Ecumenism: Confusion in the Council

The 17-member executive committee of the World Council of Churches met in Geneva last week to review plans for Christianity’s next religious spectacular: the council’s Fourth Assembly in Uppsala, Sweden, next July. Publicly, council leaders are boosting the assembly as “the most widely representative meeting in the history of the ecumenical movement.” That it will be: the 1,330 clerics and laymen who are expected to attend include delegates from the council’s 232 member denominations, as well as 15 official Roman Catholic observers. Privately, however, many council officials agree with the concerned forecast made by retired General Secretary Willem Visser ‘t Hooft that “confusion reigns supreme—politically, theologically, socially.”

One problem that the committee wishes to resolve is a potential conflict between two seemingly incompatible goals of the council: to spread its ecumenical net as wide as possible and to make Christianity more responsive to modern social issues. Representatives of the “new churches” of Africa and Asia want the council to take a strong stand on such questions as economic “colonialism” and nuclear armaments. But the numerically potent Orthodox churches of Eastern Europe and the Near East, says one council staffer, “don’t give a hoot about secular problems.”

Still another potential conflict involves the question of Rome. The founding hierarchy of the council prefers a slower approach to ecumenism with Roman Catholicism than is favored by some younger churchmen. They believe it is high time to think about providing some way in which the Roman Catholic Church can become a member—an act that would involve a major change in the council’s structure and operations.