A man on a mission
US Methodist layman John R. Mott travelled the world to win students and other youth to Christian faith and service. He was an organizer of the Edinburgh Missionary Conference in 1910 and devoted his life to organizations bringing Christians together in dialogue and common action. Mott was awarded the 1946 Nobel prize for peace and served as the first honorary president of the World Council of Churches.
Life and work for Christian unity
The Universal Christian Conference on Life and Work, meeting at Stockholm in 1925, was the crowning point of a life of ecumenical effort to which Swedish archbishop Nathan Söderblom (center) brought imagination, administrative skills, enthusiasm, tact and patience.
A woman with a message
The phrase "we intend to stay together", at the heart of the Message of the Amsterdam assembly," was coined by Anglican educator Kathleen Bliss. Speaking at the inaugural assembly, she linked the issues of women's ministry and the ministry of the laity. In 1949 she became secretary of the commission on the Life and Work of Women in the Church, and in 1971 she was moderator of the integration of the World Council of Christian Education into the WCC.
Without false modesty
When a Methodist bishop asked Sarah Chakko, principal of Isabella Thoburn College in Lucknow, India, to the Amsterdam assembly, she told him she was not Methodist but Syrian Orthodox. When he replied that she would represent "younger churches", she reminded him that her church was more than 1600 years old. After the assembly, she worked for the WCC women's department; in 1951, she was the first woman appointed a WCC president.
Confessing guilt
A German submarine commander in the first world war, Martin Niemöller became a leader of the Confessing Church and spent much of the second world war in concentration camps as a "personal prisoner" of Adolf Hitler. He urged German churches to confess their guilt for the war in the Stuttgart Declaration of 1945, making possible their reintegration into the ecumenical family. His later visits to the USSR did much to bring churches there into the ecumenical movement. A member of the central committee from 1948, he was elected a WCC president in 1961.
The first helmsman
Like many early leaders of the movement, Willem Visser 't Hooft(right) had his formative ecumenical experience in the student Christian movement. He was named WCC general secretary at the 1938 meeting where the WCC "in process of formation" was launched. He fulfilled this function until his retirement in 1966. One of his major concerns was linking the ecumenical movement to enduring manifestations of the Church through the ages. © WCC/John Taylor
A living stone
Trained as a librarian and historian, Madeleine Barot was one of the moving spirits behind the French relief and refugee agency CIMADE. During the second world war she was instrumental, with the Geneva office of the WCC, in helping Jews escape from Nazi-occupied France. After Amsterdam she became vice-chair of the WCC Youth department; following the Evanston assembly, she was named director of the department on Cooperation of Men and Women in Church and Society.
An ardent advocate
WCC general secretary from 1966-1972, Eugene Carson Blake had already demonstrated his leadership qualities in the United Presbyterian Church, the Consultation on Church Union and the National Council of Churches in the USA. An ardent advocate of the civil rights movement, he developed high-minded statements on justice into the WCC's Programme to Combat Racism. He encouraged the WCC to take a stand opposing the Vietnam war - which is said to have earned him a place on US President Nixon's "enemies list". © WCC/John Taylor
Dialogue of love
Athenagoras I of Constantinople was the first ecumenical patriarch to visit WCC headquarters in November 1967. He came, he said, "not as a stranger to strangers", but as a member of the same family coming to the common home "in witness of the Ecumenical Patriarchate's engagement in inter-Christian dialogue of love and unity".
© WCC/John Taylor
Dream of freedom
US Baptist pastor and civil rights leader Martin Luther King on a visit to the World Council of Churches in June 1967. It was agreed that he would preach at the opening service of the WCC assembly the following year. But in April 1968, King was assassinated. An assembly resolution spoke of a "deep sense of loss to the church on earth" and thanked God for King's faithful and prophetic witness "to the New Testament commandment of love and the relating of non-violence to social change".
© WCC/John Taylor
Knowledge for subjects
With renewed emphasis on ecumenical education in the 1970s, one creative voice on the WCC's staff was Paulo Freire. The Brazilian educator popularized the term "conscientization". A "conscientizing and therefore liberating education", he said, was one in which there is "no transfer of neatly wrapped knowledge" but where "both teacher and pupils simultaneously become knowing subjects, brought together by the object they are knowing".
© WCC/John Taylor
A pioneer
The first woman to be a lawyer, a circuit judge, an appeals court judge and a supreme court judge in her native Ghana, Annie Jiagge was also the first African woman president of the WCC, elected by the 5th assembly at Nairobi. A Presbyterian, she had wide ecumenical experience as a delegate to world youth conferences in Oslo and Kottayam, a pioneer in Ghana's YWCA and vice-president of the world YWCA, as well as playing an important role in UN discussions of women's rights.
A forceful speaker
A native of the West Indian island of Dominica, Philip Potter left his job as an assistant to the attorney-general there to work as a Methodist lay pastor on the island of Nevis. From 1972-1984, the missionary and youth leader served as WCC general secretary. A forceful speaker and leader of Bible studies, he has insisted on the fundamental unity of Christian witness and service, and the correlation of faith to action. He has participated in every WCC assembly, from Amsterdam 1948 to Porto Alegre 2006© WCC/Peter Williams
Progressive point of view
Emilio Castro, a Methodist pastor and theologian from Uruguay who previously served as director of the WCC commission on World Mission and Evangelism, was the WCC general secretary from 1985-1992. He achieved prominence among Protestant leaders in Latin America by virtue of his eloquent preaching and progressive views on Christianity and the social order.
© WCC/Peter Williams
A peaceful fighter
The Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu, at the WCC central committee's first meeting in South Africa in 1994. A former staff member of the WCC Theological Education Fund, Tutu is well known for his clear stance against apartheid and his leadership of the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He was awarded the 1984 Nobel prize for peace.
© WCC/Peter Williams
Leader in change
The Lutheran theologian Konrad Raiser was WCC general secretary from 1993 through 2003. He once described his ecumenical calling as a "second conversion". During a sometimes turbulent period for the ecumenical movement, he led the Council in a redefinition of its Common Understanding and Vision and in a fundamental review of the participation of Orthodox member churches.
© WCC/Peter Williams
Shared aspirations
When the WCC celebrated its 50th anniversary at its 8th assembly at Harare, helmsman Nelson Mandela called the WCC Programme to Combat Racism an expression of "true solidarity" that was "not merely the charitable support of distant benefactors, but a joint struggle for shared aspirations." "To us in South and Southern Africa, and indeed the entire continent," he said, "the WCC has always been known as a champion of the oppressed and the exploited."
© WCC/Chris Black
