A vision unites the streams
At the founding assembly
The World Council of Churches formally came into existence on 23 August 1948 in Amsterdam, where delegates of 147 churches from 44 countries met in the first and founding assembly. Although confidence in human progress had been tempered after the recent experience of global war, there remained a bold sense of defiance in the face of the world's tragic disunity, and a radical determination to seek reconciliation.
No cold war among Christians
The steadily worsening political relations between East and West were reflected at the Amsterdam assembly in an exchange between John Foster Dulles, a Presbyterian layman later to become US secretary of state, and Czech theologian Josef Hromádka (pictured). Dulles described communism as the greatest obstacle to world peace. Hromádka pleaded for a sympathetic understanding of it as representative of a force for social justice that the church and Western civilization should embody but had largely ignored.
The Assembly did not allow this difference in outlook to destroy the fellowship. It insisted that no civilization can escape the radical judgment of God's word and explicitly rejected the assumption that capitalism and communism were the only two choices available.
Reconstruction and reconciliation
During and after World War II, the urgent need for reconstruction and reconciliation was apparent everywhere, in both human suffering and physical destruction. By 1943, the idea had grown that reconstruction was an ecumenical task aimed at rebuilding "the whole life of the fellowship of churches".
Picture: Distribution of humanitarian aid at a Paris office of the ecumenical agency CIMADE in 1955.
Diaconal growth
As ecumenical interchurch aid expanded worldwide, there was a growing overlap in activities of the WCC and the International Missionary Council. Concerns among mission boards that WCC aid programmes could reverse decades of effort to free "younger churches" from dependence on foreign funds, or that the accent on development would deflect those churches from their evangelical task, were addressed by a 1956 agreement with the IMC on what sorts of projects the WCC would support. By 1961, the two councils were fully integrated.
Picture: Shoes produced in a WCC project in Amman are handed out to refugee families.
Ecumenical learning
"An energizing centre and laboratory for the whole movement" is how Visser 't Hooft described the Ecumenical Institute at Bossey, founded in 1946. It stood for "reawakening the church through the spiritual mobilization of the laity". Two lay theologians gave it early and inspired leadership: Suzanne de Diétrich (right), a Lutheran from Alsace long engaged in the Student Christian Movement; and Hendrik Kraemer (left) of the Netherlands, the Institute'sIntitute's first director, a former missionary and theologian who had been imprisoned by the Nazis for protesting against the treatment of Jewish fellow professors at Leiden University.
Call for peace
Nine years after the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese Christians presented a peace petition at the WCC assembly in Evanston, United States, 1954. The Assembly appealed to governments of the world to prohibit all weapons of mass destruction and to abstain from aggression.
Growth of a world fellowship
The 3rd assembly at New Delhi, India, in 1961 saw the entry into the WCC of four large Eastern European Orthodox churches - those of Russia, Romania, Bulgaria and Poland. Holding the assembly in Asia was a sign of growth for the Council, from its largely Western origins to a dawning recognition of what it means to be a world fellowship.
Picture: The Russian Orthodox delegation
Faith and Order
One of the streams which fed into the WCC fellowship was the Faith and Order movement, seeking agreement on divisive issues of doctrine and church order. At the fourth world conference on Faith and Order in Montreal 1963, participation was extended to include Eastern European and Pentecostal churches who had joined the WCC at the 1961 New Delhi assembly. For the first time, observers from churches that were not WCC members assisted: Southern Baptists and Missouri Synod Lutherans from the US, as well as Roman Catholics. © WCC/John Taylor
The Mississippi Delta Ministry
For the first time in 1964, the US National Council of Churches asked for international ecumenical diaconal support - for its Mississippi Delta Ministry. In this area of the southern USA, black people had been victimized for years by blatant white racism sustaining conditions of extreme poverty. The appeal to support projects of relief, rehabilitation and reconciliation sought cash contributions and volunteers who had experience working in areas of tension.
Church and Society
Vigorous debate on how Christians should respond to revolutionary changes in culture, politics, economics, science and technology marked the Church and Society conference at Geneva in 1966. It was significant, one veteran ecumenist commented later, that the results of a conference with such carefully balanced representation of North and South and of all the main confessional traditions, including Orthodox participants and Roman Catholic observers, "proved so radical that many Christians from the 'established' churches were disturbed by it". © WCC/John Taylor
