Report on World Council of Churches Assembly
Episcopal News Service. January 16, 1976 [76008]
Peter Day, Ecumenical Officer, Executive Council
NAIROBI, Kenya -- "Jesus Christ frees and unites" was the theme of the Fifth Assembly of the World Council of Churches, but the meaning of these words -- their implications. for the Council and the member churches over the next seven years -- was understood differently among the 800 delegates assembled in Nairobi.
In recent years the Council has worked to make freedom and unity a reality in the life of this world by advocating political, economic, and social change, but within the churches there is a growing movement to re-emphasize evangelism and spiritual concerns.
A tiny group of evangelical sectarians from Scotland expressed their disapproval by making a disturbance at the opening service. One of them grabbed a microphone and shouted, "This meeting is hypocrisy," and won some newspaper headlines, but the demonstration was over in a matter of minutes, and the service proceeded without further incident.
The theme of freedom and unity was referred to six sections, and contrary to the expectations of the hecklers, evangelism, the subject of Section I, Confessing Christ Today, was chosen by a much larger percentage of the delegates than any other subject.
Second in popularity was Section II: What Unity Requires, dealing with the pursuit of Christian unity. The other four dealt with the theme of liberation in society under the following headings: Section III, Seeking Community: The common search of people of various faiths, cultures and ideologies; Section IV, Education for Liberation and Community, Section V, Structures of Injustice and the Struggle for Liberation; and Section VI, Human Development: the ambiguities of power, technology, and quality of life.
A keynote address by Robert McAfee Brown, noted Presbyterian theologian from the United States, sounded the evangelistic theme under the heading, "Who is this Jesus Christ who frees and unites?" taking his text from the passage in St. Matthew in which Jesus asks: "Who do men say that I am?" and "Who do you say that I am?" and Peter's answer, "You are the Christ, the son of the living God." However, Dr. Brown insisted that acceptance of Christ involves working for peace and justice on earth. To drive home his point he delivered a major portion of his address in Spanish to escape from the" imperalisism of language" (more than three-quarters of the words spoken at the assembly were in English, and the rest were in French, German, or Russian).
A moving address by Bishop Mortimer Arias of the tiny Evangelical Methodist Church in Bolivia described the ways in which evangelism went hand in hand with doing something about the conditions in which poverty-stricken tin miners worked.
Among prepared responses to his speech, two were of special interest. One was by Roman Catholic Archbishop Samuel Carter of Jamaica showing the parallel development of a new emphasis on evangelizing in his church and collaboration with other churches in the Caribbean Council of Churches.
The other was by Dr. John Stott of the Church of England, a leader in the movement of conservative evangelicalism on a world scale. He insisted that the central theme of evangelism is to save people from their own sinful condition. He too accepted the responsibility of Christians to work for social justice, but thought that "evangelism" should be understood as the proclamation of the Gospel and "mission" should be used for the broader range of Christian activity in the world.
The report of Section I was a robust confession of Jesus Christ as divine Lord and Savior in terms of the Incarnation, the Trinity, the Atonement, Church and Sacraments, and other themes familiar to Anglicans as well as other Christians. It was particularly effective in taking up the subjects of the other five sections in relation to the church's evangelistic task. The report was presented by Dr. William Lazareth of the Lutheran Church in America, moderator of the Section. (The World Council has escaped the illiteracy of the American word "chairperson" by substituting "moderator" as a better way of coping with the semantics of women's liberation.
Section II's report, What Unity Requires, presented by Bishop Woolcombe of Oxford, sought to add to the previous work of the New Delhi and Uppsala Assemblies the new insights provided by the Faith and Order Commission in its meetings between Uppsala and Nairobi.
The concept of the Church as a "conciliar fellowship" (developed in a conference in Salamanca in 1973) was put forward in these words:
"The one church is to be envisioned as a conciliar fellowship of local churches which are themselves truly united. In this conciliar fellowship, each local church possesses, in communion with the others, the fullness of catholicity, witnesses to the same apostolic faith and, therefore, recognizes the others as belonging to the same Church of Christ and guided by the same Spirit. As the New Delhi Assembly pointed out, they are bound together because they have received the same baptism and share in the same eucharist; they recognize each other's members and ministries. They are one in their common commitment to confess the Gospel of Christ by proclamation and service to the world. To this end, each church aims at maintaining sustained and sustaining relationships with her sister churches, expressed in conciliar gatherings whenever required for the fulfillment of their common calling." (Uppsala to Nairobi, p. 79).
The special significance of the term "conciliar" is recognition of the autonomy of local churches in ordering their lives in a unity with each other that does not depend on a central government and administration. Controversies among them would be dealt with by mutual consultation and, as occasion may require, the convening of a council of the whole conciliar fellowship in the manner of the ancient ecumenical councils. National and World Councils of Churches are not conciliar fellowships, but "pre-conciliar" because the participating communions are not sufficiently one in faith, order, and sacraments to share a common life.
