It has majored in politics—to the detriment of missions, evangelism, and its own theology division.
Back in the inquisitorial 1950s, Senator Margaret Chase Smith commented that freedom of speech had been so abused by some that it was not exercised by others. A case can be ruined equally by silence and by overstatement. Thus the World Council of Churches has reason to be grateful to the more outrageous of its critics who in the past have, as it were, debased the coinage by unruly demonstrations and scurrilous articles. From this developed the unlovely conciliar tendency to dismiss as fanatical and contentious those who opposed “the ecumenical movement” (deft propaganda having made that term synonymous with the Geneva-based body). Even thoughtful churchmen who had misgivings about the WCC maintained a decent reticence because they recoiled at the way in which dissidents of the extreme right had expressed protest.
The council is now into its fourth decade. Demonstrations against it have all but vanished. But this does not mean that criticism is waning. Far from it. It has increased, become more sophisticated, more reasoned, more responsible—and originates often among those who are themselves actively involved in WCC-member churches. Such strictures came from the floor at the 1975 Nairobi assembly, to the healthy discomfiture of the establishment.
There have also been books, two of the more notable published in 1967. Ian Henderson, a radical Scots theologian, produced the highly entertaining and shamelessly overwritten Power Without Glory. He pointed to the WCC as a divisive factor, and suggested that whoever it was who marveled how Christians loved one another didn’t really know them very well. Paul Ramsey’s Who Speaks for the Church? was a much more impressive work. He warned against “a surrogate world political community” with its own “shadow state department” that told the governments of the world what to do. It was a prophetic word that fell on heedless ears.
This summer saw the publication of Ernest W. Lefever’s From Amsterdam to Nairobi: The World Council of Churches and the Third World (reviewed in our July 20 issue), an excerpt from which we carry on page 25. Renowned columnist George F. Will contributes to this book a typically incisive foreword. “What is at issue,” says Will, who holds the Ph.D. from Princeton, “is not ‘activism’ versus ‘quietism’ in Christian life. Rather the questions are whether the WCC is an appropriate instrument for Christian action; and whether the WCC is active on behalf of decent causes; and whether the WCC is indecently quiet about indecencies committed by regimes and movements on the left.”
This is an area in which the WCC has always been vulnerable, and one wherein it can be judged by what it says—and leaves undone. One of the reports received at Amsterdam expressed the challenge admirably. “It is part of the mission of the Church,” said the document on “The Church and the Disorder of Society,” “to raise its voice of protest wherever men are the victims of terror, wherever they are denied such fundamental human rights as the right to be secure against arbitrary arrest, and wherever governments use torture and cruel punishments to intimidate the consciences of men.”
At a WCC Consultation in The Hague in 1967, an official statement urged that in speaking our on international affairs the church should be prepared to say a “costly word,” declaring the truth even when “men will not dare to utter it.” Alas, doughty conciliar spokesmen often shrink into embarrassed conciliar diplomats as the spotlight moves from Chile and South Africa to Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. For too long what we have been told about the Eastern bloc is that delicate WCC negotiations are continually going on behind the scenes, and that these would be prejudiced by publicity. (Six million Jews dead in Nazi concentration camps might bear mute testimony against that line of reasoning.) This in turn permits the Geneva executive blandly to reject certain types of criticism as ill-informed, implying that if we knew all we would trust the wisdom of those involved to speak those costly words we would want them to speak on our behalf.
But a further factor emerges here. Not only should we distinguish between the WCC and the ecumenical movement, we must also distinguish between the conciliar and the curial, the WCC and its paid servants. Lefever makes a crucial point here in his book (p. 7): “In a formal sense the World Council of Churches operates by Western democratic procedures.… However … the WCC headquarters staff is highly influential because it determines the agendas for discussion, develops project proposals, plans conferences and proposes themes, commissions preparatory materials and selects authors, and in general employs the means available to the senior staff in a large organization.” The point is underlined when Lefever somberly discusses the prosocialist prejudices of the headquarters staff.
