Delivered at the Anglican Cathedral, Porto Alegre, Brazil

19 February, 2006

I bring you greetings on behalf of the world-wide Anglican Communion to this celebration in the middle of the World Council of Churches Assembly meeting here in Brazil. My own church is the Church of Ireland. A very small church on the a small island located in western Europe. Only 5 million people live in Ireland and for all of our history the sea has played an important part in our everyday life.

Christianity came to Ireland in the fifth century and since then we have had a long tradition of saints and scholars travelling overseas to many other parts of the world spreading Christianity and the Gospel in many corners of the world. Because of that many of our paintings and stained glass windows in our churches depict these early missionaries leaving our shores, and because we are an island very often they are portrayed as travelling in a boat. These ancient pictures often depict a very small boat with a huge figure or group of figures looking out of proportion and far too big for the boat. So boats play an important part in the history of Christianity in my own country.

You find references to boats very frequently in the Bible also but obviously the story of Noah's Ark, a boat providing a place of security and refuge for that part of our living creation which was to survive that cataclysmic flood. There was the boat in the gospels where Jesus and his disciples travelled on the Sea of Galilee and then when a storm blew up and the disciples became frightened Jesus calmed their fears by calming the storm. It is not surprising then with such an emphasis on boats in the Bible the World Council of Churches chose as its symbol a boat travelling across the sea. Because boats speak about journeys, about travelling, about moving on lightly from one place to another, boats are about loosing your barings and finding new places where one can settle.

The analogy of a journey speaks of hope, confidence in an uncertain and unknown future. The journey of the ecumenical movement in its formal sense if not yet 100 years old and already an enormous amount of progress has been made and part of what we are doing at this Assembly is celebrating what we have already achieved. But it is also true that some people are tiring of the journey and are beginning to be concerned about what they say as a lack of progress in our ecumenical journey. The idealism of those heady days of the early ecumenical movement has for some been lost. The journey has become bogged down in endless successions of documents, reports and it appears on ending pieces of paper. For those of you who are depressed by the lack of progress on this ecumenical journey, I would ask you a very simple but basic question. I wonder if you are looking for progress in the right place. Documents certainly have their places and there are serious doctrinal and ecclesiological divisions which have existed between Christians for very very many centuries and the undoing of those differences and divisions will take many many years work. Documents, re-understandings, reworking of traditional formulae are part of that process but in the end of the day do you expect Christian unity to come about from an negotiated settlement or because some new documents have been drafted. If you are tiring and frustrated with the lack of progress in the ecumenical movement, are you in fact simply frustrated with the slowness of the painstaking and tedious work of doctrinal and ecclesiological exploration? Are you equating the ecumenical movement with this serious work of theological study and investigation? I ask again, if you are looking for progress in the ecumenical journey, are you looking in the right place?

As I travel in many parts of the world, I meet Christians of varying traditions, praying and worshipping together. I see many instances of common witness and action. I see Christians together irrespective their denominational allegiance responding to poverty, AIDS, violence and social division and preaching jointly a gospel of hope care and reconciliation in a troubled world. It has been said that the major divisions of the Christian church began over a thousand years ago and we have had just 100 years of the ecumenical movement and of the formal search for Christian unity. 100 years is a very short period to roll back 1000 years of division and separate development. And within those 100 years there has been an extraordinary growth of understanding, respect and mutual trust between those who are formally divided.

Speak about journeys. But they also speak about fragility. In those stained glass windows in the cathedrals and churches of my own church, the boats are usually very small and the waves are almost always very high. -Traditions and people of faith today, do feel fragile and vulnerable. Faith, hope and love are not popular virtues today. Faith is still under threat in many parts of the world and apart from the formal threat that people of faith sometime experienced, there is the growing experience of indifference to the world of faith. In other parts of the world, faith is carolled into support for a particular political perspective or one economic system. Assuming and implying that Christianity is to be equated with one particular political or economic system.

In a globalising world, the danger of trying to globalise the faith is very real. We are a faith with a commitment to every corner of the world, but a faith which ignores the distinctive needs of the individual or of a community, a faith which fails to recognise it need to speak of God to the weak, vulnerable and marginalised in any society is a faith that is denying its roots in the incarnation of Christ.

We feel fragile and vulnerable just as those saints of old must have felt as they launched out in their boats to a very unknown future.

In another sense, boats speak of security. When you get onto a modern ferry today most of us don't take much notice of the life boats that are placed above our heads. But you wouldn't feel very secure if no life boats were present at all on the ship and life boats speak of security. Visiting a modern harbour today, one cannot but be impressed by the enormous ships and bulk carriers that one sees and which ply our seas and oceans today but as we also know that even the greatest tanker and the greatest bulk carriers can in certain circumstances sink and be lost.

Our security in the faith is misplaced if we trust in vessel of the church or in any religious institution. The word church only make sense when we root its meaning in the church as the body of Christ. Our security and the journey of faith is in Christ alone. Not on any organised grouping of its followers.

We are all gathered here to discern the next step on the journey towards unity in the Body of Christ. Todays Gospel had much say to our body of believers. Christ you note in our Gospel today didn't pray for his disciples to be one - he prayed that they may be one so that the world may believe that you have sent me and have loved them- even as the Father loves the Son. We are called to be one in order to demonstrate this single and simple fact.

The next step on our journey has to be a step which will enable that to happen, which will enable the world to realise that God has sent His Son and that God has loved the world. Our security rests in that fact and our confidence in our journey ahead only makes sense when we realise that that is the purpose of our journey.