Guidelines on Interim Eucharistic Sharing with The United Methodist Church
Issued by the Office of Ecumenical and
Interfaith Relations of The Episcopal Church
In 2006 The Episcopal Church officially entered into a relationship of Interim Eucharistic Sharing with The United Methodist Church. Methodists and Anglicans have been in dialogue in the United States since the 1960s within the context of the multilateral conversations of the Consultation on Church, and since 2002 in a church-to-church bilateral dialogue. Likewise Anglicans and Methodists in Great Britain have been in dialogue since the 1970s, and in 2002 the Church of England and the British Methodist Church entered into a 10-year covenant process leading to full, visible unity. In addition the 1990s saw a major international Anglican-Methodist dialogue, sponsored by the Anglican Communion Office and the World Methodist Council, which issued an agreed theological statement, Sharing in the Apostolic Communion. The 1998 Lambeth Conference of Bishops commended this document for study by the provinces of the Communion and encouraged the formation local Anglican-Methodist dialogues.
Interim Eucharistic Sharing is a step on the way to fuller unity. In 1982 The Episcopal Church entered into Interim Eucharistic Sharing with the three predecessor churches which formed the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, a relationship which lasted until 2001 when eventual full communion was reached. In 2003 The Episcopal Church entered into a relationship of Interim Eucharistic Sharing with the Moravian Church in America, and that dialogue continues on questions of interchangeability of ordained ministries.
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Letter from Bishop Daniel
Letter from the Rev. Gene Carpenter, East Carolina's Ecumenical Officer
