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Quod Ubique The Common Confession of the Universal Church

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The Porvoo Common Statement — Anglican and Nordic-Baltic Lutheran Full Communion

Anglican–Lutheran Conversations between the British and Irish Anglican Churches and the Nordic and Baltic Lutheran Churches

1992

Cross-references: Layer 4 document 04 (Apostolic Succession) is the structural treatment of what the historic episcopate requires; Layer 5 document 03 (ARCIC) is the parallel Anglican bilateral on which the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral has been the Anglican floor across both agreements; the 1988 Meissen Common Statement between the Church of England and the Evangelical Church in Germany is adjacent and instructive in its unresolved treatment of the same question.

1. The Dialogue

The Anglican–Lutheran conversations that produced Porvoo had a specific institutional predecessor: the 1982 Helsinki Report of the Anglican–Lutheran European Regional Commission, which had proposed that the British and Irish Anglican Churches and the Nordic and Baltic Lutheran Churches undertake bilateral work toward full communion on the basis of the shared apostolic faith, the shared sacramental life, and the complex but convergent history of the episcopate in both traditions.1

The conversations themselves were conducted over four rounds from 1989 to 1992, the final round meeting at the theological institute attached to Porvoo Cathedral, an 800-year-old church in the Finnish town of Porvoo (Swedish: Borgå) in October 1992.2 The co-chairs were Bishop David Tustin (Bishop of Grimsby; Church of England) and Bishop Tore Furberg (retired Bishop of Visby; Church of Sweden).

The statement was agreed in plenary on 13 October 1992 at Järvenpää, with a celebratory concelebrated Eucharist at Porvoo Cathedral on 11 October at which Anglican and Lutheran bishops jointly presided. The text was subsequently ratified by the synods of each signatory church and formally signed at commemorative services held in 1996 at Trondheim (Norway), Tallinn (Estonia), and London (England).3

The participating churches:

On the Anglican side (four churches):

  • Church of England
  • Church of Ireland
  • Scottish Episcopal Church
  • Church in Wales

On the Lutheran side (initial signatories; eight churches):

  • Evangelical Lutheran Church of Iceland
  • Church of Norway
  • Church of Sweden
  • Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland
  • Evangelical Lutheran Church of Estonia
  • Evangelical Lutheran Church of Lithuania
  • (And the churches of Denmark and Latvia, which participated in the conversations but did not initially sign — their subsequent accessions are detailed below)

The Lusitanian Church of Portugal and the Spanish Reformed Episcopal Church — both Anglican-tradition extra-provincial churches — have subsequently associated with the Porvoo Communion.

2. What Was Said Together

The Porvoo Common Statement is structured as a single 58-paragraph declaration followed by a joint declaration of agreement and a “Declaration” enumerating the specific commitments the churches make to one another.

On the nature of the Church

“The Church is the communion of the faithful in Christ… It is given to the Church to participate in the life of the Triune God” (§§20–21).4

The statement roots the ecclesiological argument in the trinitarian communion-ecclesiology that both Anglican and Lutheran traditions had by the early 1990s received as the shared theological grammar of the post-Vatican II ecumenical conversation.

On the shared faith

“We accept the canonical scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the sufficient, inspired and authoritative record and witness, prophetic and apostolic, to God’s revelation in Jesus Christ… We accept the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds and confess the basic Trinitarian and Christological dogmas to which these creeds testify” (§§32–33).

This paragraph reflects the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral (1886 Chicago, 1888 Lambeth) — the Anglican ecumenical formulation naming Scripture, the Creeds, the dominical sacraments, and the historic episcopate locally adapted as the four marks of visible Christian unity. Porvoo adopts the Quadrilateral’s substance without needing to name it formally, since the Lutheran participants receive the same marks as the shared apostolic patrimony.

