To Stay Together

Some 3,000 Christians crowded into the church, the chapel and two halls of the First Methodist Church in Evanston, Ill. this week for a service the like of which the world has never seen before. In the processional marched 700 priests and patriarchs, bishops and archbishops, ministers and laymen. The Rev. Dr. Marc Boegner of France read the First Lesson (Isaiah 53) in French. Archbishop Athenagoras, Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, read the Second Lesson (Philippians 2:1-11) in Greek. Bishop Eivind Berggrav of Norway led the recitation of the Apostles' Creed in German. The Rt. Rev. G.K.A. Bell, Bishop of Chichester, offered the prayers in English.

Thus the World Council of Churches opened its second Assembly (see box). U.S. Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam delivered the sermon. It was a great sermon, built around five words from the World Council's first Assembly in 1948 in Amsterdam: "We intend to stay together."

Said Oxnam: "We have worshiped, witnessed and worked together. We intend to stay together . . .

"I must confess my faith has cost me nothing . . . I have never been hungry. I have not been in prison. I have never had a stone thrown at me . . . I was born in a free land . . . I bow . . . before my colleagues . . . who know the meaning of prison cells, of fetters, of hunger . . .

"When competent Christians seek to express the worth of personality in political institutions, they speak of 'Government of the people, by the people, for the people' ... In this insistence, we intend to stay together . . ."

"At Amsterdam, serious questions were asked. Among them this: 'What does the world see or think it sees when it looks at the church?' One of the answers to that question was: 'It is a church that has largely lost touch with the dominant realities of modern life.' I am not sure that answer is true; but I am sure that the church must face up to the issue of justice. It is not enough for us to repudiate, as we do, the atheism of orthodox Communism . . . Men who affirm that nothing can separate us from the love of God must renounce the practical atheism that lies in the affirmation that God is not relevant to all the activities of men.

[Christians] must be more interested in abolishing the exploitation of man by man and of establishing a classless society than any Communist can possibly be . . .

"In an hour when millions are being added to our church rolls in one of the most significant evangelistic advances in the history of the church . . . we must make it plain that the Christian demand for justice does not come from Karl Marx. It comes from Jesus Christ and the Hebrew prophets . . . We are children of a God of love. We are brothers."

"We intend to stay together."

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