ecumenical thought

History of Ecumenism: The Forgotten Early Period

In the histories of ecumenism, its initial formation is usually dated by the early 20th century. The World Missionary Conference held in Edinburgh in 1910 is referred to as its “symbolic beginning”. A quest for the origins of the ecumenical thought led researchers to find some early voices in the previous centuries, even as early as in the 15th–16th c. However, there are Oriental sources which witness a much earlier formation of the ecumenical paradigm of the ecclesiological thought, typologically corresponding to the one developed in the 20th c.