Church Reunion

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 17, 21 January 1939, Page 10 (Supplement)

Church Reunion

TWO cheap little books of about a hundred pages each that should be of interest to Christian people have been published by the Student Christian Movement Press. They summarise the discussions and findings of the Oxford and Edinburgh conferences held respectively in July ami -August last year and give impressions of litem. The one is entitled "That, Tlicy Go Forward," and is the work of Erie Feint, the assistant general secretary of the Oxford conference. The other, written by Hugh Martin, joint honorary secretary of "Friends of Reunion," bears the title "Edinburgh, IO.'JT." The delegates to the conference represented all the main Churches throughout the world, with the exception of tiie Konian Catholic Church and the German Evangelical Church, and numbered over 400 prominent clergymen and laymen, with their homes in some 40 different countries. The aim of the Oxford conference was to discover what the message to the world of to-day should be, with particular reference to the young. The committee, dealing with tho economic order, it is interesting to learn, included .business men, working men, economists and philosophers, as well as tho clergy, a mixed body belonging to > different political parties. The Edinburgh conference set itself to the consideration of the causes of the divisions of the different Christian communions, and the way to union and communion between them. Since tho last similar conference, held at Lausanne 10 years ago, there has been mutual recognition and intercommunion between the Anglican communion and Old Catholic Churches, and the fusion of Churches in China into a United Church, whilst corporate unions have been consummated between the Presbyterian Churches in Scotland, the Methodists in England, and three communions in Canada. Both books show the wide survey made by the conferences, and give the reader an idea of the variety and complexity of the problems that confront, not only tile Churches, but the whole world to-day. In each there is an appendix- giving a list of books for further reading.