WORLD NEWS

Christianity in the World Today

A perceptible shift of emphasis from faith and order to mission as the center of Christian unity marked the World Council of Churches’ North American study conference Sept. 3–10 at Oberlin College, where the great evangelist Charles G. Finney was president during Civil War days.

Still ununified over “the nature of the unity we seek,” the conference nonetheless issued an 800-word message calling upon “every local church and congregation to examine the way in which it makes visible the nature of the Church of Christ” and looked for “continuing advance in the practical unity of united action by churches and congregations.” It spoke of a unity already achieved, and of a unity still to be gained.

Greek Orthodox bodies (the Great Archdiocese of North and South America, the Rumanian Orthodox Episcopate of America, the Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church of North America, the Syrian Antiochian Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of America) dissociated themselves from the conference statement. Their spokesman, the Rev. Georges Florovsky, professor at Harvard Divinity School, complained that the draft was open to various interpretations: “We are embarrassed to accept phrases which if not ambiguous are elastic. Is there any sense in using glorious phrases that can be accepted with mental reservation by everyone, but which secure no real agreement?” While other delegates thought the statement wordy and weak, some considered it an exciting symbol of positive achievements.

A beehive of activity, Oberlin revolved for the week around section and division meetings leading up to plenary sessions. Representing five Canadian and 34 U. S. denominations or churches, 279 delegates discussed and debated the nature of unity with 92 consultants, and 39 observers from non-member denominations. Although gathered on the first coeducational campus in the nation, women delegates (only two in the Methodist contingent of 40) were somewhat of an oddity. It was the first major ecumenical conference without organized protest by the American Council of Churches. Earlier ecumenical dispositions to dismiss non-participating groups as disruptive salients in the main movement of the Church’s life, moreover, gave way to respectful deference to those whose consciences disallow official participation (Roman Catholics, Protestant evangelicals, including Southern Baptists, Missouri Lutherans and denominations represented by National Association of Evangelicals and American Council of Churches), and appreciation of the unofficial presence of consultants and observers. The message to the churches stated: “We are saddened by the absence of members of other Churches whom we recognize as fellow-Christians, and we ask forgiveness for any failure of charity or understanding in us which may have kept them apart from our fellowship.”

More was at stake in the quest for unity, however, than charity and understanding. While plenary sessions were circumspect, reflecting a level of minimal agreement, conference vitality existed mainly in section meetings in which discussion might more easily become debate, and dissension disruption. Differences of faith and order shadowed the gathering more than division reports (commended to the churches for study) reflect in their emphasis on an overarching unity. The high hopes of some delegates were disappointed, that Oberlin might create a stirring confession of belief relevant to the contemporary cultural crisis. Recurring emphasis of President John Mackay of Princeton Theological Seminary that ecumenical concerns be framed in terms of obedience rather than doctrine and structure, voiced in committees, sessions, divisions, and plenary meetings, did not gain sharp expression in the message to the churches, although it shaped a growing mood among the formative leadership at Oberlin, and is mirrored in the division reports (cf. the editorial “Unity and Mission” elsewhere in this issue): Significantly, however, the main Oberlin directive spoke to rather than for the churches.

Nonetheless, Oberlin had high hours. The passionate hope of surmounting Protestant disunity marked all sessions. Some of the best minds in many Protestant confessions came out of isolation into ecclesiastical encounter to wrestle with faith and order problems. Main divisions covering faith, order and cultural pressures subdivided into twelve sections; of these, that on “Doctrinal Consensus and Conflict” was strategic. With President Edgar M. Carlson of Gustavus Adolphus College (Augustana Evangelical Lutheran) as chairman, the 30 delegates included President Mackav of Princeton (Presbyterian Church U.S.A.), Dr. Walter M. Horton (Congregational Christian) of Oberlin, Dr. T. A. Kantonen of Hamma (United Lutheran), and Dr. Robert L. Calhoun (Congregational Christian) of Yale among the consultants in this section. In all sessions, the old liberalism was but a defensive minority view, although sullen survivors murmured off the record that “these neo-orthodox fellows have now reacted against liberalism more radically than we did against fundamentalism a half century ago.” Theological emphasis had moved far beyond the old scorn for central Christian doctrines to a devout appropriation of many biblical themes.

