WCC Central Committee: Fellowship Adrift

NEWS

There were plenty of things for reporters to write about at last month’s annual meeting of the 125-member policy-making Central Committee of the World Council of Churches in Utrecht, Holland, the country where the WCC was born in 1948. But the most significant action was the election of Philip A. Potter as general secretary (see following story), to succeed the retiring Eugene Carson Blake on November 1.

In an interview, Potter disclosed that he will try to get many of the non-WCC churches in Africa and South America into the WCC fold. Most of these churches are theologically conservative, and some belong to the United States-based World Evangelical Fellowship. But, said Potter, these churches tend to be socially and politically active, quite unlike their U. S. counterparts. In fact, he said, third-world evangelicals are dismayed by the silence of Western evangelicals on important social issues, and are thus ripe for WCC harvesting. Potter’s identity as both a black and a third worlder, his advocacy of activism, and his facility in quoting the Bible should make him an effective reaper.

Whether his election will help the cause of unity remains to be seen. Although the WCC was brought into existence as “an effective tool for Christian unity,” that unity has recently proved to be more illusive than ever. The three-year-old Program to Combat Racism has caused bitter grass-roots reaction by funding controversial “liberation” movements; the Dutch Council of Churches and other member groups have left the fold. The Vatican recently served notice that it would not seek membership within the foreseeable future. (Indeed, commented an official Catholic observer to the committee members, after careful study and observation the Vatican is wondering just how committed to the WCC its member churches really are.) Blake and other speakers complained about the lack of genuine fellowship and unity in the ranks. Ironically, the meeting’s theme was “Committed to Fellowship.”

The Central Committee decided to raise the goal of its controversial anti-racism fund from $500,000 to $1 million (about $400,000 has come in so far). In a split vote the body also acted to get rid of WCC stock in companies doing business in southern Africa (about $3.5 million in WCC reserve funds is said to be affected), and to urge its member churches to do likewise.

Episcopal bishop John E. Hines, Lutheran Church in America president Robert J. Marshall (a member of the WCC executive committee, a 15-member group within the Central Committee that meets every two years), and the WCC’s financial unit opposed the action, saying it is best to exert economic pressure from within. Blake and others argued successfully for disinvestment.

Curiously, although Burgess Carr of Nairobi, head of the All-Africa Council of Christian Churches, said his council’s committee concerned with the Program to Combat Racism was unanimously for the WCC disinvestment move, committee member A. H. Zulu (Anglican bishop of Zululand in South Africa) said in a letter that he opposed such economic reprisals because they will hurt blacks more than whites.

In other actions, the Central Committee set up a rehabilitation fund and program for Indochina, called for immediate unilateral U. S. ceasefire in Viet Nam and withdrawal of all U. S. troops by December 31, and asked Uganda to refrain from oppressive acts against its citizens.

The latter seemed to be a painful decision for the WCC body. The council has been badgered almost daily by the press over its silence on Uganda’s announced decision to evict Asians. In reply Blake and other WCC officials said that the WCC spoke only when spoken to—“and no churchmen in Uganda have approached us yet.” In fact, Central Committee member Janet Wesonga of Uganda was inclined to have the WCC remain silent when the issue finally surfaced on the floor. Other blacks wanted a strong statement against Uganda, but Blake suggested milder wording and got it. The measure covered only the Asians with Ugandan citizenship, not the 50,000 without it.

A group of Dutch students led by church-history professor Gilles Quispel of the universities in Utrecht and Leuven (Belgium) demonstrated in the lobby of the meeting hall. They implored the WCC to send a message of “solidarity” to oppressed Christians in the Soviet Union to inform Soviet authorities when the civil and constitutional rights of citizens are violated, and to take a stand with the oppressed and against the oppressor everywhere in the world. (The WCC has always publicly passed by on the other side when confronted with reports of persecution of Christians in eastern Europe, not wanting to rock the ecumenical boat. But several WCC officials admit privately that the situation for Christians in the Soviet Union is “unbearable.”) The demonstration failed when W. A. Visser’t Hooft, the first WCC executive secretary, charged that Quispel had been a quisling during Nazi times.

A more positive demonstration was offered delegates by the controversial Children of God cult (see November 5, 1971, issue, page 38, and December 17, 1971, issue, page 35). The Children were invited to conduct a noon worship service and to set up a table in the display area. For nearly two weeks the Children, who are on record opposing the institutional church, courted the WCCers with songs, smiles, and Scripture verses. In return, says leader Jonathan “Hosea” Berg. 23, the Children were accorded the warmest welcome given them by any church group. A number of WCCers and family members accepted Christ, say the Children, and several moved into the Children’s colony at Amsterdam at least temporarily. The demonstration marks a change in style for the Children; they formerly invaded church gatherings to call down God’s judgment upon members lax in discipleship and doctrine.

What the Central Committee left unsaid evoked comments among reporters and observers. There was no mention of the surging revival movements around the globe or of the growing charismatic phenomenon, and there was only an oblique reference to the Jesus movement among youth. Young people were absent from sessions, even in Sunday ecumenical church services.

