LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 1962, Page 23

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DOCTRINAL-DEVOTIONAL ESSAYS 23

notable Missionary Council meetings were held: at
Jerusalem in 1928; at Madras, India, in 1938; at Whitby,
Ont., Canada, in 1947; at Willingen, Germany, in 1952;
and in Ghana in 1958. All these meetings were held in
response to the conviction of the Missionary Councils
of the churches in question, that something must be
done to bring more unity into the missionary efforts
of the churches.

While the Missionary Councils of the churches were
meeting on problems of missions, the divisions them-
selves were being attacked on other fronts. Here it was
particularly the World Conference on Faith and Order
which did advance work. This conference met at
Lausanne in Switzerland in 1927, and again later at
Edinburgh and at Lund.

It was the World Conference on Faith and Order
which sought a doctrinal formula on which the churches
might come together for joint worship and work. It
came up with the formula which was to become the
basis for membership in the World Council of Churches,
the present chief instrument of the Ecumenical Move-
ment. The formula states that membership is open to
“all who accept the Lord Jesus Christ as God and
Savior.”

To date more than 170 churches, in the sense of
larger church bodies, in more than 50 countries have
joined the World Council of Churches on this doctrinal
platform. These churches are in part very diverse in
character, confession, and church polity. Episcopalians,
Eastern Orthodox, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Method-
ists, Quakers, the Salvation Army — these and other
widely divergent church groups are linked together in
the World Council of Churches.

The World Council of Churches does not attempt to
gloss over the theological and other differences between
the member churches. W. A. Visser ’t Hooft, the first
Secretary General of the World Council of Churches,
said to the Council at its convention in Amsterdam:

“We are a Council of Churches, not the Council of
the One Undivided Church. Our name indicates our
weakness and our shame before God, for there can be
and there is finally only one Church of Christ on earth.
Our plurality is a deep anomaly. But our name also
indicates that we are aware of the situation, that we
do not accept it passively, that we would move forward
towards the manifestation of the One Holy Church.
Our Council represents therefore an emergency solu-
tion—a stage on the road—a body living between
the time of complete isolation of the churches from each
other and the time —on earth or in heaven — when it
will be visibly true that there is one shepherd and one
flock.” (Official Report, New York: Harper & Bros.,
pp. 28 f.)

The Council acted in harmony with this confession
of disunity in the matter of Communion services at
- Amsterdam and at Evanston. For though the leaders of
the Council encouraged intercommunion, they respected
the consciences of the delegates in this matter and
arranged four separate Communion services, namely,

Reformed, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and Lutheran.
Otherwise they engaged in joint worship, with pref-
erence given to liturgical services.

The feelings in the Council with respect to fellow-
ship in view of the confessed differences may be gleaned
from the following expression in the official report:
“Although we cannot fully meet, our Lord will not
allow us to turn away from one another, for the very
intensity of our difference testifies to a common con-
viction which we drew from Him. The body of Christ
is a unity which makes it impossible for us either to
forget each other or to be content with agreement upon
isolated parts of our beliefs, while we leave the other
parts unreconciled.” (Ibid., p. 55)

The fear is often expressed by Christians that the
World Council of Churches will try, either now or in
the future, to be a superchurch, seeking to swallow the
smaller churches and to be itself the one remaining
denomination. This was firmly denied by Visser ’t Hooft
at Evanston. He said, according to the published re-
port (p. 25):

“The World Council of Churches is essentially an
instrument at the service of the churches to assist them
in their common task to manifest the true nature of the
church. It is an instrument and must therefore never
be considered as an aim in itself. The important thing
is not the World Council as an organization. What is
important is that the churches should be the Church.
It is therefore a sign of confused thinking to speak of
the World Council itself as The World Church. And it
is completely erroneous to suggest that the World
Council is or has any ambition to become a Super
Church, that is, a center of administrative power. There
is not a single church in the membership of the Council
which desires this; there is none which would tolerate
this.” (Ibid., p. 25)

Summing up the work of the first six years, 1948
to 1954, W. A. Visser ’t Hooft showed that the World
Council aims, not so much at amalgamation but rather
at complete and unrestricted fellowship between the
churches. He said:

“In the first six years the Council continued to stand
for manifest unity of the Church, but its own (the
Council’s) task in that area was necessarily limited:
First to remind the churches again and again that
cooperation or friendly relations are not enough, for
unity means at least complete unrestricted fellowship;
second, to create the conditions in which the churches
come to know each other, and learn from each other
so that the walls of partition become transparent and
finally disappear altogether. . . . The Council can and
must work to create a situation in which there is so
much in common between the churches, that there is
no adequate reason for them to remain separate from
each other.” (Ibid., p. 26)

Apart from its work of seeking to draw the disunited
church visible into closer fellowship, the World Council
of Churches in four major divisions carries on a num-
ber of types of most necessary practical work.