history we have too often formed divisive habits and structures, failing to discern the body of Christ. Injustice and confl ict scar and scandalise our one body. We are implicated in colonialism and exploitation that have marked our history. We are saddened by the ways we have allowed race and ethnicity; class and inequality; patriarchy and gender bias; and arrogance of nation, language and culture to become divisive and oppressive in our churches and in our world.
4. Together, we hear God’s call and acknowledge the claim of Christ upon all areas of our life. Listening for God’s Word to us, we experience a call to continuous reform.
We hear this call when the Word is preached and the sacraments are celebrated.
We hear this call from those of our forebears who were deeply committed to the visible unity of the Church, who regretted schisms and called them sin, who
described the divided church with sadness as a dismembered body.
We hear this call from the many protests born in pain, in the plight of refugees and migrants, in the frustration and humiliation and longings of so many in our
common world, in the voices of young people who express concern for the future of the earth, our common home.
5. Together we long for renewed imagination of what being the church in communion could mean — for our world, in our time.
We need new imagination to live together in ways that would embrace our unity not only as gift but also as calling.
We need new imagination to dream a different world, a world where justice, peace and reconciliation prevail.
We need new imagination to practise spiritualities of resistance and prophetic vision, spiritualities in service of life, spiritualities formed by the mission of God.
6. Together we commit ourselves to respond to this yearning with concrete actions, convinced that God’s Word leads us to deeper communion.
As world communions, Lutherans and Reformed, we commit to explore new forms of life together that will more fully express the communion we already
have in Christ.
We commit ourselves to redouble our common efforts to embody our unity, together resisting the forces of injustice and exclusion.
We call upon our member churches to make our unity more visible in their local contexts. We invite our ecumenical partners to live out our shared
commitment for unity and witness to the world.
7. Together we pray that the Holy Spirit may give us courage and imagination faithfully to live out our commitment to unity, expressed in shared worship, witness, and work in the world. We pray for liberation in the wider world and, by God’s grace, a thoroughgoing renewal and reformation of our churches.
