Thursday October 31

Looking Back: The First World Assembly

The 10th World Council of Churches General Assembly is currently taking place in Busan, South Korea. In October 1948, Life and Work reflected on the first Assembly in Amsterdam, emphasising that the WCC should not be an end in itself.

"Master, let us make here..."

The first World Assembly of the Churches has met, with the Church of Rome and the Russian Orthodox Church alone of the larger communions dissenting - the former complaining that the Assembly was pursuing a false idea of unity; the latter, that the Assembly was wrongly involving itself in politics; each, perhaps, in its own way paying unconscious tribute to the new thing which is being created under the hand of God.

For these are two of the marks of the World Council of Churches, established at Amsterdam: the search for a unity above anything that has yet been seen in Christian history, and the claim that the kingdoms of this world, in their very politics and economics, are to become the new Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ, with a life that the world has never yet known.

The temptation of this Assembly was to stabilise itself thankfully at this achievement, to say: "This is a miracle of new fellowship - let us make it secure, let us make it permanent so that nothing of this may be lost." That is a temptation as old as the Church. It was the temptation that assailed the three disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration, when they suddenly became aware of new reaches in the unfolding mystery of God's redemption - let us capture the glory of this moment; let us do something to prevent us ever slipping back from it; let us make here, right away, three tabernacles. It is the temptation to consolidate at a point far short of the objective which God has ahead of us.

In this instance the temptation was in the desire to create a permanent structure of such organisational skill that the measure of unity achieved would be made secure, and the future co-operation of the Churches made certain - the temptation to forget that, thankful as we are for this measure of unity, this God-given fellowship across the barriers of our divisions, it must be, in God's sight, a poor shadow of what is to come. We should not wish to call it a stop-gap, a temporary substitute, and yet it would be better to call it that than to think of it as the real objective. The real objective is the Church Catholic which men's eyes have not yet seen, the Church that is above all our present Churches, the Church of which they are but the broken lights.

We believe that this temptation was seen and resisted at Amsterdam. But it will never be long absent from the ecumenical movement; it will demand "ceaseless vigilance." For the alternative will always be uncomfortable - to accept the necessary insecurity of being the means of the coming of this Catholic Church, to be ready to have this potter's vessel of our unity broken and re-made, and broken again, to be willing to bear the tension of being together while we are not yet of one mind, to do without the satisfaction of having permanent tabernacles to register our progress.

That is no more than the perpetual temptation of the Christian individual writ large and in new forms - the daily temptation, even in our very thankfulness, to make an abiding city of where we are, instead of seeking one to come, to be content with something less than the promise of God.

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