On the apostolic succession and the historic episcopate

“The apostolic succession in the episcopal office is a visible and personal way of focusing the apostolicity of the whole Church. It exists within the corporate apostolicity of the Church… The continuity of the episcopal ministry in its visible personal and collegial forms is an effective sign and embodiment of the continuity of the Church in and to its apostolicity” (§§38–39).5

Porvoo’s key theological achievement is the articulation of apostolic succession as “a rope of several strands” — Erik Eckerdal’s later scholarly gloss, faithful to the text’s §§48–58 treatment — in which the succession of ordained persons (the “personal tactile succession”) is one strand among several, alongside the continuity of historic sees, the continuity of doctrinal teaching, the continuity of sacramental life, and the continuity of the worshipping community. The argument is not that any single strand suffices but that where multiple strands are intact, the corporate apostolicity of the Church is preserved.

This formulation allows the Lutheran churches — several of which (Denmark, Norway, earlier Swedish) had at various points experienced interruptions in the personal-tactile line while preserving other strands — to be received by the Anglican side as exercising full apostolic ministry, and allows the Anglican churches — whose personal-tactile line the 1896 Apostolicae Curae had declared “absolutely null and utterly void” — to participate with the Lutheran churches in a communion that does not require resolution of the Roman Catholic question on their own orders.

The Declaration — the act of commitment

The closing “Declaration” (§58) specifies what the signatory churches commit to:

  1. To regard baptized members of one another’s churches as members of their own
  2. To welcome one another’s members to communion
  3. To welcome persons ordained by one another’s churches to exercise ministry in their own
  4. To regard bishops ordained in one another’s churches as participating in a common ministry of oversight
  5. To work together in mission and witness
  6. To establish specific structures of consultation

This is full communion in the technical ecumenical sense: interchangeability of ordained ministry, mutual admission to the eucharist, and shared participation in the Church’s life and mission.

3. Reception by Tradition Witnesses

From within the Anglican tradition

Lambeth Conference 1998 received Porvoo formally, recognising it as a “model of full visible unity” that exemplifies the Quadrilateral’s ecumenical vocation.6

Archbishop George Carey (Canterbury 1991–2002) presided at the London signing in 1996 and named Porvoo as “one of the most significant achievements of Anglican ecumenism in our generation.”7

Archbishop Rowan Williams (Canterbury 2002–2012), in subsequent Porvoo anniversary addresses, developed the theological claim that Porvoo demonstrates the possibility of full communion that does not require the complete resolution of every historical question about orders — a reading that the Lutheran side of the Communion has generally received and that parts of the Roman Catholic ecumenical community have engaged with interest.

Mary Tanner, who served on multiple Anglican ecumenical conversations through the 1980s and 1990s, named Porvoo as “the most considerable Anglican ecumenical achievement since the founding of the Anglican Communion” — a Lutheran-Anglican counterpart to the Catholic-Anglican work ARCIC was producing.8

From within the Nordic and Baltic Lutheran traditions

The Church of Sweden, whose historic episcopate had been preserved through the Reformation in an unbroken line that the Anglican side received as personal-tactile succession, received Porvoo with distinctive welcome. Archbishop KG Hammar and subsequent Swedish primates have treated Porvoo as expressing what the Swedish Lutheran tradition had always held to be the case about its ministry.

The Church of Finland and the Church of Norway received Porvoo with similar welcome, noting that the Lutheran acceptance of the Anglican recognition of their orders did not require them to revise the Lutheran tradition’s own theological understanding of the ministry (grounded in Augsburg Confession Article V).

The Church of Denmark declined initial signature, with specific reservations about the statement’s emphasis on the personal-tactile episcopate’s ongoing importance; the Danish church’s subsequent signature in 2010 reflected a revised theological articulation of the episcopate within the Danish Lutheran tradition.9

From within the broader Lutheran world

The Lutheran World Federation affirmed the Porvoo arrangement as compatible with Lutheran ecclesiology, noting that the Porvoo Communion does not replace but complements the LWF’s own communion structures.

The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod and confessional Lutheran bodies outside Europe have declined to recognise Porvoo as a model of Lutheran ecumenical practice, on the grounds that the Porvoo statement’s emphasis on the historic episcopate introduces a requirement not grounded in the Augsburg Confession’s reading of the ministry.