Blake said church division, especially at the Communion table, was responsible for young people’s lack of interest. If the fellowship crisis is not taken seriously, he warned, the young will leave “to sit at other tables and bow down before other altars.”

Potter said a major WCC conference on “Salvation Today” to be held in Indonesia at the end of the year will take serious note of the spiritual upsurge, especially among the young. Additionally, the education and communication committee called for a renewal conference to discover “where and how God is acting today through new and radical movements,” and stated it should include “conservative evangelicals and Jesus people” as well as women, social activists, and others.

Eight churches were voted into WCC membership. These include the 500,000-member Church of North India formed in 1970 by the merger of ten groups, the 150,000-member Presbyterian Church of Zaire, and the International Evangelical Church, a Pentecostal body claiming 200 churches with 200,000 members in Italy.

A 1973 budget of about $1.5 million was adopted, not including relief or certain other programs. Two German churches wiped out the WCC’s 1971 deficit with $250,000 in gifts, canceling anticipated sharp cutbacks.

There were major hassles over drafting a letter to the churches on the topic of fellowship and over the wording of a theme for the next assembly. The letter was sent back twice for revision, including an acknowledgment of the “many Christians [in the WCC] who are not in sympathy with some contemporary trends in the ecumenical movement.” The letter calls for discussion of the issue but recognizes that after everything is talked out some may feel “bound in conscience to act in ways that divide us.”

West Indian To Succeed Blake

By a unanimous vote of its Central Committee in Utrecht last month, the World Council of Churches chose the Reverend Philip Alford Potter, 51, to succeed Dr. Eugene Carson Blake as its general secretary.

Potter is a black who hails from the West Indian island of Dominica. A six-footer and former athletic star, he was educated at Jamaica’s United Theological College and London University. He was active in the Student Christian Union movement, served as a Methodist pastor in Haiti, and held executive positions with the WCC youth department and the British Methodist Missionary Society. Since 1966 he has headed the WCC’s Commission on World Mission and Evangelism.

When in Geneva, Potter sings in a Church of Scotland choir that is conducted by his Jamaican wife Doreen. He is due to begin his five-year WCC term when Blake retires this fall (in November).

In his acceptance speech Potter said he “grew up with a passion for Christian unity” because his father was Roman Catholic, his mother Protestant. “Only as the cross becomes a central part of our life will we come closer together,” he declared.

The new chief executive warmly defended the council’s involvement in the anti-racist program, in international affairs, urban industrial mission, interchurch aid and development, against the charge that these tend to divide Christians. “It is my conviction,” he said, “that to separate the horizontal from the vertical, the immanent from the transcendent, is a denial of the cross and the resurrection.”

Potter is a Bible student in the tradition of Karl Barth. He salts his addresses liberally with scriptural illustrations. He subscribes to the so-called documentary theory. He assigns Genesis, for example, to writers in the fifth century B.C., and sees some biblical accounts as myths.

In an interview Potter tended to give vague or ambiguous explanations of his doctrinal beliefs. He says he is not a universalist on salvation and that a “personal point of reference” must be established with Christ. He allows for differing “expressions and styles” in living out this relation to Christ. His own permanent attachment to Christ came when he was a young teen-ager, he recalls.

Above all, Potter—also a student of history—believes that faith and action are inseparably entwined. “Each new man in Christ is the promise of the renewal of society,” he says, declaring that Christ saves a man not so he can escape the world but so that he can be “more genuinely involved in it as an authentic person.” To be for Christ, he adds, “is to be for humanity.”

The question for the WCC, says Potter, is whether “we can live with the tension between faith and action … in repentance, faith, and joy.”

The conflict over the theme at first was whether it should be “Liberated for Fellowship” or “Liberation for Fellowship.” Then Metropolitan Antony Bloom of the London-based Russian Orthodox Church criticized the absence of the name of Jesus. He wondered if the WCC was “calculatingly” avoiding “the name which is at our center.” He drew enthusiastic applause when he asked, “How can we dare to hope for a good assembly if we do not openly witness and proclaim the name of the only one who is liberation?” Others voiced support, and the issue was sent back for further study. (Whenever deliberations touched on theological matters, Orthodox leaders all but monopolized the floor; on social and political questions they were silent.)

Although other issues got the headlines, the overriding issue was fellowship and unity. For Blake, the pursuit of unity has brought frustration and disappointment. Visser ’t Hooft’s great vision was for theology; it led to the emphasis on faith and order during his term as WCC head. Blake came to the job with a passion for unity. He had been instrumental in the United Presbyterian merger, and in 1960 he issued the call that led to the Consultation on Church Union, a movement in which he now has little interest. His dabbling in social protests and programs helped to bring into focus for him the essential disunity that exists within the Church. As he prepared to step down, he said he felt “frustration over failure to achieve greater unity.” He cited “distrust, timidity, separatism, small vision, misunderstanding, confessional arrogance, and cultural, ideological, regional, and national communities which exclude each other in varying degrees.”

