Ecumenical dialogue has produced real, documented agreements over the decades since 1948: many member churches now recognize each other's baptism as valid without requiring a convert to be baptized again, joint statements have narrowed disagreements that once looked unbridgeable, including extended Lutheran-Catholic dialogue on the doctrine of justification, and cooperative bodies at the national and regional level coordinate shared social witness on poverty, human rights and disaster relief across denominational lines that would once have made such cooperation unthinkable.
What has moved far more slowly is the question of shared Communion. Whether Christians of different traditions may receive the Eucharist together, intercommunion, remains blocked in most cases by exactly the disagreements the ecumenical movement was founded to work through, above all differing understandings of what actually happens in the rite itself, the real presence of Christ debated between traditions that affirm transubstantiation, a more general real but undefined presence, or a purely commemorative meal. The movement's own documents are candid about this limit: shared witness and cooperation have advanced substantially, while full visible unity, the goal named at Amsterdam in 1948, remains, by the ecumenical movement's own account, still ahead of it rather than behind it.