From within the Roman Catholic tradition

The Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity has engaged Porvoo as an important ecumenical development within the Anglican–Lutheran relationship, while noting that Porvoo’s affirmation of apostolic succession does not address the specific Catholic concerns on Anglican orders raised by Apostolicae Curae (1896). Porvoo is not an ecumenical instrument between any of its signatories and Rome; the Catholic response, while appreciative, has been careful to note this structural limit.10

From within the Orthodox tradition

The Ecumenical Patriarchate’s engagement with Porvoo has been primarily through its broader Anglican–Orthodox and Lutheran–Orthodox conversations. Orthodox voices (Zizioulas; Ware) have noted that Porvoo’s “rope of several strands” argument on apostolic succession, while ecumenically creative, would require substantially more engagement with the Orthodox understanding of succession as structurally constitutive of the Church’s sacramental life before an Orthodox reception could be contemplated.

4. Who Declined and Why

Initial non-signatories: Denmark and Latvia

The Church of Denmark and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Latvia participated in the conversations but did not sign in 1996:

  • Denmark — theological reservations about the personal-tactile episcopate’s prominence in the Porvoo formulation; the Danish tradition had historically emphasised a different articulation of apostolic ministry. Denmark signed in 2010 following sustained Danish-internal theological work.11
  • Latvia — similar concerns about the specific Porvoo articulation; Latvia signed in 2009.

Subsequent complications

Porvoo has been subsequently complicated by differences within the signatory churches on the ordination of women and on same-sex marriage:

  • Several Lutheran signatories (Sweden, Finland, Norway, Iceland) have moved to ordain women to the episcopate; this has generally been received within Porvoo without structural crisis
  • Several churches’ decisions on same-sex marriage have produced internal tensions — most notably the Church of Sweden’s 2009 authorisation of same-sex marriage, which the Church of England has received with strong reservations
  • The Church of England’s own 1992 decision on women priests, 2014 on women bishops, and 2023 on same-sex blessings — each of which has tested the Porvoo relationship without yet breaking it

The LCMS and confessional Lutheran non-reception

The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod has named Porvoo as a Lutheran ecumenical direction the LCMS does not receive. The LCMS theological frame — the Augsburg Confession’s grounding of the ministry in word and sacrament (AC V) as sufficient, with the historic episcopate as a good but non-essential form — reads Porvoo as having introduced a new binding requirement into Lutheran ecumenism that the Confessions do not name.12

5. What This Document Did Not Settle

Apostolicae Curae (1896)

Porvoo does not address the Roman Catholic judgment on Anglican orders. The Church of England’s 1992 women-priests decision, the 2014 women-bishops decision, and the 2023 Prayers of Love and Faith vote have each further complicated the Catholic reception of Anglican orders; Porvoo operates independently of that question within its own communion.

The ordination of women and the full communion

Porvoo’s internal handling of the women-in-orders question has been pragmatic rather than theological: signatory churches have each decided for themselves, and the communion has continued. Whether this pattern is theologically stable is one of the questions the next generation of Porvoo’s life will test.

Contrast with the Meissen Common Statement

Porvoo’s articulation of the historic episcopate as a structural condition distinguishes it from the Meissen Common Statement of 1988 between the Church of England and the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD). Meissen’s treatment left the episcopate question unresolved; interchangeability of ministry has consequently been only partial in the Meissen relationship, and the Meissen churches remain in “mutual recognition” rather than full communion. The Porvoo–Meissen contrast is one of the living theological laboratories for how the historic episcopate functions in Anglican–Lutheran ecumenism.13

Same-sex marriage and ecclesial communion

Porvoo does not address sexual ethics. The Church of Sweden’s 2009 decision, the Church of England’s 2023 Prayers of Love and Faith, and the various Nordic Lutheran positions have created a situation in which Porvoo communion continues structurally even as the internal theological and pastoral dispositions of the signatory churches diverge.

6. The Dialogue’s Present Phase

The Porvoo Communion continues as a living ecclesial reality. Regular Porvoo Consultations — gathering representatives of the signatory churches — meet at intervals; the Consultation has produced documents on a range of ecclesial questions including mission, primacy (in the pastoral sense), and ecumenical relations.

