"A Family of God"

In the sunlit Georgian harmony of Yale Divinity School, the 90-member Central Committee of the World Council of Churches began its tenth annual meeting last week, the first major World Council meeting in the U.S. since 1954. In attendance: 131 delegates, consultants and guests from 21 nations representing 170 million Protestant, Eastern Orthodox and Anglican church members. First question facing the nine-day meeting: How loud should the church's voice sound in the ears of the world's statesmen?

Britain's Archbishop of Canterbury was for well-modulated tones: too much political moralizing by the churches can lead to moral indignation in the countries concerned, and moral indignation "is a dangerous dynamite that has to be controlled." Thorniest case in point: a 900-word report from the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs urged Christians in countries that planned tests of nuclear weapons to take a calculated "risk for peace" by urging their governments to stop all such tests for a trial period--even without prior international control agreements--"in the hope that others will do the same." Attached to the report was a 3,000-word appendix on the dangers of radioactive fallout. Among other vague goals cited were the halting of nuclear weapons production under controls and "more effective mechanisms for peaceful settlement of international disputes."

The Archbishop of Canterbury thought the report "completely masterly." But Bishop George K. A. Bell of Chicester, England led a group of delegates who thought it wishy-washy. West Germany's Evangelical Lutheran Bishop Hanns Lilje of Hannover sounded off against "trying to be friends with everybody." Also for a tougher document: West Germany's famed Pastor Martin Niemoeller. At week's end the Central Committee had passed the report along to a subcommittee and was preparing for decisions on 1) a proposed merger with the 36-year-old International Missionary Council, made up of Protestant regional mission associations throughout the world; 2) "racial and ethnic tensions"; 3) new member churches.

This week, in a sermon at New Haven, the Archbishop of Canterbury presented a memorable definition of the role of the World Council in relation to Christianity. "We of the churches can enjoy our fellowship with one another in the family of God--for the moment doing without reliance on scriptural, credal, ministerial or sacramental orthodoxy . . . But there is the danger of thinking that we can confront the world like that, and if we do we fall into the same confusion as there was in Jerusalem at Pentecost--we excite some to Godly praise but others to perplexity and contempt . . . And there is the paradox that because the great Church has not yet learned to agree sufficiently in the use of its corporate weapons of the Holy Spirit, the World Council of Churches offers to help the great Church to find itself and do its work of worship, witness and service, or indeed sets out to teach it its duty. It can do much as a family of God. It can do nothing as a church, since it has none of the corporate gifts of the Holy Spirit to the Church in its own right. To act as a family only seems so often impotent, to seek to do a churchly work may reveal only confusion and contradiction. So carefully must it walk."

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