CHURCH' UNION IDEAL

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21111, 19 February 1932, Page 10

CHURCH' UNION IDEAL

PRACTICAL DIFFICULTIES.

METHODISTS AND ANGLICANS.

[by telegraph.—own correspondent. 3 CHRISTCHURCH, Thursday.

Declaring that the menace of a mateiial and secularistic age was a formidable challenge to the Christian Church to greater unity of spiritual aim and effort, the Rev. M. A. Rugby Pratt, in his presidential address .this evening at tha opening of the Methodist Conference, referred to the question of church union. Referring to the recently-expressed desire of the Anglican Primate of New Zealand for "conversations," along the lines of.the resumed Lambeth "conversations" to which the Aichbishop of Canterbury had invited the English Free Churches, Mr. Pray, said while such a gesture merited their and sympathetic consideration, "the Lambeth Conference had itself already extinguished any gleaming possibility of union with the Free Churches, for the more remote and uncertain prospect of reunion with the Greek and Latin Churches.

Furthermore, it was difficult to visualise union with the Anglican Church while that church was itself so confused in regard to sacerdotal and evangelical practice, and so divided on vital principles of faith and order, as appeared from the controversy between the High and Low Church factions in fcfie Mother Church. Touching the ques'tion of reordination, Mr. Pratt- said that the Methodist Church, certain of the validity of its own orders, could not regard as acceptable any equivocal proposals to extend the commission of non-episcopallv ordained ministers by an episcopal ordination. It was also difficult to understand why Methodists, the spiritual validity of whose ministrations was recognised by Lambeth, should be excluded from the Sacrament of Unity at the Lord's Table.

The question of union between the nonepiscopal churches presented fewer problems, the difficulties being mainly of an administrative character. If it was not possible in the immediate future to create .in the Dominion a single church with unified control and a common creed, it might be possible, for some of the nonepiscopal churches—the Presyterian and Congregational Churches were already acquainted with the mind of the Methodist Church in the matter—to formulate basis of union to be consummated; say, eight or ten years hence.