Ecumenism After the Handshake
By Gabriel Stephen
Gabriel Stephen is an Assistant Professor of Practical Theology and Society at the Norwegian School of Leadership and Theology (HLT) in Oslo, Norway. He completed his Ph.D. in Religion and Theology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research focuses on migration, ecclesiology, integration, lived theology, and church life in modern society.
Christian unity is often easiest to preach and hardest to recognize after the benediction. Churches confess one body, one Spirit, one baptism, yet migrants entering many Western congregations often encounter something quieter and more painful than theological disagreement: distance. Not open hostility. Not a formal rejection. Just the slow realization that unity can be proclaimed publicly while remaining absent relationally. My doctoral research, Living Narratives, Living Ecclesiology, forced me to wrestle with this tension repeatedly through the stories of migrant Christians in Norwegian churches.[1] Again and again, migrants revealed a troubling contradiction at the heart of modern ecumenical imagination: churches may speak the language of reconciliation and unity while still struggling to embody it in ordinary church life.
This contradiction matters because the modern ecumenical movement emerged with admirable intentions. Throughout the twentieth century, churches gathered through councils, conferences, commissions, and theological dialogues in pursuit of visible Christian unity. The goal was serious and necessary: overcoming historical division so that the church might be true to its self-understanding as being one body of Christ.[2] Yet much of this ecumenical imagination emerged within relatively stable Western ecclesial frameworks. It assumed denominations with clear theological borders, institutional authority, and predictable cultural identities.[3] Unity, therefore, was often imagined as something negotiated doctrinally between ecclesial institutions. Thomas Rausch rightly notes that Christianity is no longer centered within the Western structures that shaped much of this ecumenical vision.[4] Migration exposes this shift with unsettling clarity. Migrants arrive with complex histories, fragmented identities, and faith shaped by displacement, challenging Christian unity and raising ecumenical questions, as migration exposes the fragility of Christianity when lived experience diverges from theological doctrine.[5]
Photo by Palden Gyamtso on Unsplash
What stood out in my research was that many migrants did not first experience division through doctrinal disagreement. They experienced it socially, relationally, and emotionally. The fracture often emerged not through theological debate but through silence, hesitation, and withheld presence. The story of Deborah captures this painfully well. Coming from an Asian Baptist context shaped by communal participation, she assumed the church in Norway would naturally function as a spiritual home regardless of denominational or cultural difference. Instead, she encountered suspicion and relational distance almost immediately. Reflecting on her experience, she explains, “Some were skeptical of us” because of the visible differences despite their shared faith.[6] As a result, “Those who are skeptical … just do not talk to us.”[7]
There is something profoundly revealing about ecclesial silence. Deborah was not expelled from worship. Nobody publicly rejected her faith. No doctrinal statement excluded her from the body of Christ. Instead, those from the majority culture, Baptist or not, seem to simply withhold relational presence. Silence itself became ecclesiological. The problem was not theological heterodoxy but relational absence. Yet what makes Deborah’s narrative remarkable is not merely the exclusion she experienced, but her response to it. Rather than withdrawing, she remained present. “Sunday in and Sunday out, we were present… I sat with them during church coffee… I did not understand anything… but I sat there and listened.”[8] There is a quiet theological depth in that persistence. Deborah’s story reveals that unity is sustained not primarily by institutional declarations but by embodied practices of patience, vulnerability, and presence. Long before ecumenical reconciliation becomes official, it often becomes relational. Church coffee sometimes reveals more about Christian unity than formal theological dialogue ever can.
Peter’s story sharpens the critique further. Coming from an Orthodox African background, he entered a Baptist congregation expecting refuge during his journey. Instead, he encountered subtle reminders that he remained outside the social imagination of belonging. “There were occasions… from [native Norwegian] Christians [in the church] that say ‘no,’ this is not your space, it’s not your place, you don’t belong here.”[9] That statement exposes something many churches are uncomfortable confronting directly: theological inclusion does not automatically produce relational inclusion. Peter was welcomed while remaining socially distant. Theologically, he was called a brother. Socially, he was treated as a stranger.