Evening public meetings left profound impressions on the delegates. Addresses by the Rt. Rev. Angus Dun, Episcopal bishop of the Diocese of Washington, D. C., Professor Calhoun of Yale, Dr. Albert C. Outler of Southern Methodist University, Dr. Joseph Sittler of University of Chicago, and Dr. Walter T. Muelder of Boston University, represented the movement at a high and sometimes stirring level. Beyond the horizontal level of agreements and differences reflective of the WCC’s first decade, conscious effort was being made to shift discussion to the vertical level of divine confrontation and bequest. Professor Calhoun’s address included as a dramatic turn a cautious reassertion of Christian trinitarianism in the tradition of the Protestant Reformers, reflecting views of a WCC committee (with representatives from Yale, Union and Hamma) in contrast with narrower Christological formulations.

Oberlin included, moreover, provision for refreshing and positive Bible exposition by Dean Walter J. Harrelson of University of Chicago Divinity School. Dr. W. A. Visser ’t Hooft, WCC general secretary, told Sunday morning worshippers that “in the great encounter with other religions which have found new vitality, in the conflict with totalitarianism, in the struggle against cheap caricatures of the Christian Gospel, our cause lacks convincing power as long as we do not prove that we live under the authority of the same Word of God.”

But the question of an objective index to Oberlin remains a difficult one. In the high public addresses, spokesmen were not formulating official positions binding upon WCC constituents. This was clarified by Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, vice president of the Oberlin conference and stated clerk of Presbyterian Church U.S.A., in his comment on complaints over German Bishop Johannes Lilje’s remark that “we reject the notion that the Church needs that sort of historic guarantee of her continuity which is supposed to be given in the apostolic succession of bishops.” Prodded by private protests of Protestant Episcopal and Polish National Catholic delegates, Dr. Blake stressed that the speaker had full right to voice his convictions, yet did not commit the conference. Orthodox Bishop Athenagoras, who pronounced the benediction after Bishop Lilje’s sermon the previous night, publicly told the plenary session: “A few more sermons like this … and the ecumenical consciousness is gone.” Public addresses, therefore, were not definitive.

Some delegates considered “the Church at worship” the heart of the ecumenical enterprise, but this too had flutters. Variegated programs of worship and prayer, reflecting Greek Orthodox as well as more familiar Protestant traditions, are now an ecumenical commonplace. But initial announcements of a communion service were clarified to stress optional participation, because the WCC in accord with policy sponsors no such service. Greek Orthodox delegates chose not to exercise their option. Unprotested by participating groups, however, was the Greek Orthodox devotional service including prayers for the dead. Devotional life at Oberlin was no sure index.

Conference leaders spoke, in fact, of a prevalent ecumenical temper more than of the ecumenical mind. It was really an open question whether Oberlin signaled victory for the Great Dane (Kierkegaard) as fully as for the Great Tradition. In the emphasis on the priority of obedience over faith and order, in the phrasing of doctrinal concerns, and in the general formulation of positions, the neo-orthodox approach—although with many shadings—held initiative. Yet leaders were eager to preserve both evangelical and modernist participation in the dialectic. A theory of religious knowledge reflective of modern speculation was frequently evident in the dialectical relating of revelation to reason, in the disregard of coherence as a criterion in religious commitment, in the capitulation of intellectual considerations to a more voluntaristic view of faith, and in invocation of the Bible as relative authority only.

This approach was blessed, in turn, by the tendency of the earlier Lund and Edinburgh conferences to relate study of the nature of the Church directly to the study of the nature of Christ, rather than to an adjustment at doctrinal borders. Taken as doctrine, the declarations on Christology were diverse and often inadequate, and the trinitarian emphasis did not survive in official reports. Prevailing views were criticized for doing more justice to the humanity than to the deity of Christ, in view of a semi-Arian tendency that affirmed that Jesus is the Christ while refusing to speak of the full deity of the person. While Oberlin bristled, moreover, with appeals to the Word of God, and the emergence of biblical theology was identified as “one of the exciting developments of our time,” the conference deleted from its statement to the churches an insistence that this development “does not constitute a return to … uncritical bibliolatry” because of possible effect upon the laity.

