Ecumenical
The Institute's approach to ecumenism is, like Christianity itself, profoundly incarnational. Ecumenism, like faith, happens one person at a time. Beyond research conducted and books written, the Institute's impact on the world can best be measured in terms of people and relationships. Unlikely networks of Christian friendships have far-reaching consequences for the places and organizations to which people return after their stay at the Institute. Scholar-teachers reflect on and live their faith in ecumenical community, and they take the impact of this experience back to their own students.
Through its people the Institute has always been anchored in myriad forms of official ecumenical exchange and encounter. The "Collegeville approach" has imprinted itself on the highest-levels of international dialogues, such as those between the Vatican and Pentecostals, Methodists, Lutherans, or Disciples of Christ; or those between Lutherans and Orthodox, and many others. Indeed, there is virtually no cross-denominational conversation to which Institute people have not contributed locally, nationally or internationally.
The Institute is also a safe, steady place where "bridge people" are formed-people who bring new and passionate visions of ecumenism and church to the table: Orthodox laity, African American biblical scholars, Christians living in non-Christian cultures, women, people who have found hope and renewal outside the church. A series of consultations between Pentecostal, Holiness, and Evangelical Christians in the mid-1980s helped bring these traditions into fellowship with each other and with other churches worldwide.
Much of the world of ecumenical dialogue is a movable feast of conferences and events. In contrast, the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research is a permanent place where ecumenism is constantly lived as well as learned. Scholars and their families reside together at the Institute. This enables the formation of community and friendship essential to profound ecumenical awakening and exchange. The Institute's connection to Saint John's Abbey and University imparts a peaceful, prayerful, and hospitable perspective to scholarship and the ecumenical enterprise. Nourished by the Benedictine spirituality of the long haul, the Institute is content to have a wide, slow, fermenting influence in the world and in the church.
The Institute's history is rooted in the rich ecumenical heritage of Saint John's Abbey and University and the Benedictine tradition, which predates the divisions of the Christian Church.
In the late 1950s, Saint John's University decided to add a course in Protestant theology to its curriculum. In a move unusual for that time, the Abbey sent a monk, Kilian McDonnell, to Germany to prepare. Father Kilian spent four years in great theological centers--Trier, Tübingen, Paderborn, Münster, and Heidelberg. After his return in the mid-1960s, right after the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), he developed a vision for an American center of scholarly research to nurture the best of Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox theology and to ground it in a Benedictine rhythm of worship and work in community.
Kilian McDonnell was supported in his studies and later plans by businessman/philanthropist Patrick Butler and his wife, Aimee, of Saint Paul. This relationship was the beginning of a tradition of collaboration between ordained and lay Christians that still characterizes the Institutes board of directors, just as the interplay of scholarly research and cultural realities characterizes its programming.
Another enduring, defining feature of the Institute's life has been a sense of place, a holistic ethos and atmosphere inherited from the Abbey. When the monks of Saint John's set out to build the ecumenical center that Father Kilian envisioned and Patrick Butler made possible, they set it down on the shores of lovely Lake Watab. The cry of loons was considered a fitting, even necessary backdrop to the work to be done. They insisted on the graceful architecture of Marcel Breuer, who conceived of apartments walled with windows that maximize the sense of place, in the middle of the beauty of God's created world.
The first scholars arrived on Lake Watab in 1968. In 1973 Father Kilian became president of the Institute, a title he still holds. Dr. Robert S. Bilheimer, who arrived as executive director in 1974, had held positions with the dynamic postwar World Council of Churches in Geneva. He consolidated the resident scholars program and created a new program of summer consultations--small groups of invited participants in uncommon mixes, with topics of concern across ecclesiastical boundaries. Beginning with the inaugural consultation, "Confessing Faith in God Today," Bilheimer and consultation co-chairs Father Thomas Stransky, CSP, and Patrick Henry pioneered a first-person method of discourse that has become the Institute's hallmark contribution to the ecumenical movement.