“Ecumenical shared ministries” (ESMs) result from two or more congregations merging resources and worshipping together while retaining distinct denominational affiliations (Beardsall et al. 2018). In 2025, I conducted a qualitative study of two ESMs in neighbouring rural communities. Adapting Sarah Dunlop’s method of “narrated photography,” I collected photos of each ESM’s worship space (Dunlop 2024). I then conducted semi-structured interviews to explore how congregants engage in receptive ecumenism to discover “what each tradition might…fruitfully have to learn from the other” (Murray 2008).
My qualitative data suggests that the messy work of receptive ecumenism happens for ESMs through real-time encounters between differently ritualized bodies in a shared worship space. One ESM models receptive ecumenism by bringing differently ritualized bodies into the same space for a shared liturgy. The other ESM rarely engages in receptive ecumenism because differently ritualized bodies take turns using the same space instead of worshipping together in it.