World Council Of Churches Is Already Getting Things Done

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 11, Issue 96, 7 November 1947, Page 3

World Council Of Churches Is Already Getting Things Done

(Contributed by the Ministers’ Association) The World Council of Churches, although still only “in process of formation,” is already getting things done, says “The Church and the Community,” organ of the National Council of Churches in New Zealand. It began in 1937 with one department—that concerned with Study: Today it has eleven departments, and a staff of over a hundred. It’s first budget was 25,000 dollars. Last year over 3,000,000 dollars were spent. When war broke out it had 48 member Churches: Today it has 106 member Churches in 38 nations.

“This means,” says Dr. Vissert Hooft, General Secretary, that the Council is truly needed. If it did not exist, it would have to be created. It performs tasks which must be performed in the name of the Church of Christ as a whole and which could not possibly be performed to the same extent and on the same level, if the Churches acted separately.” Council’s Strength Increased

The recent accessions to membership are interesting and important not only because they increase the World Council’s strength, but even more because they enlarge its representativeness. Critics have sought to disparage its importance on this score, charging on the one hand that it was aiming merely towards a Pan-Protestantism because its members were almost exclusively Protestant bodies, and on the other hand that it is merely “Western” because member Churches are drawn preponderantly from Europe and North America. But hereafter the Eastern Orthodox Churches in the Greek-speaking world will participate in the Council’s work and take their places at the First Assembly.

This is the fruit of a visit to them by a delegation of World Council representatives last February. The WCC delegates were especially impressed by the vigorous Christian youth movements in several Orthodox countries and, by successful efforts to enlist lay participation. This presence of vhrtually the whole of Greek Orthodoxy within the Ecumenical Movement must alter its character and emphases in ways which cannot yet be wholly foreseen.

Church Of Russia

It also lifts to new importance the relation to the Ecumenical Movement of the Church of Russia and of the smaller Slavic Orthodox bodies of the Baltic and Balkan nations which, in ecclesiastical hardly less than in political affairs, take their cue from Moscow. A conference between representatives of the Moscow Patriarch and of the World Council is hoped may take place in the near future, and the presence of delegates from Russia and sisterchurches at the Amsterdam Assembly is not impossible. On recommendations of the Joint IMC-WCC Committee, no fewer than twenty additional younger churches are to be invited to membership. These, added to the eleven younger churches already members and ten others previously invited, would bring the total of that group to forty-one churches from sixteen lands of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Pacific Islands. Their presence in strength likewise should enrich the complexion and outlook of the Council, making it in the fullest sense a world body, and counterbalancing the traditionalism of Orthodoxy by the prophetic zeal of youth. There is good prospect that, by the time of the First Assembly the Council’s membership will total nearly one hundred and fifty churches from some fifty nations.