The major lack was Oberlin’s failure to exhibit an unambiguous Protestant principle of authority. The hope for unity, some leaders stressed, lies in the ecumenical movement “studying the Scriptures together,” but the controlling suppositions of such study remained diverse. In Oberlin the weather blew both hot and cold, both wet and dry. Religious journalists, some fresh from the Madison Square Garden phenomenon, found no revival atmosphere. The notion of a growing unity was more of a feeling than of anything logically demonstrable. This was no unique kairos, no time of decisive change, in the minds and lives of the delegates that could be refracted at the local level. Ecumenical leaders who looked for a breakthrough into the midrange of American life were disappointed. There was a feeling that Oberlin’s conclusions were too much hastened and dictated by the time factor, by the necessity of reflecting sectional and divisional unity for the sake of plenary unanimities. In the one fellowship of Oberlin remained lonely souls—there to bear witness, professing to love the same Lord, yet unconvinced that the message to the churches faithfully reflected their differences.

Greek Orthodox delegates criticized the discussions both at the outset and conclusion as framed from an inadmissible viewpoint that the unity of the Church has been lost and needs recovery, instead of permanently characterizing the body of Christ. They publicly pointed to the Eastern Orthodox Church as its visible and historical expression: “Since Pentecost she has possessed the true unity intended by Christ … She has been unassociated with the events related to the breakdown of religious unity in the West.” Insisting that the Orthodox Church has kept the integrity both “of the apostolic faith and of the apostolic order,” her delegates lamented the deletion from the program of “the most vital problem of ministry and that of the Apostolic Succession, without which … there is neither unity nor church.” Before the week ended, German Lutheran Bishop Johannes Lilje remarked in a sermon that “Protestantism which is so frequently blamed for having sown the seed of disunity within Christendom, was neither the first nor the greatest schism which Rome had to suffer; the great schism of 1054 (900 years before Evanston) separated … the Eastern church from its Latin lord.”

Orthodox delegates justified WCC membership under the category of “witness.” [Roman Catholic spokesmen, off the record, say that the Greek Orthodox Church has no business in the WCC, but are nonetheless glad she is in, because Orthodox leaders “say many things we would say.”] Although officially distributed, the Orthodox statement was largely ignored until a Jesuit observer asked the section on doctrine why there was no comment on it. The Greek Orthodox delegate promptly gave answer: his church’s claim to be the Una Sancta is avoided as an unpleasantry in the Protestant search for unity (which supposes that none of its members has given adequate expression to all the truth), yet for having invited the Eastern Orthodox Church into the WCC, Protestantism must pay the price of hearing that claim. “Sometimes we Orthodox feel much out of place, and even wonder whether we speak the same language,” he added, “but we value the Protestant search for unity, and bear witness in it; if we were to withdraw, the WCC would become simply a pan-Protestant endeavor.”

In his opening address Bishop Dun took note of misgivings produced by the conference title. But it did not necessarily exclude, he said, a given spiritual unity among believers, nor imply such division that the one Church must search for and restore its unity, but reflected rather that the Church’s presence is to be acknowledged in other churches, and that others stand outside the unity that is given.

Later named chairman of the plenary sessions, Bishop Dun voiced “the ecumenical sorrow”: “For at least 35 years I have been engaged in such conversations.… If you are like me, you will find, as you meet your brothers and sisters coming out of their own particular households of faith, that you cannot think lightly or contemptuously of what has nurtured them, even though you should not be at home where they are at home. And you will experience afresh the sorrow of realizing that they go back and you go back into households or structures of faith and prayer and allegiance that in many ways separate you from them and fail grievously to make manifest our unity in Christ. This sorrow can turn you into a patient seeker for the household in which we could all be at home.”

Nature Of Ministry

The ministry of Jesus Christ continues in the world today as the Church participates in his ministry. The bourgeois, middle-class churches of America are very imperfect, but nevertheless the true Church is in them. The Church must continually struggle to get its message and forms from the New Testament rather than from the secular culture. The special ministries of the clergy are instrumental and come from the primary unit of the congregation in Christ dwells.