The theological stability of Porvoo depends on several factors:

  • The ongoing willingness of each signatory church to receive the others’ theological and pastoral decisions without breaking communion
  • The willingness of each church to articulate its own tradition’s reception of the Porvoo framework (especially as the framework ages and the churches’ circumstances change)
  • The broader ecumenical relationships of the Porvoo churches with Rome, Constantinople, and the wider Lutheran and Anglican worlds

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has directly affected several Porvoo member churches: the Estonian and Latvian Lutheran churches have taken specific positions on the invasion and on the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate’s blessing of Russian military action that have required articulation within the Porvoo relationship.

The Porvoo Communion remains an instrument in its first quarter-century of life. Its present phase is a living one.

7. For Further Study

Primary text

  • The Porvoo Common Statement (Porvoo, October 1992); subsequently published with the Together in Mission and Ministry materials by the Council for Christian Unity of the Church of England and by the corresponding Lutheran signatory churches

Predecessor documents

  • Anglican–Lutheran European Regional Commission, The Helsinki Report (1982)
  • The Niagara Report (1987) — subsequent Anglican–Lutheran North American work adjacent to Porvoo

Parallel / contrasting documents

  • The Meissen Common Statement (1988) — Church of England and EKD Germany; unresolved episcopate question
  • Called to Common Mission (1999) — ELCA and Episcopal Church USA; parallel full-communion arrangement

Scholarly treatments

  • Erik Eckerdal, Apostolic Succession in the Porvoo Common Statement: Unity through a Deeper Sense of Apostolicity (Uppsala, 2017) — the standard monograph
  • Paul Avis, Anglican Orders and the Priesting of Women (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2009) — on how the women-in-orders question sits with the orders question more broadly
  • Ola Tjørhom (ed.), Apostolicity and Unity: Essays on the Porvoo Common Statement (Eerdmans / WCC, 2002)

Anglican reception

  • Lambeth Conference 1998, Resolution IV.8 (on Porvoo)
  • Mary Tanner, The Unity We Seek (Church House, 1988)

The Porvoo Communion itself

  • The Porvoo Communion website (porvoocommunion.org) carries the Statement, the associated documents, and the records of subsequent Porvoo Consultations

Notes

Footnotes

  1. The Helsinki Report of 1982, prepared by the Anglican–Lutheran European Regional Commission, is the immediate predecessor document to the Porvoo conversations. ↩

  2. On the four rounds of the Porvoo Conversations, see the Porvoo Communion’s own historical records and Erik Eckerdal’s monograph. ↩

  3. The signing schedule — 1996 Trondheim, Tallinn, and London — reflects the ratification pattern across the signatory churches’ synodal processes. ↩

  4. All §§ references are to the Porvoo Common Statement as published in the Porvoo Communion’s authorised text. ↩

  5. Porvoo §§38–39 on apostolic succession as “a visible and personal way of focusing the apostolicity of the whole Church”; the full treatment extends through §§48–58. ↩

  6. Lambeth Conference 1998, Resolution IV.8. ↩

  7. Archbishop Carey’s reception of Porvoo at the 1996 London signing; the characterisation is a fair summary of his published remarks on the occasion. [∗] ↩

  8. Mary Tanner’s “most considerable Anglican ecumenical achievement” characterisation is drawn from her addresses of the 1990s and 2000s. [∗] ↩

  9. On Denmark’s trajectory to the 2010 signature, see the Porvoo Communion’s records and the Church of Denmark’s own synodal documents. ↩

  10. The PCPCU’s engagement with Porvoo is carried in the Council’s Information Service of 1996–1997 and subsequent years. ↩

  11. The Danish Lutheran theological debate on the episcopate is a significant internal matter across the late 1990s and 2000s, with theologians including Regin Prenter and subsequent generations articulating the specifically Danish Lutheran reading. ↩

  12. The LCMS position on Porvoo is articulated in the LCMS Commission on Theology and Church Relations materials of the late 1990s and 2000s. ↩

  13. The Meissen Common Statement (London, 1988), with subsequent reports on the continuing Meissen relationship between the Church of England and the EKD. ↩