What is Going on at Amsterdam?                           8/29/48

 

Scripture:  Acts 2: 14-21

 

Text:  Acts 2: 17b;  “Your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.”

 

At least four times during the past week Associated Press dispatches have appeared in our local newspaper datelined “Amsterdam, The Netherlands.”  Each dispatch has reported a meeting of great historical significance -- a church gathering.  This meeting is the Assembly of the World Council of churches which has been in session all this past week and will continue to meet through this coming week.  To some, it may have been momentary news, something about which they have heard for the first time.  To many others, well-informed churchmen, it is coverage of an event to which they have looked forward for a long time.

 

Something like 140 Protestant and Orthodox church bodies from 39 countries around the world are represented in this great gathering.  Only a very few Christian denominations are not represented.  The Roman Catholic church is not there.  Nor is the Eastern Orthodox church, except for an unofficial observer from a non-Russian country.  The Southern Baptist and Missouri Synod Lutheran churches of the United States are not taking part.  Otherwise, most major denominations of the Christian churches all over the world are represented at the Amsterdam Assembly right now.

 

About 1,400 people are attending the Assembly.  Of these, 450 are official delegates; 350 are alternates; 100 are youth delegates; and the remaining 500 are consultants, fraternal delegates, observers, accredited visitors and press representatives.  The cross-section of Christian representation from 140 church bodies springs from churches totaling about 100 million members all over the world.  So much for a few statistics.

 

Now, for the first time in history, the major branches of the Christian church, with the exception of the Roman Catholics and the other churches I have noted, are establishing a continuing organization of cooperation and unity.  Dr. Paul Macy, director of the World Council of Churches’ Midwest office in this country, expresses the opinion the “no event of like importance has taken place for 400, and perhaps 800, years.”

 

How did all this begin?  Spiritually, it began with the early, first century Christian church, and has continued through the ages as a concern for Christian unity.  But the modern “ecumenical” movement may be dated from 1910.  In that year, there met at Edinburgh, Scotland, representatives of various missionary societies to discuss their common problem of reaching the millions who had never heard of Christ.

 

Out of that 1910 Edinburgh meeting there flowed 3 streams of the movement toward Christian unity.  (1)  One was the formation of the International Missionary Council which held its next great gathering in 1928 at Jerusalem, and its latest one in 1938 near Madras in India.

 

In that 1910 Edinburgh conference it was apparent that the discussion had to do with so-called “practical” problems.  All matters touching basic beliefs were avoided, probably because the delegates feared division in controversy.  Bishop Charles Brent of the Episcopal Church in the Philippines was so concerned over this fact that he persuaded his church, the Episcopal church, to call a meeting of all churches which “accept our Lord Jesus Christ as God and Savior” for a World Conference on Faith and Order.  This conference was held at Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1927.  There it was found that representatives of widely differing shades of belief could discuss their faith with no loss of Christian love and unity.  In other words, it was at last apparent that one Christian, or one church, does not have to be “mad” at another church, or even aloof, just because of a difference of opinion, even on basic belief.  But the spirit of Christian love and unity can be preserved and even strengthened by frank discussion of our beliefs and understanding of each other.  Ten years later in 1937 a second conference on Faith and Order was held at Edinburgh.  This movement was the second stream in this modern ecumenical movement.

 

(3)  A third stream in this movement toward Christian unity was a conference on “Life and Work” first held at Stockholm in 1925.  91 churches from 33 countries there formed the “Universal Christian Council for Life and Work” which held another conference 12 years later in 1937 at Oxford, England, on “Church, Community, and State.”

 

Note that this conference and the last one on “Faith and Order” were held the same year, 1937, in the same general area (Great Britain), one at Edinburgh and one at Oxford.  There was presented to both conferences a proposal that they merge into a new “World Council of Churches.”  The proposal was accepted with very few dissenting votes, and in the next year, 1938, delegates of over 100 Christian bodies met with the continuing “Committee of Fourteen” at Utrecht, Holland.  There, 10 years ago, with no single vote of dissent, a preliminary draft of a proposed constitution and plan of organization for the World Council of Churches was adopted.

 

Not in 1948 we are witnessing the first Assembly of that great Council.  The World Council is already functioning.  Its headquarters are at Geneva, Switzerland.  Its staff have done a magnificent job in appraising need and supervising distribution of relief supplies through Christian church channels.  Many of the gifts of our own churches here in Wisconsin Rapids have been so supervised.

 

Head man of the World Council is Dr. Visser ‘t Hooft of Holland, general secretary of the Council, and an intensely practical man.  Due to the practicality of his vision, Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., for instance, was moved 2 years ago to give a million dollars to get the World Council better organized and functioning.

 

The Would Council’s Ecumenical Institute, on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland, is a very real and vital organization.  It was one of the first to do anything about the spiritual care of Prisoners of War in 1938.  Its refugee commission helped to undo a lot of Hitler’s Nazi racial persecution.  Its important study department has done a vast amount of basic spade work in preparation for this Assembly.  Its press service published a bulletin of incalculable value to Christian papers and magazines throughout the world.  This press service was not interrupted throughout the war.  Its department of Reconstruction and Relief perhaps eclipses all of its other functions in the postwar period, even penetrating the Iron Curtain with carefully spent Christian relief.  So the present Assembly of the World Council is, in a sense, a “stockholders’ meeting” of a going concern.

