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Young adults enter the ecumenical, interreligious movement with hope, urgency

August 17, 2026

[Episcopal News Service] To be religious in today’s world is to live, work and pray alongside people of other faiths, denominations or none at all. Young Episcopalians who have inherited this increasingly secular, interreligious world are looking with fresh eyes on ecumenical institutions of the previous century and entering a movement whose aims of Christian unity and interfaith solidarity they see as existential and nonnegotiable. In June, New York City-based Hank Jeannel logged onto a Zoom call with over 60 young adult Christians from around the world and was put in a breakout room with others from North America and the Middle East. Some lamented their region’s pressing challenges, such as climate change, while others requested prayers for personal struggles. And amid it all was hope for a world where young Christians are united, Jeannel, The Episcopal Church’s associate for ecumenical and interreligious relations, told Episcopal News Service. “You felt like you were walking away with all of these concerns from around the world, these young people you met, and you had a long list of things to add to Evening Prayer later that day,” he said. It was the second “E-cumenical Youth Gathering” convened by the World Council of Churches. Jeannel said this was just one place where young people are bringing new energy to a movement whose work is increasingly urgent. The ecumenical movement started as an early 20th-century push among Christians to seek understanding and unity across doctrinal differences. The Rev. Kirsten Guidero, the ecumenical and interreligious officer for The Episcopal Church, noted the church’s crucial role early on. “You’ve got one world war down, and you’re about to enter another one, and I think there was just this burgeoning enthusiasm for, ‘Hey, if we actually talk to each other, what could happen?’” Guidero told ENS. Inspired by the World Missionary Conference in 1910 where he preached a sermon entitled, “The Call to Unity,” Episcopal Bishop Charles Brent served as president of the First World Conference on Faith and Order in 1927 in Switzerland. The Episcopal Church convened the gathering, where over 100 churches discussed divisions over doctrine and polity. When the World Council of Churches formed in 1948, Faith and Order became one of its commissions. The examples of the church seeking unity in the past remain instructive to some whose ecumenical work still takes place in institutional spaces. The Rev. Joseph Woyniak, a priest in The Episcopal Church in Colorado, is the program director of a Lilly Endowment-funded ecumenical initiative called The Narthex and has participated in The Episcopal Church’s Presbyterian-Episcopal dialogue for 12 years.  He finds Brent’s reminder that Christian unity is a call from God inspiring. However, he also sees the old foundations of the movement cracking. “Like many things, the institutions of even the last mid-century are kind of falling apart,” Woyniak said. “Especially for younger people, we are inheriting institutions that are under a lot of stress and duress.” And the world has changed. Today’s Christians live in a global context, different from the Western European-centric Christianity that birthed the ecumenical movement. And in the United States, following on what is now largely a secular Europe, Christianity is on the decline as the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans rises. “Most of my friends in the church, they live interreligious lives just because they wake up in the morning and go hang out with the people around them, and those are not always Christians and not always Episcopalians,” Jeannel said, adding that the church’s ministry must urgently address this reality. Michael Wheeler, a student at Seminary of the Southwest, will become the first Episcopal seminarian to attend the Bossey Ecumenical Institute in Geneva, Switzerland, this fall. The institute is part of the World Council of Churches, and Wheeler’s participation in the one-semester program in ecumenical theology is thanks to The Episcopal Church’s Charles Henry Brent Ecumenical Fellowship. “Just getting to experience so many different parts of the Christian tradition, I think, is going to be so expansive and enriching,” Wheeler said. “I think that’s what I’m most excited about because there are so many people with life experiences [and] experiences of Jesus different than mine.” Wheeler identified rapidly developing technology, including AI, as a concern young people are particularly aware of within the ecumenical movement. Jeannel said climate change and the liberation of oppressed people across the world are also at the top of the priority list. Both Wheeler and Jeannel said ecumenical work can get stuck in intellectual spheres, with important theological discussions never reaching the ground. Guidero said young adults are more willing to look critically at older institutions whose mission of visible Christian unity hasn’t translated to action. “[They say] ‘You have to have integrity, you have to live these ideals that you’re preaching at people, or we’re not voting for you, or we’re not going to work for you. We’re not playing this game,’” she said. “I think in ecumenical and interreligious spaces, that’s great energy.” Everyone is involved in ecumenical or interreligious work every day, Guidero said, whether or not they have the terminology for it. One of her goals, she said, is to lift up the wisdom that is already in the church, fulfilling Jesus’s prayer in John 17 that his disciples and future followers “may be one.” Part of this includes tapping young people to join bodies explicitly dedicated to ecumenical and interfaith unity that might need new life. “When you’ve been laboring on a project for decades, you can sometimes miss the forest for the trees,” Jeannel said. “But when you’re new to it, things are less precious and there’s a kind of creativity that can come out of that.” For Wheeler, whose sending parish supports the food pantry and clothing donation drives of the Congregational church across the street, modern-day examples of ecumenism interest him more than the big names of the past. “Something that really inspired me was [Archbishop of Canterbury] Sarah Mullally’s first […]