At the turn of the 20th century, the Jamaican Christian community was hailed internationally as a trailblazer when previously divided local churches embraced the concept of ecumenism, came together and formed the Jamaica Christian Council, later renamed the Jamaica Council of Churches (JCC).

But 63 years later, the churches are finding, agonisingly so, that while they serve an omnipotent God, the Jamaican church is impotent when it comes to speaking with one voice.

Furthermore, the churches are being forced to face the fact that the Biblical injunction – ‘that they all may be one’ – on which the philosophy of ecumenism was founded, is easier said than done.

A press release, for example, after being drafted must be passed to the head of each of the 10 member-churches, for their approval, before it can be faxed off to the newsrooms. Usually, by the time the draft completes the round-robin, the issue would have long disappeared from the headlines.

Now, responding to growing public criticism abut the silence of the church in the wake of rising crime and violence and other social ills, leaders of the JCC met last Thursday to find ways to correct their inability to speak with one voice on issues affecting the nation.

“For a group of Christian communions which have been in council together for 60 to 80 years, why is it so difficult for us to make a joint statement?” asked Rev Catherine Gale, general-secretary of the Jamaica Methodist District of churches.

“Why is it so difficult for one of us to represent all of us to the world?” Gale asked the meeting, almost rhetorically.

The JCC grew out of the ecumenical movement which swept Christendom in the early 1900s. Jumping ahead of many countries, a modest unity movement took shape in Jamaica in 1921. Twenty years later, it formalised into the Jamaica Christian Council and in 1966 changed its name to the Jamaica Council of Churches.

To its credit, the JCC has survived the notorious divisiveness of the church, although in one of its rare quarrels it lost the membership of the Church of God in Jamaica.

The 10 current member denominations of the JCC are: The African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Anglican Diocese, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the Jamaica Baptist Union, the Methodist District, the Moravian Church in Jamaica, the Quakers, the Roman Catholics, the Salvation Army, and the United Church of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands.

In the spirited discussions that marked the meeting at the Springburn Guest House in Meadowbrook, St Andrew, the church leaders spoke frankly and openly about the problem of disparate voices. Among those who made telling points were Rev Gale, Rev Ernle Gordon, Anglican; Rev Phillip Robinson, Methodist and president of the JCC; and Rev Garnet Roper, Missionary.

Gale, one of only three women among the 23 church heads assembled there, brought the harshest criticism of all, likening the JCC to a “bullfrog” that “makes a giant leap then sits still”.

The council, she argued, could be perceived as irrelevant by its silence at a time when many in the society were looking to the church for direction.

Denominational differences in member-churches and other barriers, Gale said, had historically prevented the council from speaking publicly on any issue without statements first being endorsed by every member. This time-consuming approach had resulted in the loss of the window of opportunity for commenting on the issue by the time consensus was finally reached.

She had some hard questions for her colleagues: “Why, when we elect a president, does he/she have to pass any statement to be made to the head of every participating church before something can be said publicly on our behalf?”

“What are we afraid of? Or is it that we do not trust each other? Or is it that this says more about our individual denominational hierarchical structures than it does about the JCC?”

Repeating a criticism first made years ago by Rev Heckford Sharpe of the Jamaica Baptist Union, Gale charged: “Maybe the JCC is the biggest bullfrog of them all. Sixty years ago we made a massive leap, a leap that was ahead of many other countries in the world and now we are sitting and sitting.” she said.

She noted that the average man on the street was not looking to denomination, but to the church. “It tells us, firstly, that the world still expects us to say something; secondly, that they expect us to say one thing together.”

It was time, Rev Gale insisted, that the group “begins to work out our ecumenism not over theology books, but over joint work and mission”.

Her argument drew supporting ‘amens’ from several in the assembly, including Rev Canon Ernle Gordon, rector and chairman of the Church and Society Commission of the St Mary’s Anglican Church.

Gordon, a firebrand speaker who gained attention in the 1970s as a supporter of the democratic socialism of Michael Manley’s People’s National Party, said that in the past, church population growth could be linked with the level of its public voice and participation.

But JCC president, Rev Robinson, cautioned the leaders not to allow the organisation’s agenda to be set by the public.

“Your job is to preach, our job is to govern. When trouble comes they say, ‘where is the church?’ Who sets the church’s agenda? The church’s agenda is not set by a particular group,” he remarked.

Rev Garnett Roper, the renowned Christian intellect and controversial talk show host who now pastors the Portmore Missionary Church, argued that there was no point in the council attempting to make an impact on the society if it did not first make an impact on the church.

And he warned the council against trying to redefine itself in terms of appearing newsworthy on issues.

“Why should you worry about publishing public statements? I think you have to retreat from any idea that the world of the ’70s is still with us where we can sit down in a room, write down something and it means anything. It doesn’t mean anything,” Roper declared.

“I think we have to drift away from this idea of relevance being a kind of re-imaging of this newsworthiness of the goings on of the JCC. That’s nothing, that’s vanity, that’s wanting to be stars like everybody else. It’s a curse,” he warned.

Roper, who attended the meeting as an independent guest – the Missionary Church is not a JCC member – spoke on ‘The Contextual Relevance of the JCC’, and chastised the council for not doing more in its over 60 years of existence.

He suggested that the JCC could undertake joint projects in Christian education, such as developing training material locally, and in providing more opportunities for training and research for the younger generation of clerics.

“I think we really have missed the ball (because) 60 years after, the (training) material is largely imported and we simply have not managed to devote skill and attention to providing that kind of material,” he said.

He also pointed to the absence of real joint, inter-denominational projects to benefit the wider society, for example, in the care of children or in responding to the spread of HIV/AIDS.

“.We simply have not showed the world, for all our lofty ideals, that we can come together to co-operate, putting our resources, our energy and our individual ambition to achieve something greater for the sake of the community than any of us can do by ourself,” said Roper.

He also said the continued incidents of crime and violence were symptoms of a need for a change in values – something the JCC and its members must come to terms with.

“So as long as we are outing fires on Mountain View or Spanish Town we will forever be playing catch up. We must come to terms with the fundamental need for a transvaluation of values,” Roper continued.

“We must challenge the consumerism which has come to dominate us and we must begin to recapture the intellectual hegemony that the Third World once had in the mid-1970s where we did the research, we did the thinking.”