These were some of the emphases of four notable addresses delivered at the Fourth National Triennial Conference of the Inter-Seminary Movement at Oberlin, Ohio (Aug. 27–Sept. 1), at which 500 theological students and professors from 64 seminaries of 23 denominations met to consider “The Nature of the Ministry We Seek.”

Dr. W. A. Visser ’t Hooft, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, in his keynote address, “Slaves and Spokesmen,” referred to the renewed search for authority in the world today, pointing out that there is no Christianity without accepting the final authority of Jesus Christ, concerning whom the Church must declare, “Thou are the Son of God.” The ministry must be above all else the ministry of the word, the living Word, known only through the Scriptures; “If there is ever to be a theological renaissance in America it will involve the rediscovery of the Greek New Testament.” “Preaching has to do with events, facts, the great reality”; consequently, there is only one kind of valid preaching, expository preaching.

Dr. James I. McCord, Dean, of Austin (Texas) Presbyterian Seminary, speaking on “Flunkies and Soothsayers,” charged that the ministry as we know it in American churches is a luxury the rest of the world cannot afford. He contrasted the typical American ministerial student and minister with a simple-hearted lay-minister who works as a hod carrier all week and ministers evenings and Sundays in poor communities of Latin America. Although not arguing against a trained ministry, he believes the congregation is in the ministry, and deplored the term “layman” which too often implies an incompetent and unskilled person. “It is not the minister who should organize the congregation; it is the congregation which should organize its ministry of preaching, of oversight, and of mercy.” The Church needs to focus less attention on ministerial “orders” and give greater heed “to God’s ordering us within the body of Christ.”

Dr. Paul Lehman of Harvard Divinity School spoke on “Society’s Elite and Christ’s Elect.” In the Old Testament the people who were called as God’s elect assumed this made them society’s elite; they confused their theological terms with sociological ideas. Under the new covenant the Church is constantly in tension between being society’s elite and Christ’s elect. The elite count their blessings, but the elect are troubled by them. The elite want to be seen, but the elect sit with publicans and sinners. The elite are respectable and conforming, but the elect must be non-conforming and challenging to the world order. He showed that the goal of the Christian life is maturity, possible only within the fulness of the Christian community. The congregation “must be the vital center and not the dead center of the church.”

The American theological student today is living “the distracted life,” said Dr. Daniel Day Williams of Union Theological Seminary, New York. Theological education is being blocked, he said, by “too many courses, too many subjects, too many lectures, too many papers, too many selections to be read from too many books, instead of rereading and digesting those that can be mastered only through prolonged attention.” Dr. Williams said the greatest lack in American seminaries is in the field of Christian ethics, dealing with questions of what to do in contemporary situations, on Christian ground. Practical studies in the seminary are important to help the minister continually bring to bear on the life of the Church valid criteria upon which to judge its work; “the theological school is the Church in its most intense and concentrated activities.”

C.A.H.

Oberlin Comments

Non-member observers of Oberlin sessions divided in their appraisals solicited by CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Father Gustave Weigel, noted Jesuit theologian of Woodstock College, gave Roman Catholic reaction: “… Today the language and spirit are contemptuous of the Liberal Theology … (and) also far removed from the concerns and approach of those Evangelicals called Fundamentalists. The present terminology could be called ‘Catholicizing,’ though more evangelical than genuinely Catholic in its dynamism … From the Catholic point of view … the primary issues were never faced … There was no accepted test for any theological statement. Rather, creedal tests were deprecated … In consequence, it was impossible to come to a common understanding of what the Church is; to tell what revelation is or how it can be decisively ascertained. In spite of this fundamental incapacity, all took it for granted that all belonged to the Church and that they were speaking for her … The Conference belief was activist, vague and its expression emotionally warm but intellectually baffling. Nor can the accepted formulas reveal the wide and contradicting varieties of the understanding of the terms. The Bible was always recognized as a normative expression of Christian doctrine. Yet there was no common understanding of what the Bible is or how its authority can be exercised … The Catholic doctrine of Tradition was timidly approximated in the term ‘the historical experience of the Churches.’ … The unity of the churches in the Conference is more emotional and verbal than substantial … There is a strong tendency to make doctrinal statement a matter of less than primatial significance, if not of indifference. There is indeed some doctrinal unity in the conference, but on nothing decisive and crucial.”

