45 mins
70 Years of walking together
COVER
WCC Assembly 1948, Picture courtesy of WCC
ON August 22 1948, representatives of 147 churches from across the world met in the Nieuwe Kirk, Amsterdam. In a city and world still heavily scarred by war, they gathered for the first assembly of the new World Council of Churches (WCC) – a visible expression of Christian unity.
The WCC represented the next step in the ecumenical movement begun at the 1910 World Mission Conference in Edinburgh. The Rev Dr John McPake, the Church of Scotland’s Ecumenical Oicer, says it can be seen as a direct response to the tragedy of World War Two.
Dr McPake says: “Just as the decade after the end of the Ffirst World War saw the evolution of the contemporary ecumenical movement, the decade after the Second World War witnessed a renewed attempt to unite the life of the Church in shared witness.”
The Roman Catholic Church was not represented in Amsterdam – ‘victim of its own rigid conception of unity’, commented the Life and Work correspondent – and neither was the Russian Orthodox Church, which stayed away for political reasons, but most of the other major denominations were there.
The Message of the Assembly, conveyed in the opening passage of the novel-length oicial report, states: “We are divided from one another not only in matters of faith, order and tradition, but also by pride of nation, class and race. But Christ has made us his own, and He is not divided. In seeking Him we find one another.”
It goes on, in confessional language: “When we look to Christ, we see the world as it is – His world, to which He came and for which He died. It is illed both with great hopes and also with disillusionment and despair… There are millions who are hungry, millions who have no home, no country and no hope. Over all mankfind hangs the peril of total war.”
And it admits that the churches, separated from each other had often spoken ‘not the Word of God but the words of men’.
70 years on, the world is diferent but arguably no less dangerous, with ‘total war’ still a threat, and millions of people still lacking adequate food or shelter. The need for the churches to speak with one voice is no less urgent.
Against this backdrop, the WCC marks its anniversary this month with much to celebrate, but acknowledging that the work is very far from inished.
On the positive side the organisation has grown – those 147 member churches have more than doubled to around 350, representing over 550 million people (around a quarter of all the Christians in the world) in around 150 countries.
The Roman Catholic Church is still not a member, but that denomination’s engagement in ecumenism from the Second Vatican Council onwards, through the Pontiical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, has led to increasingly warm relationships and co-operation in some areas.
Pope Francis, visiting the WCC’s Ecumenical Centre in June as part of the anniversary celebrations, reairmed the Catholic Church’s commitment to ecumenism. “For us as Christians, walking together is not a ploy to strengthen our own positions, but an act of obedience to the Lord and love for our world,” he said.
However, as the message from the WCC’s central committee marking the anniversary admitted ‘with sorrow and regret’, “Our churches still cannot all share around the Lord’s table”. There is still a long way to go before the ‘full, visible unity’ to which the Council aspires becomes a reality.
And the picture is further complicated by the emergence of the World Evangelical Alliance and the growth of interest in ecumenism among the Pentecostal churches. The Global Christian Forum (GCF) is now probably the broadest gathering of churches worldwide, encompassing the WCC and Pontiical Council as well as Pentecostal and evangelical churches. John McPake says the GCF ‘may be seen as ofering a diferent model for contemporary ecumenism… as the centre of world Christianity has shifted from the global North to the global South’.
Away from church politics, the WCC can point to signiicant successes in its campaigning work over 70 years, including a leading role in the anti-apartheid campaign and wider anti-racism work, and in pioneering Christian care for creation and climate justice work. Between 1976 and 1992, its Human Rights Resources Oice for Latin America supported churches in standing by the victims of 18 military dictatorships. More recently, its Thursdays in Black campaign helped highlight the issue of gender-based violence long before the Harvey Weinstein allegations and the #metoo movement (see p45). The latest initiative is the Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace, which calls on churches everywhere ‘to join with others in celebrating life and in concrete steps toward transforming injustices and violence’.
Miriam Weibye is an elder in the Church of Scotland and its representative on the WCC Central Committee, as well as Church Relations oicer of the Scottish Episcopal Church. She says: “The long trajectory of the ecumenical movement over the last hundred years, and of the WCC in the last 70 years, is not just about bringing the churches together so we feel good, about ourselves or each other. It’s about bringing together all humanity in harmony. The unity of the churches foreshadows the unity of all humanity, and the community we share within the Church of Scotland, the Scottish Episcopal Church, or among the churches is one part of or one step toward the unity of all peoples—that, after all, is Jesus’ vision of the reign of God, of justice and peace everywhere.
Olav Fyske Tveit, Photo Credits: Magnus Aronson WCC
“We are divided from one another not only in matters of faith, order and tradition, but also by pride of nation, class and race. But Christ has made us his own, and He is not divided. In seeking Him we find one another. ”
WACC General Secretary Philip Lee and Miriam Weibye, picture by Albin Hillert WCC
Olav Fykse Tveit and Pope Francis, picture by Albin Hillert WCC
“Since its last assembly, in 2013 in Korea, the WCC and its 350 member churches— which together comprise 550 million people—see themselves united in a quest for social justice and healing the world’s hurts. That is a diferent way to pursue the historic ecumenical quest for unity, because there’s less emphasis on doctrfinal diferences and more emphasis on making a diference! Unity doesn’t mean uniformity, but it does mean accountability: we should always call each other to renewal and to more adequately relect the values of the gospel.
“That’s what the Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace is all about. And that approach and mission dovetail so well with how Pope Francis sees the future of ecumenism. As he has said, we are on a journey of faith together, and when he came to join the 70th anniversary celebrations it was speciically to airm that we are ‘walking, praying and working together’ for justice and peace. The Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace remfinds the WCC member churches and other Christians and people of good will around the world that achieving a just and peaceful world takes hard work and commitment. Anyone who has made any sort of pilgrimage knows only too well that pilgrimage brings mountaintop moments of wonder and sometimes long hours of yearning to get home to the familiar. Nothing happens easily. But a just world is something that we yearn to reach.
Giving his report to the Central Committee before the anniversary celebrations, the WCC general secretary, the Rev Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, described the organisation as a ‘successful if imperfect fellowship’. He said: “We have seen more clearly what unites us. We have costly experiences of truth and reconciliation processes to share. We have gradually become able to understand one another better and respectfully deal with our diferences. Even deep divisions based on theological convictions and historical developments can be bridged. We have learned a lot about living together with our diversity. We have become mutually accountable to one another and to our common calling and mission…
“There are strong powers undermining the need to see one another as participants in the one humanity, seeking our common good and our common interests. There needs to be somebody and something that represents a counter-power of unity, justice and peace and that expresses nonpartisan, universal love.”
For the Church of Scotland, the WCC represents one strand of its mission, contained in the Declaratory Articles since the Union of 1929, to ‘seek and promote union with other churches’, but its inluence goes back even further than that. John McPake says: “In terms of international ecumenism the 1910 World Mission Conference really sets the template for a whole range of bodies.
“The Church of Scotland has historically been a founder member of a number of ecumenical bodies, including the WCC, and we have contributed I think very well to these bodies and helped to give shape to them.
“I think the need for considerations of unity has not diminished in our contemporary world. In fact, I think we could reasonably argue the need forcooperation has never been greater.”
This article appears in the August 2018 Issue of Life and Work
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