Next Meeting: 1953?

In a musty lecture hall of Toronto's Emanuel College, 47 men & women deliberated last week upon the state of Christendom. They were on hand for the third annual meeting of the 90-member Central Committee of the World Council of Churches, representing 160 million Protestants; as such, they could probably be called the most important Christian body in the world.

Like the 160 million, the 47 were most concerned about war and the threat of war. After careful word-weighing and the abstention of two members on pacifist grounds, the Committee produced a resolution on the Korean war. "An act of aggression has been committed . . . Armed attack as an instrument of national policy is wrong. We therefore commend the United Nations, an instrument of world order, for its prompt decision to meet this aggression, and for authorizing a police measure which every member nation should support.

"At the same time, governments must press individually and through the United Nations for a just settlement by conciliation and negotiation ... We must not regard the worldwide conflict as inevitable. We stand for a just peace under the rule of law, and must seek peace by expanding justice and by attempting to reconcile contending world powers. The Korean situation need not be the beginning of a general war."

First order of business at the meeting was the unanimous election of Norway's 65-year-old Lutheran Primate, Bishop Eivind Berggrav, to succeed aged former Archbishop Erling Eidem of Sweden as one of the World Council's six presidents. Bishop Berggrav became something of a legend of Christian resistance during the war. Imprisoned by the Nazis in his summer cottage from 1942 to 1947, he still managed to direct the affairs of the underground church by escaping from his barbed-wire enclosure to meet with its leaders at night (TIME, May 28, 1945).

Also on the Central Committee's agenda were plans for the next full meeting of the World Council, scheduled for Evanston, Ill. in 1953. Dr. Henry Pitney Van Dusen, president of Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary, expressed "grave doubt if we will be able to meet in 1953," and suggested that the committee might well postpone setting a theme for that meeting. The committee concurred.

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