Meaning of Oikos - House

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. - Nobel Peace Prize Lecture Dec. 11, 1964"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." -
Another Greek word tells us how to participate in God's goal -- that is, to turn strangers into companions 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. As such it connotes, not a movement to co-opt into unity, but a recognition of the Holy Spirit working amid the whole household, amid other religions goal 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.