Leaders of the nation’s largest coalition of Christian churches will gather here this week (Nov. 9-11) to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the ecumenical movement.
Members of the National Council of Churches, representing 100,000 congregations and 45 million people in 35 Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox denominations, will also discuss and how to fight poverty, war and environmental degradation””while trying to bring down barriers dividing denominations.
The group will hold its annual General Assembly alongside its global humanitarian arm, Church World Service.
I looked up the NCC 35 members. Mostly liberal mainlines and a smattering of Orthodox. No wonder they are more interested in poverty, war and the environment than they are in evangelization.
Let the dead bury the dead.
Indeed. There has been a strong movement among some of the Orthodox to withdraw from the NCC (one church did a few years ago). Let us pray the rest do so quickly.
Seeing as how much of the Orthodox clergy in the US is reworked Protestants, their membership doesn’t surprise me.
The 1910 Edinburgh Conference was focused on world mission, and sought ecumenical cooperation in order to foster the fulfillment of the Great Commission. Among other things, it was notable because for the first time, major Anglo-Catholic representatives (like +Charles Gore) participated alongside hardcore Protestants (and low church Anglicans).
The real centenary celebration of the 1910 mission conference was the Lausanne III conference on world evangelization that took place last month in Capetown. Over 4,000 evangelical leaders from all over the world gathered for the week-long event. From an ethnic and international perspective, it was far more inclusive than the 1910 event (which was almost entirely confined to white Europeans and European missionaries). But sadly, from an institutional perspective, Lausanne III was less representative of the whole Church. Alas, the WCC has forgotten or betrayed its roots by aligning itself so closely with liberal Christianity and a focus on social justice that often appears to be at the expense of evangelism.
John R. Mott, call your office!
David Handy+
Ad Orientem (#2),
I think you’ll probably agree that while there were good reasons for the Orthodox to participate in the WCC in its early days before that organization turned so liberal, and while most Orthodox churches were isolated and harshly oppressed in either Muslim or Communist countries (until the fall of Communism and the Soviet empire starting in 1989), those circumstances have changed radically. Now the Russian Orthodox Church and the other Slavic Orthodox groups are much freer to communicate with the outside world and seek other forms of fellowship and witness.
Alas, the representatives that the Orthodox generally sent to ecumenical meetings during the Communist era were often stooges of the Party, or at least not free to speak openly and honestly of the cruel struggles the Church faced in their homeland. Those days are mostly past now, thanks be to God.
David Handy+