The World Council at 25

A quarter-century ago, when the delegates to the first assembly of the World Council of Churches met in Amsterdam, Swiss Theologian Karl Barth gave the ecumenical gathering a stern warning. "We are not the ones to change this evil world into a good one," he said. Yet Barth himself had found in the 1930s that his Christian conscience required him to support the defiant German "Confessing Church" in opposing Nazism.

The men who have led the World Council of Churches during the years since World War II have found the definition of their duty no easier. As the council's central committee met last week in Geneva and celebrated the organization's 25th anniversary, the conceptions of Christian witness ranged from total pacifism to the direct support of revolutionary movements.

After a quarter-century, the changes in the council were sharply defined. When it was founded in 1948, the World Council embraced 147 churches in 48 countries, and was solidly dominated by North American and Northern European members. Today it has 263 member churches in 90 countries. Four out of ten member churches are now in the Third World. At silver jubilee services in Geneva's austere medieval Cathedral of St. Pierre, the preacher who stood in John Calvin's pulpit was W.C.C. General Secretary Philip A. Potter, a West Indian Methodist and a black. When the cathedral organ was silent, Papa O'Yeah MacKenzie, a black drummer from Ghana who wore a leopard-skin jacket, played lively percussion solos.

The council's growth in breadth and numbers has not been without problems. Though conversations with Rome have increased, the prospect of official Roman Catholic membership is remote. Evangelicals both within and outside the W.C.C. question whether it has not virtually abandoned the traditional goal of spreading the Gospel. The W.C.C. has financial troubles, too. The combination of Swiss inflation and dollar devaluations has made the American and Canadian contributions--40% of the $2,000,000 budget--worth roughly half of what they were just five years ago.

But the focus of the W.C.C. meeting was its continuing concerted attack upon racism and colonialism. The attack has been under way since 1969, when the W.C.C. began collecting and doling out funds--$600,000 so far--as part of its Program to Combat Racism. Half the money has gone to strengthen the antidiscrimination efforts of such minorities as aborigines in Australia, Koreans in Japan and blacks, Indians and Eskimos in North America. The other half has been given to various liberation movements in Africa--including some $150,000 to anti-Portuguese guerrillas in Angola and Mozambique.

It was the contributions to the guerrillas that provoked the angriest criticism of the council during the past few years and that apologists defended at the Geneva meeting. The discussion centered on a 13-page report on strategies for social justice prepared by a W.C.C. study group headed by Memphis Methodist Pastor James Lawson. The report saw three "options" open to contemporary Christians: 1) Nonviolent action as the only possibility consistent with obedience to Jesus Christ; 2) Accepting the necessity of violent resistance as a Christian duty in extreme circumstances, but applying to it criteria similar to those governing a "just war"; 3) Participation in already existing situations of violence by support of some kind of rebellion.

The report acknowledged that "too little attention has been given ... to the methods and techniques of nonviolence in the struggle for a just society." But Lawson noted that nonviolent tactics too often go unnoticed or unaided. Most violence in the world, he charged, is "structural"--the violence of "racism, militarism, hunger, exploitation of people, economic inequity, war, disease, and poverty." By contrast, "revolutionary violence is a tiny percentage--and a response to systematic violence." Indeed, said Swiss Pastor Clement Barbey, assistant to Potter, revolutionary violence has been the accepted answer to such oppression. "Are the Africans in Mozambique who fight the Portuguese for their freedom any different from our Swiss ancestors who took up arms for their freedom from Austrian oppressors in 1291?" he asked.

Not all the council's members were pleased with the emphasis on liberation struggles. A message of strong support from Demetrios I, the Eastern Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, reaffirmed Orthodoxy's support for the ecumenical movement but urged it not to be overly preoccupied with "sociopolitical aims." The W.C.C.'s campaign against racism has raised other hackles, too, by blacklisting some 1,000 firms in Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand for investing in or trading with South Africa. The W.C.C. itself sold $ 1.5 million worth of holdings in just such firms (out of its $3.5 million portfolio) as a "symbolic" gesture, but noted that member churches might well use their interest in such companies to influence policies instead.

The Swiss Federation of Protestant Churches took issue with the blacklist, which included 17 Swiss firms. Commenting on the churches' criticism at a meeting of the federation, Philip Potter got in a wry last word. "I rejoice that we have started a real ecumenical conversation in Switzerland," he said. "Even though the World Council has its headquarters in Geneva, that is something that has been missing all these years."

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