Marching Orders

As befits a religious council, the long days in New Delhi usually ended with a prayer service held under the cavernous shamiana (canopy). During working hours, the 577 delegates to the third Assembly of the World Council of Churches struggled to frame a coherent stand for non-Roman Catholic Christianity on the major issues of the times. Last week, after 18 days of debate, the Council adjourned. It will probably meet again six years from now; Ethiopia and Australia have already offered to serve as hosts.

"This assembly was far more dynamic than Amsterdam in 1948 or Evanston in 1954," said Manhattan Lawyer Charles Parlin, the Methodist layman who will serve as one of the Council's presidents. "It has been an extremely serious, united effort of giving directives for work." The Council's General Secretary, Willem Visser 't Hooft (TIME cover, Dec. 8), agreed that "we have received pretty clear marching orders," although, he added cautiously, "some of them will have to be worked out a little further."

The marching orders covered nearly everything from Portuguese oppression in Angola (disapproved by a narrow margin of 179-177) to admission of Red China into the U.N. (gingerly favored) to anti-Semitism (bitterly condemned). But the clearest expression of the Council's mind came in the three major reports on 1) Christian Service, 2) Witness, and 3) Unity. In this triad of messages, the Council reflected both its actuality as a going, growing concern, and the difficulties still to be faced in giving the right weight to beliefs so different as those of Greek Orthodox Metropolitans and Pentecostal missionaries from South America.

sbTHE REPORT ON SERVICE displayed the churches' keen awareness of social change and its effect on Christian life. It called on the church to "strive actively for racial justice" and urged Christians from rich nations to help poorer lands. It urged Christians "to work for political institutions which encourage participation of all citizens, and which protect both the person's freedom of conscience and his freedom to express his convictions . . . The state is not the Lord of the conscience." As might be expected of a message from Christians, the report was strong in defense of human and political rights, warning that "government without consent of the governed cannot be approved by Christians in our time." But in an appraisal of problems faced by new nations, it admitted the likelihood of "emergencies" that "seem to call for temporary authoritarian regimes." "Some of these systems," it said, "are more authoritarian than those whose outlook has been molded by the Western tradition of democracy would find acceptable for themselves. Yet the difficulty of maintaining order . . . may call for new forms of political life."

sbTHE REPORT ON WITNESS called for more intense participation by the laity* in the proclamation of the Gospel, for "they alone can bring Christian judgment to bear upon all the issues of life in the spheres of industry and commerce, scientific research and social organization." Most detailed was a recommendation that churches in predominantly secular communities consider new ways to spread the word of God. "It may be that the local church should seek to penetrate into the unevangelized population by the setting up of 'cells' or local Christian community groups: a handful of typists or salesgirls in a big store, a dozen or so workers on the various floors of a factory, eight research workers and their wives in a big chemical plant; a little congregation gathered from two or three streets, meeting as a house-church in the home of one of their number. They will try to be the Church, the People of God, in their own particular context."

sbTHE REPORT ON UNITY, in its tortured study of intercommunion, most acutely reflected the wide diversity of belief within the Council. The report urged member churches to strive for a "mutual recognition of ministries" as a first step toward recognition of members, suggested that local churches--even while prohibited from sharing the Lord's Supper--could grow together through "common worship, Bible study groups, prayer cells, joint visitation, common witness in our communities." At major interfaith meetings, intercommunion could be allowed even when union was not in sight. Perhaps, the report went on, the matter might better be resolved if unity meetings reversed the usual order of discussion, concentrated on what the Lord's Supper really was instead of on which church's ministry was valid and why. And at such talks, the report said, "the good offices of the Council should be used to help in breaking the deadlocks."

Along with their orders, Council delegates took with them a warning that their responsibility had begun, not ended. In a moving farewell sermon to the Assembly, Germany's famed Dr. Martin Niemoeller, president of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Hesse-Nassau (and one of the Council's six new presidents), summed up the meaning of the Assembly work as a "sharing of a common responsibility for what has happened here and for what will be done in future and in years to come. Our general theme these days has been: 'Jesus Christ the light of the world.' We shall have patiently to study and to work and to wait and to pray for his light that we may become able to find and to recognize the way on which he will be with us because it is his way."

*From the Greek laos, meaning "people."

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