A U.N. on Its Knees

A Memphis car salesman, a Ghanaian supreme court justice, a Japanese cartoonist--all are Kenya-bound for next week's opening of a potentially explosive international religious meeting. At Nairobi's* capacious Kenyatta Conference Centre, a band beating gazelle-hide drums and blowing on cow horns will greet 747 voting delegates and 1,600 observers and staff. And then the fifth septennial Assembly of the World Council of Churches will settle down to the issues that trouble the non-Catholic wing of the ecumenical movement.

Representing a constituency of 400 million Protestants, Anglicans and Eastern Orthodox in more than 90 nations, the W.C.C. Assembly is something of a United Nations on its knees. And, like the U.N., the council, once Westerndominated, is now heavily Third World. Only two-fifths of the delegates to Nairobi will be from North America and Western Europe.

The W.C.C. started in 1948 with the hope of unifying the world's Christians, largely by talking out differences on theology. But increasingly the council has gravitated toward social and political "liberation." Whatever its worth, this emphasis has divided Christians as much as it has united them. The Rev. Philip Potter, 54, a black West Indian Methodist who succeeded the U.S.'s Eugene Carson Blake as chief executive in 1972, is himself an activist, but admits that the policy has been "costly."

Since the last Assembly in 1968, the W.C.C. has set up a Program to Combat Racism, which has pumped $913,000 into the coffers of black liberation forces in southern Africa, including all three groups whose armies are now struggling for control of newly independent Angola. Though the funds were intended for nonmilitary use, they have given a moral imprimatur to armed violence. Despite the outcry, the W.C.C. has, so to speak, stuck to its guns. In Britain, Towards Racial Justice, a W.C.C. grant recipient, is accused of stirring racial hatred among blacks.

Last spring, Nairobi delegates received leaflets designed to get them thinking in particular ways about Assembly issues. Heavy on political consciousness raising, they give a once-over-lightly to traditional belief. Much of the political criticism zeroes in on the West, while Communist and Third World countries are largely exempt. Claims one piece in a flight of revolutionary fervor: Mainland China "is the only truly Christian country in the world." To U.S. Catholic Theologian Avery Dulles, the W.C.C. "has been progressively drawn into a political and social activism that makes little reference to the theological tradition." Within the council, the same complaint comes from Eastern Orthodox members, even some from Communist East Europe who naturally like the W.C.C. political line. Then there are Protestants who favor the conservative Gospel preached by Billy Graham (see story below) and argue that the W.C.C. wants to convert the world politically, not spiritually. The Nairobi meeting will likely have to face whether these criticisms have merit. The mood is hard to figure. Three-fourths of the W.C.C. staff and 80% of the delegates have never attended an Assembly before.

*The meeting was scheduled for Jakarta until predominantly Moslem Indonesia let it be known that the Christians were no longer welcome.

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