Dr. John W. V. Smith, Church of God: “Two aspects … seemed to stand out. The first was the abundance of strong affirmations of basic truth about the unity of the Church … The second was the very apparent difficulty in really apprehending these truths … Discussions often revealed many deep-seated prejudices and an unwillingness to look beyond particular traditions. At times presuppositions contrary to Biblical truth were evident.…”

The Rev. F. Burton Nelson, Mission Covenant Church: “… Reports from the various sections indicate a marked sensitivity to contemporary currents in Christian theology … There appears to be a fresh appreciation of what the Bible has to say … The majority of churchmen at Oberlin have seen that divisions in the Church are deeply rooted, and … not likely to be alleviated by sentimental approaches.…”

National Day Of Prayer

Wednesday, October 2, has been proclaimed by President Eisenhower as a national day of prayer, according to annual custom initiated by joint resolution of Congress in 1952. The President urged that “each according to his own faith unite in prayer and meditation on that day” and “in constant dependence upon our Creator for the spiritual gifts required in the conduct of our affairs as individuals and as a nation … ask for wisdom and strength” in seeking the “welfare of all people through a just and lasting peace.…”

Cathedral’S Fiftieth

Washington Cathedral marked the fiftieth anniversary of the laying of its foundation stone September 28–29. Observance events included special services at the cathedral and a dinner addressed by Presiding Bishop Henry Knox Sherrill of the Protestant Episcopal Church. The Bishop of Coventry, Dr. Cuthbert Bardsley, preached the anniversary sermon.

New York, Baptist Target

Dr. Paul S. James, Pastor of the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, for the last 16 years, has been appointed by the Home Mission Board, as director of Southern Baptist work in the greater New York area. He will also become pastor of the Southern Baptist Chapel group in New York, which presently meets at the 23rd Street YMCA in downtown Manhattan and will soon be organized as the first Southern Baptist church in New York City.

In a statement to his church, Dr. James said: “This is a call to lead Southern Baptists in the establishment of churches in one of America’s greatest mission fields. It comes in the wake of the Graham Crusade when the time seems ripe for constituting churches and missions according to the pattern being followed by Southern Baptists.”

The spirit of ecumenical merger, motive force of contemporary Protestantism, has set as it next goal the integration of the International Missionary Council with the World Council of Churches. Most ecumenical leaders view this step as a logical move in shaping a master framework of organizational unity for Protestant witness, and they are confident that merger will be a fait accompli before the end of the 1960 WCC assembly. Many evangelical leaders, on the other hand, regard the drive for merger with dismay, and as tending to disrupt the harmony of missionary effort in many parts of the world. One fact is certain: while the merger would bring almost half the world witness of Protestant missions within the orbit of the ecumenical movement, it poses fresh problems for mission boards at home and missionary workers abroad.

35,000 Protestant Missionaries

The number of Protestant missionaries in the world today is just under 35,000. Standing at the frontiers of Christian faith against the powers of unbelief and darkness, this missionary force faces modern pressures for alignment unknown in apostolic days. The missionary today is caught in the tension between denominational and interdenominational or superdenominational alignment, which the ecumenical movement proposes to transcend, ostensibly by fulfilling the New Testament conception of the unity of the Church. Over and above this issue, however, hangs the theological tension of the day, posed by the conflict between the liberal and evangelical theology.

Strength Of Imc Effort

Since its organization in 1921, the IMC has gathered somewhat less than half the Protestant missionary personnel around the world into its orbit. Since IMC includes most of the older and established mission boards, it doubtless represents half the Protestant missionary effort. Most estimates place its missionary force between 12,000 and 15,000. The bulk of its strength is in missionary personnel from the United States and Great Britain; in fact, 60% of its missionary personnel is accounted for by the Division of Foreign Missions of the National Council of Churches, U.S.A., and much of the remainder by its British counterpart, the Conference of Missionary Societies. Of the 35,000 Protestant missionaries, 25,000 are from North America, and 43% of these are represented by IMC.

