With great sadness, The United Church of Canada announces the death of The Very Rev., The Honourable Dr. Lois M. Wilson, the denomination’s 28th Moderator, and the first woman to fill the role. She faithfully served as Moderator from 1980 to 1982. Rev. Wilson died in hospital in Fredericton, NB, on Sept. 13, 2024. She was 97 years old.

Her faith drove her actions, and she remained involved in the work of the Church right to the end.
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His All-Holiness the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew has noted that the Easter celebrations in 2025 “will not merely be a fortuitous occurrence, but rather the beginning of a unified date for its observance by both Eastern and Western Christianity.”

The Ecumenical Patriarch said that this aspiration is particularly significant in light of the upcoming 1700th anniversary in 2025, marking the convening of the First Ecumenical Synod in Nicaea.
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A group of Catholics and evangelicals has released a one-page document that identifies areas of common ground among the two largest Christian groups in the world.

“The Gift of Being Christian Together: An Ecumenical Statement of Fidelity and Recognition” is “the fruit of a new ecumenical dialogue,” according to a news release from Glenmary Home Missioners in Cincinnati on the document.

“At the most basic level, Catholics and evangelicals share a love of Jesus Christ,” said Alexei Laushkin, founder of Kingdom Mission Society, an evangelical organization that helped spearhead the effort.
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Unleashing congregants’ talents and leadership abilities, embracing open-minded listening and fostering synodality at the parish and diocesan levels were prominent topics of conversation during the Canadian National Online Gathering for Priests video conference Aug. 14.

Approximately “80 to 90 per cent” of the 100 priests invited tuned in for presentations from Frs. Fabio de Souza of Calgary, Pierre Ducharme, OFM., from Richmond, B.C and Quebec’s Daniel Ouellet, all of whom participated in the Vatican’s Parish Priests for the Synod spring meeting.

Attendees were then divided into 21 small groups for discussion. Each grouping featured four priests and one facilitator. All but four of the moderators — two priests and two religious sisters — were lay Catholics.
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The Mennonite-Anglican Dialogue in Canada was created in 2017 with a mandate to build up understanding and to encourage greater partnership between these two distinct Christian communities. A first term of the dialogue was held between 2018 and 2022 under the sponsorship of Mennonite Church Canada and the Anglican Church of Canada. In 2023, the sponsoring bodies agreed to a second phase of the dialogue to commence in 2024.

The first meeting of this second iteration of Mennonite-Anglican Dialogue was held from May 31 to June 2 in Treaty 1 Territory in the city of Winnipeg. It was hosted by Mennonite Church Canada at their offices and on the campus of Canadian Mennonite University.
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The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) has unveiled a new strategic vision conceptualized to enhance and enliven future ecumenical and interfaith initiatives.

Several weeks after the CCCB hosted the Triennial Forum for Dialogues with various partners at St. Augustine’s Seminary in Toronto in late June, the bishops unveiled the four ecumenical trajectories assented to by the assembly participants.

The findings of audits of various ecumenical and interfaith dialogues conducted by the CCCB informed this strategy of priorities. The bishops’ [Episcopal] Commission for Christian Unity, Religious Relations with the Jews and Interfaith Dialogue, chaired by Regina Archbishop Donald Bolen, then developed a proposal from the audit resolutions that anchored the discussions at the forum.
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The Lutheran World Federation (LWF) and the Orthodox Church have issued a joint statement on the addition of the Filioque clause to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, a theological issue that has divided the Eastern and Western Church traditions for almost a thousand years.

The word ‘filioque’ (‘and the Son’ in English) to describe the procession of the Holy Spirit, was added by the Latin Church to the Creed centuries after its composition to counter Arianism but the Eastern Church has always protested this insertion.

In a Common Statement of the Joint International Commission on Theological Dialogue between the LWF and the Orthodox Church, both partners “suggest that the translation of the Greek original (without the Filioque) be used in the hope that this will contribute to the healing of age-old divisions between our communities and enable us to confess together the faith of the Ecumenical Councils of Nicæa (325) and Constantinople (381).”
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A few weeks ago, I attended the Synod Convention of the ELCIC Saskatchewan Synod. The ELCIC is the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, one of the more ecumenically engaged churches in Canada. I have known the ELCIC in Saskatchewan for many years. In fact, when I was the executive director of the Prairie Centre for Ecumenism in the 1990s, the ELCIC was one of our seven sponsoring churches and I worked very closely with the Saskatchewan bishop, clergy, and many lay people.

In some ways, attending the Synod Convention was a homecoming. There were many people there that I have known for 20 or 30 years. Although the Synod Convention is a governing council of the ELCIC with a long business agenda, the convention is also a time of gathering for this church spread across Saskatchewan. People come to see friends and remember past ministries. There were many prayer and social times to build up the community. As an invited observer from the Catholic Church, I was welcomed with hugs and I shared numerous conversations over the weekend about ministry together, past and present.

In this post, I want to introduce you to the ELCIC to help you see why this small church is of great importance to our ecumenical relations in Canada.
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The reason why the 2024 edition of the Vatican yearbook has re-inserted “Patriarch of the West” as one of the historical titles of the pope appears to be a response to concerns expressed by Orthodox leaders and theologians.

For months after the yearbook, the Annuario Pontificio, was released, the Vatican press office said it had no explanation for the reappearance of the title, which Pope Benedict XVI had dropped in 2006.

But new documents from the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity place the change squarely in the middle of a broad discussion among all mainline Christian churches on the papacy and the potential role of the bishop of Rome in a more united Christian community.

Members of the dicastery proposed that “a clearer distinction be made between the different responsibilities of the Pope, especially between his ministry as head of the Catholic Church and his ministry of unity among all Christians, or more specifically between his patriarchal ministry in the Latin Church and his primatial ministry in the communion of Churches.”
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