Episcopal Press and News
World Council Fourth General Assembly Meets
Diocesan Press Service. August 1, 1968 [67-8]
UPPSALA, Sweden -- While apparently preoccupied with contemporary world crises and the search for Christian consensus on a host of issues, the Fourth Assembly of the World Council of Churches, meeting in Uppsala, Sweden July 4 - 20, almost unconsciously, went a long way toward defining the goals of the ecumenical movement and the probable style of the Christian Church which recognizes that it is a minority community in a tempestuous world.
From the Assembly opening on July 4 it appeared that the world's immediate crises would allow no time for anything else to be dealt with. Racism, social justice, economic and social development vied for the primary place in the Assembly's concerns.
Addresses by such prominent figures as Zambia's President Kenneth Kaunda; British international economist Barbara Ward; American author James Baldwin; and the United Kingdom's permanent representative to the United Nations, Lord Caradon;: kept these issues before participants, as did a number of specially prepared films and displays.
The fact that 10 percent of the official participants were "youth participants" and that 31 percent were from the developing nations also contributed strong voices to enunciate the needs of the world.
By its final session the Council produced a host of guideline actions, plans and pronouncements of real significance.
The Assembly may well have redeemed for the World Council's member churches the entire concept of catholicity while at the same time chastising the entire church for its introversion and narrow legalism.
It has declared justice for all men to be a primary requirement not only of the Church's service, but of God's mission and the individual Christian's life.
World Council general secretary, Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, summarized the Assembly on its final day as "not as conservative and more ecumenical than many predicted." He stated that this Assembly has turned the attention of the churches to the world and cited major achievements as the endorsement of an educational campaign on national development issues, and the full participation of the Orthodox churches.
He regretted that more delegates had not seen fit to express "the Christian reasons for our involvement in social issues."
Of all Assembly documents that on "The Holy Spirit and the Catholicity of the Church" will probably receive the closest attention, not only for the force of its texts on "secular catholicity" and apostolicity, but also because it is a report which the Orthodox churches, for the first time the largest confessional group at the Assembly, considered of major importance.
The report calls on the churches "to realize that they belong together and are called to act together. " It is also explicit in its description of the WCC as "a transitional opportunity for eventually actualizing a truly universal, ecumenical conciliar form of common life and witness."
It warned that the unity and the catholicity of the church are often confused, noting, as examples, times when Christians discriminate on the basis of race, wealth, social class or education; when they allow cultural, ethnic or political allegiances to prevent organic union; when they "prescribe their own customary practices as binding on other Christians" or "permit loyalty to their own nation to hinder or destroy their desire for mutual fellowship with Christians or another nation" and when they "allow themselves to be forced into a unity by the State for nationalistic ends or break their unity for political purposes."
This Assembly was the first at which delegated observers with the right to speak but not to vote, were present from non-member churches. Of the 65 attending in this capacity, 15 were from the Roman Catholic Church. Another 100 Roman Catholics, many priests, attended as press, visitors or in other capacities.
The first Roman Catholic to address a WCC Assembly, Father Roberto Tucci, S.J., of Rome, said that Roman Catholics "no longer regard themselves as outside spectators who are indifferent or merely curious . . . but . . . as partners engaged in the same . . . quest for unity. "
Part-way through the Assembly, delegates voted nine Roman Catholic theologians to the Council's 135 member Faith and Order Commission. This is the first time Roman Catholics have had actual membership in a WCC unit.
In other action, the Assembly accepted a report encouraging continuing attention by the WCC-Roman Catholic Joint Working Group to the question of Roman Catholic membership, although concern was expressed in some areas, notably by the Rev. Dr. Jerome Hamer, associate secretary, Secretariat for Christian Unity at the Vatican, that excessive preoccupation with the question of membership might well be a "retrograde step."
The issue of national development clearly dominated all others. "It must become clear that church members who deny in fact their responsibility for the needy in any part of the world are just as guilty of heresy as those who deny this or that article of faith," Dr. W.A. Visser 't Hooft, former WCC General Secretary, and newly elected honorary president of the Council, said in his address to the Assembly.
The issue was elaborated in a major statement, accepted by the Assembly, which declared that "radical changes in institutions and structures" must be made before want and misery can be eradicated.
The statement also advocated an increase in governmental assistance to an annual one percent of gross national product by 1971 and support of preferential access to developed markets for manufactured goods coming from developing nations. Nine recommendations were also listed for individual Christians, chief among them a voluntary self-tax for development aid and political activity designed to influence government aid and trade policies.
The statement also recognized that the building of political structures suitable to national development will involve revolutionary changes in social structure, but would not identify such revolutionary changes with violence.
In a major address on revolution, Indian layman and chairman of the 1966 World Conference on Church and Society, M. M. Thomas, stated that the possibility of a revolution for justice betraying the ends of justice is always there. He said that "we have to reject the idea that violence is the essence of revolution, whether it comes from the side of the establishment or of the revolution."
Current political developments in a number of countries also engaged the Assembly.
Approved was a new $3 million appeal for relief operations in Nigeria (an addition to the $3,800,000 in cash and goods already on their way). Later the Assembly authorized the sending of three WCC representatives to attend the Organization of African Unity talks on the war.
In a statement on Vietnam, the Assembly called for an end "to the mortal suffering of the Vietnamese people." The resolution emphasizes the self-determination of the Vietnamese people and requests a strengthening of the United Nations.
On the issue of conscientious objection, the Assembly-approved report unequivocally stated that "churches should give spiritual care and support not only to those serving in armed forces but also to those who . . . object to participation in particular wars or to enter the military service of their nations for reasons of conscience." Such support, the statement said, should include pressure to have laws changed where required.
In repeated statements the assembly dealt with the race issue. "As Christians we must refuse to participate in any form of racial or class segregation in worship," said one document. "Contemporary racism robs all human rights of their meaning and is an imminent danger to world peace . . . " said another.
Then, in an Assembly session, when the new 120-member Central Committee was nominated, an American Negro needed to point out that all the nominees from integrated, but predominately white churches in the United States, were white. Subsequently, three Negroes from the United States were added to the committee, replacing three white American clergy, two of whom withdrew their names from nomination.
In somewhat similar fashion, the degree of participation by women and youth in the Assembly provided a running skirmish. The nomination of six presidents, all male, and all ordained, was challenged with the nomination of a lay woman, a move defeated by 339 votes to 284.
Elected as presidents of the Council until the next Assembly were: His Holiness German, Patriarch of Serbia; the Rt. Rev. A. H. Zulu, bishop of Zululand and Swaziland, Church of the Province of South Africa (Anglican); the Rev. Dr. D. T. Niles of Ceylon, chairman of the East Asia Christian Conference; Bishop Hanns Lilje, Evangelical Lutheran Church of Hannover, Germany; the Rev. Dr. Ernest A. Payne, Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland; and the Rev. John Coventry Smith, United Presbyterian Church in the USA.
The new Central Committee, also elected by the Assembly, is composed of 88 ordained men, 24 laymen, one ordained woman and seven lay women. Sixteen members are from Asia and Africa, six from Australasia and the Pacific, five from Latin America, 23 from North America and 54 from Europe and the Middle East.