IMC functions as an association of national councils of missions and as an association of councils of national churches, with a shifting emphasis from mission boards to younger churches as the basis of membership. It is rooted in an effort to coordinate the missionary effort of national churches whose rise is an aspect of ecumenical Christianity in the twentieth century.

At first IMC was promoted as a non-theological agency concerned only with missionary cooperation and efficiency. Its early efforts were carried on under the theme of the missionary proclamation of the gospel. Many evangelical missionaries cooperated with the understanding that its existence was wholly independent of ecumenical interests. Although the IMC program was increasingly represented as a means of fulfilling Christ’s prayer for the unity of the Church—the favorite theme of all ecumenical ventures—evangelical leaders who were apprehensive about this trend understood ecumenical pronouncements before and after the 1955 Evanston Assembly to mean that no plan was on foot to integrate IMC and the WCC.

The fact is, however, that IMC and WCC had already been brought into an official consitutional relationship at the Amsterdam assembly in 1950. IMC leaders, replying to evangelical protests that they were misled by ambiguous statements at Evanston, stress that the question in debate was not whether to merge, but when to merge, and that 1955 was not the propitious time. The announcement was not “we have resolved not to integrate,” but rather, “we have not resolved to integrate.”

Other Mission Agencies

Alongside IMC, which accounts for less than half of the Protestant missionary personnel, exist other missionary agencies organized on a specifically theological basis, both denominational and interdenominational. Organized in 1917 as an association of non-denominational faith mission boards, Interdenominational Foreign Missions Association now represents 6,000 missionaries. Evangelical Foreign Mission Association, an association of mission boards formed in 1945, reports 4,600 missionaries in direct membership. Doubtless these figures reflect some measure of overlap. But since EFMA represents an additional 1,000 missionaries not in direct membership but outside IFMA, these organizations account for more than 10,000 missionaries.

Both IFMA and EFMA are fundamentalist or evangelical in theology. IFMA excludes denominational and holiness groups, while EFMA includes both. In addition to its framework of spiritual fellowship, EFMA emphasizes its service features (expediting passports, protesting infractions of religious liberty, etc.).

Beside these movements exist denominational groups going their own way and represented by none of the larger organizations. For example, there are 1,000 Southern Baptist missionaries and almost 300 Lutheran (Missouri Synod) missionaries outside the orbit of IMC, IFMA and EFMA.

The Shift In Imc Emphasis

When local and national councils of churches were organized in foreign lands by the ecumenical movement, many areas boasted a predominance of evangelical missionaries. In many instances these missionaries did not wish to be excluded from a voice in organized Protestantism. Since IMC was projected as a non-creedal agency assisting established missions in doing their job, these evangelicals did not resist its advances, but enlisted in the local IMC councils.

In recent years, evangelical opinion has cooled toward IMC, primarily for two reasons. Little by little IMC has moved into the realm of theological issues. The question of the nature of the Church has been constantly raised by the younger churches in relation to their mission boards, and this in turn has renewed the issues of liberalism, neo-supernaturalism, and evangelicalism. Moreover, while IMC has not directly implemented the WCC program, the agency has doubtless done much indirect footwork for WCC since the Amsterdam assembly.

The Big Merger Looms

These issues have now come into major focus with the announcement that merger of IMC and the WCC is under active consideration. Whereas a few years ago the imminence of merger was scouted, the current emphasis is that the WCC in reality is a product of the IMC as the symbol of ecumenical missionary concern. The IMC claims that its 1921 beginnings were really sparked by the Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910. Whereas the ecumenical movement has centered interest in the concerns of Faith and Order, and Life and Work, it is now proposed to center its outreach in the missionary movement.

The next step toward merger is scheduled next December when the IMC assembly at Ghana, on the African Gold Coast, will vote on a draft plan of integration. If approval is ratified by IMC constituent councils, the plan will come before the 1960 assembly of the WCC.

