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The following list offers links to Ecumenical organizations that are dedicated to the work of promoting Christian unity. Tellico Village Community Church strongly supports ministries that bring Christians together. The descriptions of each Ecumenical organization are from Wikipedia.
The National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA (usually identified as National Council of Churches, or NCC) is an ecumenical partnership of 36 Christian faith groups in the United States. Its member communions — variously called denominations, churches, conventions, or archdioceses — include a wide variety of Mainline Protestant, Orthodox, African-American, Evangelical and historic Peace churches. Together, they encompass 100,000 local congregations and 45 million adherents.
The World Council of Churches (WCC) is an international Christian ecumenical organization. Based in Geneva, Switzerland, it is a fellowship of about 340 churches of which 157 are members. The fellowship includes denominations collectively representing about 550 million Christians throughout more than 120 countries.
Churches Uniting in Christ (CUIC) brings together ten mainline American denominations (including both predominantly white and predominantly black churches), and was inaugurated on January 20, 2002. CUIC is the successor organization to the Consultation on Church Union (COCU) founded in 1962. The original task of COCU was to negotiate a merger between its ten member denominations; however, the membership of the denominations overwhelmingly rejected a merger when it was proposed in 1969. With the failure of the merger proposal, COCU then turned to negotiating "full communion", whereby each member church would retain its own autonomy and identity, while recognizing the validity of the rites and ministry of the others and accepting them as true churches. In 1991 it was proposed that this was to be done on the historic model of bishop, presbyter and deacon. However, the Presbyterian Church USA was unwilling to implement some of the changes to its internal rules that this model would require, and the Episcopal Church did not feel able to participate at the time. It was then proposed that intercommunion be established without a resolution of the ministry issue, which would be resolved by 2007 by means of intensive dialog between the churches. This modified proposal was then accepted by the member churches.
CUIC is not a merger, but rather an intercommunion agreement whereby each member recognizes the others as part of the true church, and recognizes its rites (baptism, communion) as valid. The original proposal for CUIC also had a full recognition of each other's ministers, but the Episcopal Church's insistence on the historic episcopate, which conflicts with the system of organization and governance in some other member churches (especially in the Presbyterian Church USA and the United Church of Christ), has meant that this part of the CUIC proposal has been put on hold. CUIC will however hold negotiations once it is established, possibly leading to a full recognition of each other's ministers within the next few years.
Christian Churches Together in the USA (CCT) is a Christian ecumenical group formed in 2006 to "broaden and expand fellowship, unity and witness among the diverse expressions of Christian faith today".
CCT envisions itself as a place where people of widely differing Christian backgrounds can come together for dialog and sharing, to seek common ground rather than debate differences. It does not have the goal of combining Christian faiths or asking them to yield up their distinctives. The organization is less concerned with particular religious creeds than is the National Council of Churches (NCC). The CCT is therefore expected to appeal to a wider range of Christian churches in the United States. One example is the Roman Catholic Church, which has united with CCT and is not a member of NCC, though they do participate in some NCC programs.
The group was officially organized when over 50 churches and national organizations met together at a retreat center near Atlanta, Georgia on March 28 –March 31, 2006.
The charter membership of CCT comprises 34 churches and church organizations representing over 100 million Americans from Catholic, Orthodox, mainline Protestant, Evangelical, Pentecostal, and ethnic Christian faith traditions.
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