He traces the growing involvement of the WCC in Third World politics since 1948, and deals particularly with the Program to Combat Racism. Speaking of the 1978 grant to Rhodesian guerrillas, Lefever says: “Here was a Christian body supporting an organization that had recently killed 35 members of Christian missionary families. Here was a grant given in the name of racial justice to terrorists who were attempting to destroy an interracial regime pledged to majority rule and replace it with a self-appointed ruling elite.”
It is both ironic and tragic that when the WCC hits international headlines it has nothing to do with the things that belong to our peace. Rather is it a reflection that the WCC has majored in politics—and done so to the detriment of missions, evangelism, and even its own theology division. This imbalance dismays many believers who would like to see an equally vigorous Program to Combat Atheism, or a Program to Commend Christ. To that might be added a Program to Promote Civil Rights that would not discriminate because of the nationality of the victim or the size and influence of the oppressor.
Until it gets problems and priorities sorted out, the World Council of Churches need not be surprised if the world’s uncommitted adopt the kind of Nietzschean stance cited by John Baillie at Amsterdam in 1948: “I will not believe in the Redeemer of these Christians till they have shown me that they are redeemed.”
Is Relevance Tossing To And Fro?
Contemporary Americans doubtless think more readily of the heavens as populated by airplanes than by angelic hosts. They are more likely to begin the day with a deodorant than with the Decalogue, to carry a wristwatch than a Bible, and to go to a movie than to meditate on divine things. So the summons to be relevant, to meet this secular generation where it lives, needs to be heard.
The modern cry for relevance, however, all too often serves as a pretext for vacating essential features of the gospel. For example, certain denominational book editors use “relevance” as their excuse for offering books that depart notably from traditional beliefs. But then these books sell very poorly, which raises the question: to whom are such editors seeking to be relevant? The rank and file? Or a small elite very much like themselves? Fallen humanity is constantly “on the outs” with God’s Word. But Christianity’s basic mission is to hew to God’s timeless Word, not to weave a deft path through the “out” and “in” words of successive generations.
Concentration of the mass media on the momentary more than on the eternal is costly to the modern spirit for a multiplicity of reasons. The major networks marshall technical skills to escalate an emotive impact and to evoke maximal response by thrusting the viewers into the very midst of major battles and controversies. But the passing parade of short-term crises has a notable capacity for eroding dedicated engagement. Long before American forces withdrew from Vietnam one campus newspaper editorialized: “You hear people saying, ‘The war is a dead issue. The ecological crisis is more crucial! What has actually happened is that napalmed jungles, blood-spattered soldiers, and burned-out villages have been milked for all the full-color magazine covers and features they can supply. The ecological crisis is just what our jaded palates need—a refreshing and colorful change.’ ” With the arrival of the energy crisis, recently symbolized by Three Mile Island and long lines at empty gas stations, we do indeed have a change—though hardly refreshing.
Only if these contemporary crises are persuasively linked to the long-term human crisis of spirit, truth, morality, and conscience can one expect from a secular age the motivations for consistent sacrifice.
A vacuum in respect to the transcendent provides an open door for all the spurious führers whose manipulation of human pawns can only lead to a showering disillusionment. But a summons to the justice and justification of the self-revealing God and to the public duty he requires of us alongside the inner purity that biblical religion promotes can bring new life and power to a renegade humanity.
The gospel is enduringly good news, and ought to greet a generation enervated by bad news like a dramatic discovery of oil and natural gas. Great and good news is what the human spirit needs today if it is not to be sunk by despair. News can be big news and yet be bad news or even untrue. Yet news can also be true without being great, like an announcement that the crime rate has declined a notch or two. But the good, great, and true news that Jesus the crucified and risen Savior offers sinful humanity a life faith for eternity, and stands ready to cancel the guilt and power of sin in their daily existence, and to renew their sense of moral earnestness, meets every person at the point of private desperation.