Denominational Questions

Structural and theological aspects of the proposed merger are causing concern to leaders in some denominational mission boards.

On the structural side the questions are numerous. The IMC has been and is, as its name implies, an organization strictly devoted to the business of missions. Those who compose it are, for the most part, persons who are engaged in the missionary task. Thus IMC is of the nature of a “trades association” in which those who are charged with a specialized responsibility meet for consultation and counsel concerning matters to which they hold a direct administrative relationship. The WCC, on the other hand, is quite different in structure. It is, as the name suggests, a council of churches. Representatives from various ecclesiastical bodies to the WCC are not persons who necessarily have any relationship to their own denominational program of missions. For example, of the 12 representatives of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. in the WCC, not one has any administrative connection with its Foreign Mission Board or with its program of work overseas. The framers of the plan of integration have undoubtedly seen this difficulty and have sought to meet it by proposing that there be set up within the WCC a Commission on World Missions and Evangelism, approximately two-thirds of whose membership will be drawn from councils now affiliated with the IMC. However, this Commission would have no final authority within the Council, but would submit its report and make recommendation to the Assembly and the Central Committee.

Some denominational spokesmen also fear that all this machinery of organization, with the interposition of additional steps before any action can be regarded as authorized, will have the effect of retarding the functions and processes that the organization is designed to serve. The unwieldiness of ever larger structures involves enormous overhead costs, time waste and delay, and inefficiency that one critic declares “would bankrupt any organization except one supported by charity.”

Fear Growth Of Power

Others warn that democratic liberties characteristic of Protestantism will be in serious danger under this system of concentrated power. While the new organization is projected as “consultative, not controlling,” designed to serve the purposes of reference and counsel, and without compromising the independence and autonomy of constituent bodies (the draft plan of merger asserts that “the Commission has no mandatory authority over any of the affiliated or associated councils in its membership”), they regard this as unconvincing. Mandatory power there may not be; but the power of pressure, persuasion, preponderance, publicity and propaganda is tremendous. A kind of regimentation can be brought about which is absolute in authority. Experience clearly shows, they argue, that organizations of this sort, begun for the purpose of mutual consultation and sharing, soon develop administrative powers.

By way of example, such observers note that since the Foreign Missions Conference was superseded by the organization of the National Council in 1950 with its Division of Foreign Missions, there has been a gradual change with respect to function. The elements of reference, counsel and consultation are still there, but there is a definite development in the direction of making the Division of Foreign Missions and its Executive Board increasingly administrative and directive. Various units of the Division, such as the Africa Committee, the Far Eastern Committee and the Latin-America Committee, are setting up programs and projects administered centrally from New York, the boards participating by contributing their share to the special budgets required for these enterprises and by their representation on the controlling committees. There develops, through this process, a sort of collective administration of rapidly increasing programs of work in these several areas. Would it not be too much to expect, observers ask, that the same thing would not happen if the merger takes place between the IMC and the WCC?

Whatever the structural problems, the theological aspect is viewed by some denominational spokesmen as the real heart of the difficulty. Theologically speaking, the WCC is a disappointment to many who stand for a vigorous Christian testimony in the world. They feel that the Council, purporting to represent the major stream of Christian life, thought and action in the world, ought to have a more forthright testimony in faith and doctrine. What kind of mission will be fostered and promoted by a unity that seems to be interested primarily in organizational oneness, they ask, rather than in a united proclamation of a forthright full-rounded gospel that will be honoring to Christ?

Evangelical Concern

The evangelical missionary enterprise has been thrown into new tensions over ecumenical issues through the IMC-WCC merger maneuver. Evangelical missionaries enlisted in the IMC on the basis of its non-creedal framework are now threatening to detach themselves from local missionary councils on foreign fields unless those councils detach themselves from IMC in view of the proposed merger with WCC. The ecumenical drive for merger, it is protested, while ostensibly in the name of the unity of the Church, is actually disruptive, since it is now threatening and curtailing the range of missionary cooperation, in and through the identification of the broad missionary interest with an objectionably abbreviated theological base as represented by the WCC.