The growing recognition among the churches that the one Eucharist is the heart of the matter led, in discussions at Nairobi, to a renewed sense of frustration between churches that practice open communion and churches that do not -- the Protestant communions on one side, and the Orthodox on the other.
Orthodox priest Kirill, Dean of the Zagorsk Russian Orthodox Theological Academy at age 29, responded to the pain of Protestant speakers by saying that he too felt the same pain, but raised the question whether the right approach was to alleviate the pain with drugs or to cure it by getting rid of the cause.
Another church unity issue emerged in a passage of the report on "confessional identity" which mentioned, among other things, the bi-lateral conversations among world bodies (e.g. between Anglicans and Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Lutherans, Roman Catholics and Lutherans, Lutherans and Reformed Churches) as activities that "do not always assist and enrich one another."
All in all, it is difficult to find any real progress toward unity celebrated in the report of Section II. The preoccupation with refining and polishing the definition of the goal seems to take the WCC farther and farther from the task of doing what is possible today to appropriate God's gift of unity more fully here and now.
Perhaps the problem can be best understood by an analogy of science vs. engineering. The theological scientist attempts to define a pure form of unity harmoniously including every ingredient; the theological engineer wants to work now with the materials at hand -- people and churches and "confessional families" -- to make the most of the present possibilities.
"The common search of people of various faiths, cultures, and idologies," the subject of Section III, was dramatized by the presence of distinguished representatives of five non-Christian religions -- Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Sikh, and Buddhism. The section report was received with unease by many delegates who accepted the idea of learning to live cooperatively with their non-Christian neighbors but questioned the desirability of dialogue on specifically religious questions as tending toward syncretism. Bishop Gregorios of the Syrian Orthodox Church of India (formerly Paul Verghese of the WCC staff) was a skillful defender of the report as moderator of the section.
Education "for liberation and community, " in the report of Section IV seemed to struggle in a dilemma between the right of a culture to define its own educational goals and the desire to reform education to serve the goals and the desire to reform education to serve the goals of a Christian political radicalism critical of the existing culture.
An idealized depiction of Christian education took little note of the existence of countries in which Christian education of the young is forbidden by law. All in all, differences of outlook within the section seemed to be handled by vague generalizations rather than straightforward attempts to clarify the issues on which there were disagreements.
The report of Section V on Structures of Injustice and the Struggle for Liberation was, on the whole, lucid and well organized. The role of transnational corporations in the life of developing countries was perhaps painted in unnecessarily dark colors -- one delegated pointed out that the WCC was not boycotting the Hilton and Intercontinental Hotels; and Nairobi did not seem to be suffering from the presence of international concerns such as Fiat motors.
However, the most explosive moment of the Assembly came when an Anglican layman, Nicholas Wright of the Church of England, proposed an amendment adding the name of the World Council of Churches to oppressive structures. He complained that the voices of individual delegates were powerless against tight control by an establishment that was dictating the whole assembly process.
When put to a vote, his motion passed by an overwhelming majority, to the con sternation of General Secretary Philip Potter and others.
Sexism and racism were denounced in the report, along with the confession that all nations were participants in these forms of injustice.
Previously, the women had proved the extent of their liberation within the assembly by allowing their presentation of the subject to run much longer than its scheduled time. This did not prevent the election of Annie Jiaggi of Ghana, a lavish time-user, as one of the six presidents of the Council.
The sixth section, on Human Development: ambiguities of power, technology, and quality of life, began by listing four "revolutionary and powerful elements which will affect the processes of change": the demands of two-thirds of the earth's people; the ecological problems that threaten present and future generations; the misuse of power and the struggle of the powerless; and the questioning of the growth-oriented affluent societies and the consequences of this for the rest of human kind.
The report as a whole dealt with these four subjects in detail in a social analysis claiming to be based on God's will, but otherwise not dissimilar from secular discussions of the predicament of humankind.
One of the best addresses at the Assembly dealt with the specifically Christian and theological dimensions of the problem -- biologist Charles Birch's paper on Creatioan, Technology, and Human Survival, but his contribution was compressed into two brief paragraphs. Missing from most of this and some of the other section reports was an effort to see individuals as human persons in relation to a personal creator and savior, rather than nameless units of a collective.
Perhaps it is not appropriate for affluent Christians to dwell on the fact that the Gospel is good news for the poor even though they remain poor in this world's goods, but this is the central core of liberation in Christ.
The final paragraphs, on quality of life, helped to redress the balance in favor of a truly Christian view. The old dialectic between law and gospel, between works and faith is at issue here -- becoming what we are, members of Christ, children of God and inheritors of the kingdom of heaven.
In the words of Section VI, this faith will make us "open to each other, to nature, and to God. . . once more 'at home' in creation."
All of this seems to indicate a return to the basic proclamation of the Gospel without withdrawing from the concern for social justice which has preoccupied the World Council in recent years.