National Council

When the work was completed, church leaders described it as "one of the most historic events in American Christianity." For four days last week 600 delegates and 3,000 observers had threaded their way to & from Cleveland's Public Auditorium through shoulder-high embankments of leftover snow, to found a new organization that will represent non-Roman Catholic Christianity as it has never been represented before in the U.S.

Pooled Ideas. The new organization is called the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Nine years in the making, it is a merger of the most important Protestant and Eastern Orthodox agencies in the U.S. One of them, the Federal Council of Churches, was itself a federation of 27 religious bodies with 29 million members; the seven others were interdenominational agencies organized for specific purposes. Their names: the International Council of Religious Education, the Foreign Missions Conference of North America, the Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada, the Home Missions Council of North America, the Protestant Council of Higher Education, the United Stewardship Council and the United Council of Church Women.

Purpose of the new overall body is to pool the best ideas and techniques each group has to offer, and to confront the world with an immensely more powerful united voice. The combination will also save money. By 1952 the Council's budget is expected to amount to less than the previous combined budgets of the constituent agencies.

The National Council's work will be divided into four major fields--Education, Life & Work (to deal with such problems as race relations and economic injustice), Home Missions and Foreign Missions. Through these divisions the council's impact will be felt in 150,000 Protestant and Orthodox member churches (the two large U.S. denominations to remain outside are the Southern Baptist Convention and the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church).

Effective Procedures. The council's first president: handsome, 60-year-old Bishop Henry Knox Sherrill, Presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church, to which post he was elected in 1947--one of the youngest men ever so honored. A longtime leader of the ecumenical movement in the U.S., Brooklyn-born Yaleman Sherrill seemed a natural choice to head the new superagency. Vice presidents at large: Mildred McAfee Horton, World War II commander of the WAVES, onetime (1936-49) president of Wellesley College; Abbie Clement Jackson, executive secretary of the African Episcopal Zion Church Women's Home and Foreign Missionary Society; Dr. McGruder Ellis Sadler, president of Texas Christian University; and the University of Pennsylvania's President Harold Stassen. Treasurer: General Electric's President Charles E. Wilson. As operating head, with the title of general secretary, the delegates elected Dr. Samuel McCrea Cavert, who has held the same job at the Federal Council of Churches since 1921.

To U.N.'s Secretary General Trygve Lie, during U.N.'s most nerve-racked week, the delegates wired their belief that "war is not inevitable," adding that the council was praying that the U.N. "may find just and effective procedures for containing and resolving the conflict in Korea."

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