Congo Protestant Council, one of the oldest members of IMC and also one of the most vigorous councils in Africa, has threatened to withdraw from IMC because of the provocative theological issue if the merger with WCC is consummated. The Norwegian Missionary Society has also given indications of withdrawal on the ground that its workers would not be at home within the new alignment.

Meanwhile, tensions between evangelical forces and the IMC are rising. Some missionary leaders resent increasing IMC pressures in behalf of the WCC aimed to secure evangelical continuance within the merger framework. IMC spokesmen have propagandized to preserve the status quo on foreign fields while home constituencies are pressuring missionary boards for theological reasons to pull their missionaries out of foreign councils that persist in affiliation with IMC. In French Indo-China, evangelical leaders complain, IMC advocates have sought to influence local churches contrary to the principles of their governing mission boards in America. EFMA has already set aside a day during its Winona Lake conference, October 1–4, when its executive committee will discuss problems related to the drive for merger.

Ecumenical spokesmen discount evangelical fears that the proposed merger will neutralize the missionary effort through a blurring of theological distinctives. But evangelical mission leaders point to the Church of South India, arguing that it was shaped according to the lowest common denominator theologically on the ecumenical pattern and then defected from a Bible-centered ministry.

Peace Of The Churches

In recent decades evangelical leaders have been exasperated frequently because they have been dismissed as uncooperative or divisive simply because they have not enlisted in ecumenical organizations and ventures. Many of them point to the implications of the IMC-WCC merger as an evidence that ecumenical forces are more interested in massively organized Protestantism than in harmony of the Protestant witness. What genuine devotion to the unity of Christian missions, they ask, dictates an unyielding drive for massive mergers that are provocative of tensions in evangelical missionary effort and disruptive of the harmony of established church enterprises?

Evangelical spokesmen point especially to the Congo, where the crisis posed by the merger possibility affects 54 mission boards. Of these, 46 are in the Congo Protestant Council, which is older than IMC, of which it is now an affiliate. Some of the largest of these boards are also in EFMA and IFMA, but all have cooperated and contributed to the Council within the IMC as a non-theological agency. The vast majority of these boards want no affiliation with the WCC for theological reasons, and their leaders have given advance warning that an IMC-WCC merger will split the Congo Protestant Council.

The disruptive consequences of the IMC-WCC drive for merger, some evangelical leaders argue, gives a hollow center to ecumenical attempts to impute to evangelical Christianity blame for the disunity of Protestant witness.

As pressures increase for the ecumenical movement’s absorption of the missionary enterprise, reaction will also increase on the part of those lacking enthusiasm for the ecumenical effort in its present theological outlines. The present Protestant missionary situation is therefore not bright with the promise of harmony.

Is Merger Assured?

Some Protestant leaders doubt, however, that the IMC-WCC merger is certain of achievement in 1960, though they regard it as inevitable. Dr. Norman Goodall, secretary of the Joint Committee of the WCC and IMC, concedes some reservations have been voiced both within IMC and WCC to the present formulation. Moreover, the IMC constitution makes possible the defeat of the merger plan, once it is commended to the member councils in December at the Ghana assembly, by the opposition vote of but six of those councils during the subsequent two-year interval.

Already there are indications that the Congo and the Norwegian councils will oppose. Moreover, opposition to the merger has also been voiced by the Orthodox Church (both Greek and Russian), for reasons quite different from evangelical opposition. The complaint of the Orthodox Church is that the merger would imply WCC approval of the Protestant Reformation missionary witness to which the Orthodox Church is opposed in its own geographical sphere as objectionable proselyting. (Some ecumenical leaders think the Orthodox opposition will help to crystallize evangelical enthusiasm, while some evangelical leaders reply that the inclusion of the Orthodox Church within the ecumenical framework only serves to dramatize its objectionable theological base.)

Although Dr. Goodall concedes that the IMC assembly “could turn down” the merger plan as too divisive, he thinks the general proposal is more likely to receive a majority vote at Ghana, and that its fate will be commended to the constituent councils. In the event of their approval, the merger will be consummated at the 1960 WCC assembly.

END