I wrote this to place in pews in First United Methodist Church of Oak Park, Illinois. Nancy and I also sent it out with our Christmas letter in 2008 with this thought,

. Ed composed the enclosed bookmark for our church’s hymnals as an aid to prayer and meditation for the community that sustains us. Accept it as a kind of distilled worldview of his faith—albeit a work in progress. We share it trusting that whatever your faith, most thoughts will resonate with the faith out of which you also live under God.

"We have inherited a big house, a great "world house"[oikoumene] in which we have to live together - black and white, Easterners and Westerners, Gentiles and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, Moslem and Hindu, a family unduly separated in ideas, culture, and interests who, because we can never again live without each other, must learn, somehow, in this one big world, to live with each other.
This means that more and more our loyalties must become ecumenical [oikoumene] rather than sectional. We must now give an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in our individual societies.
This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men."
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr - Nobel Peace Prize Lecture - Dec. 11, 1964

SOME ECUMENICAL ETYMOLOGY The root of the word "ecumenical" is oikos, a Greek word in the Bible meaning "house." We find oikos in words like "economy" and "ecology." Therefore "ecumenical" has to do with the "household" of God - and oikoumene is a "world house" (see MLK above). I interpret various scriptures about the God's plan/telos/end as being that All (panta) people are to realize they are brothers and sisters in God's household. More
Another Greek word tells us how to participate in God's goal -- that is, to turn strangers into com-panions around the table of dialogue. Xenos means "stranger," as in xenophobia "fear of strangers (we see that as an overriding social/political pathology). Paradoxically, the Greek word for "hospitality" is xenia which means a "stranger turned into a guest."
While the word "ecumenical" has traditionally described the movement for unity within the Christian house, as against the words "interreligious" or "interfaith" meaning relationships to religions outside Christianity, I believe "ecumenical" can be correctly used to in relation to other faiths. (Again MLK) As such it connotes, not a movement to co-opt into unity, but a recognition of the Holy Spirit working amid the whole household toward the telos/end of a world family reconciled in a just peace. Interfaithing is a imperative verb for this whole household. You can draw some ecumenical views from Ephesians 1:10; John 17:21; Acts 2; Acts 9:10f; Acts 15:12f; Luke 4:24f; Mark 7:24-36.

Edgar Hiestand YDS 1959 50th
Being the bishop's ecumenical/interreligious factotum during retirement has been the absolutely satisfying outworking of ordination call since retiring as a pastor. In this role I resource our Northern Illinois Conference United Methodist Church and its Commission on Christian Unity and Interreligious Concerns. The role includes lots of liaisoning with other faith communities, ecumenical bodies, workshops, as well as maintaining our conference CCUIC website http://www.gbgm-umc.org/interrelig
Major projects have included organizing weekend interfaith bus tours to Chicago area's wide diversity of temples, mosques, synagogues, etc., and developing our UM Conference relationship with the Chicago metro area Council of Islamic Organizations. This involved a dialogue including Christian and Muslim college students, church and mosque clergy and laity using "scriptural reasoning." Helping plan the National Workshop on Christian Unity in Chicago, implementing a Korean emphasis of the Chicago area 's Week of Prayer for Christian Unity service, and with my wife, Nancy, being part of our bishop's delegation to intimate interfaith meetings in Turkey, made for rich experiences.
I've been pleased to see the things Yale Divinity School has been doing to transform "stranger/other" (xenos) to "guest" (xenia), as in last September's Chrisian-Muslim conference on loving God and neighbor, the earlier response by the YDS Center for Faith and Culture to "A Common Word between Us and You," and the orientation of the Class of 1959 gift to a global perspective resource.

Reading Ginkgo poem

Ginkgo Leaves in Fall

THE GINKGO LEAVES IN FALL

They fall all at once
No wind, no catastrophic trauma
But just the season of cold
And then the circle of yellow carpet around the trunk
Sign of the life that was
Perhaps it is teleological fulfillment
Like a beautiful life
Heaven bentward
Leaving its neverending circle of grace
For others to mark upon their way.
Defiant victory against a company of fossils.