With that kind of turbulence, and with activist Philip Potter at the helm, the fellows in the WCC ship may be headed for the rocks. Time—and the 1975 General Assembly at Jakarta—will tell.

Bavaria Won’T Listen

The Evangelical Lutheran (state) Church of Bavaria has refused to publish the Pentecost message of the presidents of the World Council of Churches. In a letter to the WCC general secretary Eugene Carson Blake, Lutheran bishop Hermann Dietzfelbinger declared that the message, signed by the seven WCC presidents, was defective in its exposition of Scripture.

The bishop said that the living Christ was not mentioned anywhere, and that as a result the reference to the Holy Spirit was misleading. Because of this “unclear theological background,” he said, the Bavarian church decided not to cause confusion in the congregations by publishing it.

This Pentecost message, the only annual message of the WCC to all the congregations of member churches, referred to the activity of the Holy Spirit in appealing for more vigorous activity against environmental pollution, military action, and human isolation.

Canadian Union In Limbo?

Eighteen months ago in the honeymoon capital of Niagara Falls, Canada’s two largest non-Catholic churches, the Anglican and United, met in joint sessions, enthusiastic for forthcoming union. In the prairie city of Saskatoon last month representatives of one of the churches, the United Church of Canada, found that the prospect of church union now seems to be drifting into a lethargic limbo.

Outgoing moderator A. B. B. Moore—longtime union enthusiast and co-chairman of the commission that produced a draft plan of union presented in 1971—disappointedly told 450 United Church delegates at the twenty-fifth General Council Meeting that union seemed far off. He said there had been a noticeable drop in temperature between the two churches in the eighteen months since the Niagara conclave. Union talk is entering the doldrums, Moore said, as caution quietly overtakes the spirit of adventure that characterized early Anglican-United talks.

Nevertheless, a proposal to halt all talks with the Anglicans was overwhelmingly defeated. (The proposal said that while its sponsors themselves favored union, the Anglicans seemed less than ardent about the plan.) Moore had urged the delegates to reject the proposal and stated that the 2.2-million-member church should abide by its covenant with the Anglicans.

Delegates chose as successor to Moore a 43-year-old Toronto minister, N. Bruce McLeod. One of the youngest moderators in the church’s forty-seven-year history, McLeod is considered a creative, unorthodox man; many church members would call him radical. He admires the Jesus people, and thinks the church has trained “over-polite” young people—he wants more “rude and abrasive kids” in the church. He also favors legalizing marijuana (“prohibition is no answer”).

Union talks with the Anglican church don’t excite him as much as union on a world-wide scale—Christian-Muslim cooperation for example. McLeod calls for Anglican-United merger within a year; union any later would be a “marriage of the senile,” he says.

Convention delegates also tackled abortion. The 1971 conference approved abortion as a matter of personal choice between a woman and her doctor. But editorial pressure from the denominational magazine, the United Church Observer, forced reconsideration. Observer editor A. C. Forrest called the 1971 decision a mistake that should be corrected.

The often heated abortion debate left the church trying to reconcile opposite views and being accused of fence-sitting for doing so. The half-lay, half-clergy delegates, a third of them women, batted the issue back and forth. A large number of the women supported the church’s 1971 position. Later in the conference the issue resurfaced, and the church approved abortion in special medical, social, or economic situations.

Also up for discussion were the editorial activities of gadfly editor Forrest, who has been criticized in the past for using the Observer to promulgate anti-Jewish views (see August 11 issue, page 39). An unrepentant Forrest—he received a standing ovation—told the delegates the church may be unnecessarily worried about offending Jews. Forrest also pecked at the church for criticizing South Africa and Rhodesia while refusing to take a similar stand against Israeli actions such as reprisal raids on Lebanon condemned by the United Nations.

The discussion was a vindication for Forrest. New moderator McLeod described the Observer as the best church paper in Canada, praised Forrest as the best editor, and promised to back him “any chance I get.” Forrest told delegates he had never advocated a Middle East policy that wasn’t consistent with findings of the World Council of Churches or the United Nations.

Business sessions at the nine-day meetings were kept short so delegates could tackle issues facing Canada. A position paper on relations with French-speaking Quebec urged church members to be prepared for the possibility of the province’s secession from Canada. Delegates approved the paper, which recommended that Canadians accept the right of either of the country’s two linguistic units to dissociate from the other.

On the foreign-affairs front, Canada’s largest Protestant denomination roundly condemned Portugal, Rhodesia, and South Africa for their racial policies. The church agreed to examine its own investment policies in South Africa to see if they were hurting the church’s credibility on racism. Portugal was slammed for what the church termed oppression of residents of Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Rissau, three Portuguese colonies.

Delegates rejected a suggestion that the church ask Uganda to extend its deadline for expulsion of resident Asians. One church leader said the church should listen to black Africa, not lecture it. Nations have the right to decide who is alien, he said, though sympathy might be felt for the Asians.

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