Church Communion as Being Church Together in the Context of the Dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church
At the invitation of Prof. Dr Barbara Hallensleben, who has been a member of the Roman Catholic delegation in the official dialogue between the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity and the Communion of Protestant Churches in Europe (CPCE) since 2022, Prof. Dr Thomas-Andreas Põder, CPCE Secretary for Theology and Ecumenical Dialogue, gave a guest lecture at the Faculty of Theology of the University of Fribourg on 13 April 2026. The lecture took place in the context of the course “Introduction to the Theology of Ecumenism (Western Churches)” and was entitled “Church Communion as Being Church Together: The Ecumenical Perspective and Commitment of the Communion of Protestant Churches in Europe”.
The central thesis was that church communion does not merely mean a more intensive form of church cooperation, but being Church together. Taking the Leuenberg Agreement as his point of departure, Põder showed that church communion is grounded in the mutual recognition of churches as churches in the light of the Gospel. It is therefore not only the result of theological understanding, but a spiritual-ecclesial reality and, at the same time, an ecumenical commitment.
He particularly emphasized that the CPCE as church communion becomes concrete in Word and Sacrament, witness and service, teaching and learning, in its growing structural embodiment, and in its shared ecumenical responsibility. Põder identified commitment, reception and catholicity as continuing challenges: church communion is to be effectively received and shaped in the life of the member churches, and understood within the horizon of the broader unity of the Church of Jesus Christ.
In this way, the lecture also gains particular significance within the horizon of the dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church. Here, the church communion of the CPCE comes into view not as a merely Protestant model of cooperation, but as an ecclesial and ecumenical contribution to the question of how the unity of the Church can be perceived, witnessed and lived amid real ecclesial diversity. This unity is not sought beyond real ecclesial diversity, but is experienced and shaped in binding communion, mutual recognition and being Church together.
The guest lecture was situated within the wider context of previous contacts and the official doctrinal dialogue between the CPCE and the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity. Between 2013 and 2018, a series of consultations had taken place, the results of which were summarized in the “Report on Church and Church Communion” and welcomed by the CPCE General Assembly in Basel in 2018. In Basel, a joint declaration of intent to enter into a formal dialogue between the then Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the CPCE was also signed at leadership level.
Due to the pandemic and other factors, the beginning of the official doctrinal dialogue was delayed; the Joint Dialogue Commission began its work in spring 2022. The 9th General Assembly of the CPCE in Sibiu in 2024 supported the continuation of this work. Following a meeting of the mandate-givers of both sides in Rome in December 2025, a temporary pause in
the dialogue in its present form is currently envisaged. The Council of the CPCE will decide on this at its next meeting at the end of May 2026 in Doorn, the Netherlands.