Religion: The Russians Join the World Council

It was as if the U.N. unanimously took in Communist China and all the new African and Asian nations in a single morning session. For the World Council of Churches is roughly an ecclesiastical equivalent of the United Nations, and last week at New Delhi, in the early hours of its third Assembly, the World Council accepted in full membership the Russian Orthodox Church and three other Iron Curtain Orthodox churches—plus the onetime missions of Africa and Asia.

The 18-day New Delhi meeting, which began last week, is the most portentous and significant of the World Council’s three gatherings—more so than the founding Assembly at Amsterdam 13 years ago, or the second Assembly at Evanston, Ill., in 1954. The massive transfusion of new blood, filled with potent hormones, that the ecumenical movement absorbed last week may mark a new lease on life for non-Roman Christianity or bring on a critical case of confusion and decline.

“This conference can be either a Babel or another Pentecost,” said Evangelist Billy Graham. Said General Secretary Willem A. Visser ‘t Hooft: “We have arrived at one of those decisive moments in the history of the church of Christ.”

A Daring Action. Last week’s piece of Christian history began with a procession under the warm Indian sun. Two by two they strode, 1,000 strong, into a striped tent called a shamiana, and New Delhi’s Hindus, Moslems, Jains and Buddhists gaped at their diversity. Archbishops and patriarchs, metropolitans and primates, bishops, canons, pastors and professors—capped, cassocked, bearded, bareheaded, in flowing robes or academic gowns, in business suits or sarongs—bodied forth the range and outreach of Christianity. Among them: Anglican Arthur Michael Ramsey, Presbyterian Eugene Carson Blake, Lutheran Franklin Clark Fry, German Evangelical Otto Dibelius, Episcopalian Arthur Lichtenberger, Greek Orthodox Lakovos.

The 1,200 delegates, observers, staff members and special guests (plus 275 newsmen) met in a world unused to organized religion. A memorandum prepared by General Secretary Visser ‘t Hooft and Bishop Lesslie Newbigin of the Church of South India reminded them that the mysterious East was accustomed to a different brand of holy man. “To go to the capital city of India and proclaim that Jesus Christ is the light of the world is a daring action,” the memo noted. “It is difficult for most people in India to take seriously a claim to religious insight which is not accompanied by an element of austerity in regard to such matters as food and living conditions … It would be wise to limit the use of alcohol and tobacco, to avoid extravagant spending, and to accept with serenity any small discomforts or difficulties which one may encounter.”

There were discomforts and difficulties aplenty for Westerners to practice their serenity on. A hotel shortage forced many of them to share their rooms with one or more strangers and to scatter about the city in embassies and dubious hostels, from which it was often a laborious journey by arthritic jitney to the sleekly modern Vigyan Bhavan (Hall of Science), built for the UNESCO conference in 1956.

An Ecumenical Mobilization. Here, in the 1,081-capacity main auditorium, the Council’s leaders and delegates—plus a team of five official observers sent by the Vatican—watched what Visser ‘t Hooft called the “ecumenical mobilization” click along like clockwork. With a simple show of hands at its first day’s meeting, the Assembly voted to merge with the International Missionary Council.

This merger finally unites the three elements with which the ecumenical movement began. At a historic meeting in 1910 of the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh, elements of Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox Christianity began to meet and work in parallel. One stream, known as “Life and Work” and concerned with the social aspects of the churches, met in Geneva in 1920, in Stockholm in 1925, and at Oxford in 1937. The second, known as “Faith and Order” and dealing with theology and liturgy, met in Geneva in 1920, in Lausanne in 1927, and Edinburgh in 1937. The two streams flowed together in Utrecht in 1938 and agreed to unite in the World Council of Churches a decade later in Amsterdam.

A Second Reformation. The third ecumenical stream was the International Missionary Council, in which the different denominations slowly pooled their problems and potentials in six big meetings and numerous consultations. Last week the onetime missionary movement, now engaged in a vast handover to “younger” (indigenous) churches (TIME cover, April 13. 1960), became the World Council’s Division of World Mission and Evangelism, under the leadership of one of Christendom’s ablest ecumenists, Bishop Newbigin, who is 51, a onetime Presbyterian missionary, now the inspiring leader of the 14-year-old Church of South India.

Many church historians regard this union of missionary and ecclesiastical ecu-menisms as almost equal in importance to the Reformation in the 16th century. Commented President Henry Pitney Van Dusen of Manhattan’s Union Theological Seminary: “Today we actually saw one of the very early events in the second great reformation of Christendom.”

Who’s Skittish Now? At least as powerful an influence on the future of the predominantly Protestant ecumenical movement was the admission of the Communist-dominated churches. Many a visitor to the Assembly—and certainly some delegates—thought, from the way the voting went, that there was nothing but joy unconfined over the move. There was no debate on the subject; it had been specifically banned to shush any boat-rockers. There were cheers and applause when the vote was announced (142 for, three opposed, four abstentions), and again when roly-poly, auburn-bearded Archbishop Nikodim, head of the 16-man Russian delegation, mounted the stage for his formal admission.

But in high places and low, there were misgivings. In the beginning, it had been the Russians who were skittish about the relationship. When the World Council was founded, in the old Stalin days, the Russian Orthodox Church refused to join, on the grounds that this was a capitalist plot to dominate the churches. Under the Khrushchev regime, Moscow’s Patriarch Alexei let it be known that the World Council might not be so bad after all, and the ecumenical leaders stepped up their efforts to bring the Russians in, finally succeeded when the Russians formally applied for membership last spring (TIME, May 5).

Two reasons were advanced for the inclusion of Russian Orthodoxy: 1) it would buttress the claim of the World Council that it encompasses all Christianity except Rome, and 2) it would bolster the morale and mettle of the church in Russia. But the new size and importance of the Orthodox bloc in what began as a predominantly Protestant movement is giving many an ecumenical veteran private qualms.

No one can do more than close his eyes and guess at how many Christians there are in Russia; pink-cheeked Archbishop Nikodim round-figures his constituency at 50 million, with 20,000 parishes, 40 monasteries, 73 bishoprics. Whatever it is, the Russian, Bulgarian (6 million members), Rumanian (13 million members) and Polish (400,000 members) Orthodox churches, added to the Orthodox churches already in the World Council, are something to be reckoned with, ecclesiastically as well as politically. Some delegates speculated that the ten ecclesiastical members of the Russian delegation might actually be Reds in robes, but informed opinion was that the archbishops, bishops, archimandrites and priests were not official agents of Communism any more than U.S. Episcopal Bishop Henry Knox Sherrill, one of the Council’s presidents, was an agent of capitalism. This was not necessarily so of the six laymen on the Russian team, and suspicion centered on Interpreter V. Zaitsev, who often seemed to be giving directions to the others. Nikodim, the 32-year-old whiz kid of the Russian church, was thoroughly in command of the situation. With better English than his colleagues, he was a popular and jocular spokesman for the Russian blend of Christianity and what he referred to as “socialism.”

Unquiet Men. It became clear last week that Iron Curtain Orthodoxy intended to make its membership count. As the Assembly split up into the section and committee work that will feed reports and opinions into the plenary sessions during the high-geared, hard-working 18 days of the conference, the Red Orthodoxists turned up with strong ideas in the areas of social action, international affairs, and “faith and order.” “A lot of people in the World Council,” observed Van Dusen, “tended to think of the Russians simply as learned men living in their own quiet world, who would remain rather silent members of the World Council and take relatively little part. But it’s turned out to be quite the other way.”