What makes this especially uncomfortable is that the tension was not fundamentally caused by doctrinal disagreement (although it could very well have been). The exclusion emerged from the presence of difference itself: accents, habits, cultural instincts, unfamiliar forms of social interaction, and inherited anxieties about belonging. Migration exposes how easily churches can proclaim universality while quietly protecting cultural familiarity. Kristine Suna-Koro argues that ecumenical reflection must confront these social and structural sins embedded within earlier foundations, even when those exclusions remained unspoken.[10] Migrant experiences force churches to confront precisely these unspoken realities. They reveal that unity can easily become rhetorical while remaining thin in practice.
This is why migration becomes both a disruption and a gift for the church. It disrupts inherited assumptions about what unity looks like, but it also creates possibilities for renewal. Migrants expose the distance between claims and embodiment, yet they also reveal pathways toward a richer and more robust ecumenism. The future of ecumenism cannot survive as institutional diplomacy alone. Nor can it dissolve into vague celebrations of diversity detached from theological depth. What migration reveals is the necessity of embodied ecumenism: a unity practiced before it is perfected. Hospitality, translation, shared leadership, mutual vulnerability, and patient presence are not secondary acts orbiting theology—they are theology embodied socially.
Considering this, Michael Root’s warning rings louder. Ecumenism requires patience “for the long haul.”[11] Christian unity cannot be reduced to emotional immediacy or romanticized multiculturalism. Institutions still matter. Doctrine still matters. Theological truth still matters.[12] Yet migrant narratives reveal with unsettling force that doctrine loses credibility when churches fail to embody its implications relationally. Churches cannot proclaim one body while quietly reproducing distance in everyday life.
Perhaps this is where the future of ecumenism is already unfolding—not first in councils, declarations, or carefully negotiated statements, but quietly in ordinary spaces where Christians choose presence over distance. At church coffee tables. In translated conversations. In awkward acts of hospitality. In communities where migrants continue showing up despite exclusion. In these fragile moments, unity becomes visible not as an abstraction but as a practice. The influx of people from the global south, therefore, is not about standing at the edges of ecumenism waiting to be included by the Western institutional church. They are exposing what Christian unity was meant to look like all along, beyond these frameworks.
[1] Gabriel T. Stephen, Living Narratives, Living Ecclesiology: Migrant Voices Reframing Norwegian Baptist Ecclesiological Perspectives (PhD diss., Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2026), https://doi.org/10.5463/thesis.1743.
[2] Antonia Pizzey, Receptive Ecumenism and the Renewal of the Ecumenical Movement: The Path of Ecclesial Conversion (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 31-32.
[3] Jeremy Morris argues that modern ecumenism has often assumed clear denominational boundaries, stable ecclesial cultures, and institutional forms that could be negotiated toward convergence. Jeremy Morris, “Imaginative Ecumenism—Rethinking the Paradigm from an Anglican Perspective,” Religions 14, no. 11 (2023): 1410, 4–5.
[4] Thomas Rausch, “A New Ecumenism? Christian Unity in a Global Church,” Theological Studies 78, no. 3 (2017): 596–613.
[5] Phillip Connor, Immigrant Faith: Patterns of Immigrant Religion in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe (New York: New York University Press, 2014), p. 19.
[6] Deborah, interviewed by Gabriel Stephen, p. 3.
[7] Ibid., p. 3.
[8] Ibid., p. 2.
[9] Peter, interviewed by Gabriel Stephen, pp. 6-7.
[10] Kristine Suna-Koro, “Toward Decolonizing Penitential Rites: A Diasporic and Ecumenical Exploration of Worship on (Still) Colonized Land,” in Decolonial Horizons: Reimagining Theology, Ecumenism and Sacramental Praxis, ed. Raimundo C. Barreto and Vladimir Latinovic (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), 259–79.
[11] Michael Root, “Normal Ecumenism: Ecumenism for the Long Haul,” Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theology 28, no. 1 (2019): 61.
[12] Larry Crabb, Real Church: Does It Exist? Can I Find It? (Nashville, Tenn: Thomas Nelson, 2009), p. 126.
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