New Things at Uppsala

THE WORLD COUNCIL

New Things at Uppsala

"A crisis of faith has overtaken the churches more rigorous, perhaps, than was ever true before. Structures of church life and congregational worship are under serious questioning. The Bible has increasingly ceased to be a book to be listened to. It is asked whether even Jesus points beyond man to God. And yet, just because this is the situation, God's promise to make new must become explosive in our midst."

With that charge, delivered by the Rev. D. T. Niles, president of the Methodist Church of Ceylon,* the fourth Assembly of the World Council of Churches opened last week in the green and gabled Swedish university town of Uppsala. The first such gathering since 1961, the session marked the 20th anniversary of the Council--and also amounted to a crossroads of sorts for the world's largest non-Catholic Christian body.

Revolt from Below. Since its founding, the Council has made historic contributions to the cause of Christian unity. There were 1,900 delegates and official observers at last week's event; the delegates represented 232 churches with 300 million members, a total approaching Catholicism's one-half billion adherents. Despite the difficulties of rapprochement with Rome, the Council has been instrumental in fostering an unprecedented atmosphere of contact and discussion between Protestants and Catholics. The Vatican was present at Uppsala in a message from Pope Paul expressing ecumenical affirmation, and in the form of 15 Catholics invited as nonvoting observers. The Council has also attempted to spur Christians into doing more about the ills of this world; its 1966 Geneva Conference on Church and Society, for example, stands as a landmark of clerical involvement in secular problems.

But the mood of the delegates at Uppsala attested to the fact that their grand experiment in Christian action has come up against serious problems. Paradoxically, many are the result of the World Council's own visionary initiatives. A fissure has opened within the body between younger leaders, who want the Council to move more aggressively in social action, and more conservative elements. Notable on the conservative side are the Orthodox churches, most of which were admitted to the WCC at its last assembly, and whose 140 voting delegates at Uppsala (of a total of 750) represented the most powerful single bloc. The ecumenical movement has slowed in the face of continued differences over fundamental issues of faith. Potentially most serious of all for the WCC is the emergence of "underground churches," in which growing numbers of Christians worship in far-out manners and modes that represent a revolt against the more rigid religious superstructure of the World Council.

Rods of Anqer. Well aware of the underground challenge, the assembly chose as its theme "All Things New," and its opening ceremonies showed a temperately turned-on effort to bridge the gulf between the traditional and the revolutionary. As the richly robed churchmen filed into Uppsala's twin-spired Gothic cathedral, trumpeters, oboists, French horn and trombone players scattered throughout the church sounded a hauntingly dissonant hymn by Danish Composer Per Norgard worthy of John Cage. Seated together with Sweden's octogenarian King Gustaf VI Adolf, was another secular guest, Zambia's President Kenneth Kaunda. The prayer was read by Tanzanian Evangelical Lutheran Bishop Josiah Kibira, resplendent in a stole whose tribal designs stood in dramatic contrast with its white silk background. The program for the 16-day conference included everything from Bible study to some readings from Bertolt Brecht's play St. Joan of the Stockyards.

Whether the substance of the assembly will prove as avant-garde as its style remains to be seen. But the World Council's General Secretary Eugene Carson Blake warned that "the ecclesiastical establishment worldwide had better look hard to try to discern what God is now requiring of us as we are disturbed by the rods of anger." Added Ceylon's Pastor Niles: "Everywhere in our world today events are taking place which reveal that God is doing a new thing among us."

* In the keynote sermon, which was to have been given by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

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