 

Four great tasks are before the present Assembly.

 

(1)  To discuss and grapple with the theme of the Assembly, “Man’s Disorder and God’s Design.”  This, in turn, is attacked under four subtitles for sectional discussion and report:

            I.     The Universal Church in God’s Design.

            II.   God’s Design and Man’s Witness.

            III.  The Church and the Disorder of Society.

            IV.   The Church and International Affairs.

 

(2)  The adoption of a World Council constitution, the preliminary form of which was drafted at Utrecht in 1938.

 

(3)  Decision as to the tasks which the World Council should undertake in the future.  Working out of agreement on the main principles and policies to be formed.

 

(4)  Discussion of several urgent concerns of the churches:

 

            I.  Place and task of laymen in the church.

            II.  Life and work of women in the church.

            III.  Christian attitude toward Jews et al.

 

The Amsterdam Assembly will probably tell the Christian churches a great lead about how far the spirit of Christian unity has really grown during these tragic years.  It may be that the Holy Spirit will be allowed to further His work throughout Christendom through the medium of this Assembly.

 

This will measure the true significance of the present Assembly meeting.  I have this morning reviewed a few points of the history and organization of the World Council.  I needed the review, and perhaps you did, too!  But I am certain that no amount of organizing and “committee-ing” makes a church or a true council of churches.  The true church lies in its spirit alone --- the Holy Spirit -- the spirit of God in the hearts of people.  Do we have that spirit, or do we not?  Will the Assembly witness it?

Henry Smith Leiper expresses the profound hope that “this Assembly will mark a great renewal of faith in the original concepts of Christian brotherhood.”  That depends on a renewed, experiential faith in the fatherhood of God.

 

The true church is not a historical society of interpretation of the past.  The church -- our church -- the church of Chrisst universal -- is a living fellowship seeking truth from the past, and light in the present and hope in the future.

 

It should be a community, above locale and above State.  Within the Roman Empire, and above the Roman Empire, it was so in its beginning.  The State has too far been allowed to take its place.  One aggressive non-Christian movement, the Cominform, is now determined to take this place.  The church -- the fellowship of Christian people -- the true “family of the saints” must again be a reality.  To this end, we and our Christian representatives must stir up our wills to be the channel of God’s grace in this hell-bent world.

 

For a distressing period in history, churches divided and sub-divided on matters of organizational and theological controversy.  That insistent, and often violent, urge to freedom of thinking had its merit, and has largely fulfilled its purpose in human history.  Today the major theological controversies are not between denominations.  These controversies are largely within denominations or across denomination lines.

 

The sharpest theological difference of opinion in Europe today is between two groups whose leaders, Barth and Brunner, both belong to the Reformed Church in Switzerland.  It is not necessary that Christians agree in order to have love and unity of Christian spirit.  It is important that Christians know and experience this spiritual kinship despite disagreements.  Paul and Peter, and their  respective followers, disagreed very sharply in the very first century of Christian church experience.  But the Christian church grew in spite of it -- or perhaps even because of these honestlly expressed differences.

 

The most seriously divisive force in Protestantism is across denominational lines.  A group of relatively smaller churches, extremists of what we might call fundamentalist persuasion, has become convinced that the major denominations are bad.  Accordingly, they have formed a smaller National Council of Churches that works confusion in the non-churched eye because of the similarity of its name to the Federal Council.  Furthermore, under the name “International Council of Churches,” they held their meeting at Amsterdam for the week of August 12 to 19th -- same month, same place, very similar name.  God will be the judge, for good or ill, of the apparent effort to sabotage the possibility of great spiritual progress in the World Council of Churches.

 

But the World Council, and its present Assembly, will in no wise be tested by any opposition to the so-called “International Council,” but by the evidence of Christian unity and spiritual fellowship evidenced in its own entity.

 

It is already a remarkable thing that such frank opinion can be expressed in this Christian fellowship as is heard.  Christians from Asia have written in preparation for Amsterdam, with utter honesty, to western Christians about race, about imperialism, about capitalism and communism, about attitudes of western powers and western churches.  Western Christians have listened in patience and sometimes in penitence and have offered their views.  And all have spoken in honesty and love with a freedom, even in difference, not to be found elsewhere except in Christian community.  A leading German layman could say, “The church universal is the only place in the world where we Germans are treated with the same respect, and receive the same rights, as the other members.”

 

Here agreement and disagreement is subordinate to the bonds of love and unity.

 

Our denominational differences of expression, and our own individual Christian opinions are safe from oppression and have full possibility of contributing to the common good of all in this kind of unity.

 

The intense cooperative thinking now going on at Amsterdam, where young men may see visions and old men may dream dreams, and all help bring the better day to reality, is the very stuff that can be used by the Holy Spirit for the rebirth of the church of Christ spiritual and universal.

 

Pray God for his guidance at this great meeting!

 

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Delivered at Wisconsin Rapids, August 29, 1948 (union service)