The World Council of Churches Is Founded

In January 1920 the Ecumenical Patriarchate wrote to “the Churches of Christ everywhere” that differences of doctrine need not prevent the churches from drawing closer. Pointing to the League of Nations, it proposed a league, or fellowship, of churches (Ecumenical Patriarchate, Encyclical of 1920). The World Council’s own report traces its ancestry to the missionary conference at Edinburgh in 1910, on which see the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh, and names two further movements that flowed into it, Life and Work and Faith and Order (World Council of Churches, First Assembly: Official Report, pp. 12–13). A conference at Utrecht in 1938 drafted a provisional constitution and set up a provisional committee to carry on the work (World Council of Churches, First Assembly: Official Report, p. 14).

The first assembly met in Amsterdam. On Monday 23 August 1948, in the Concertgebouw, with Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury, in the chair, Pastor Marc Boegner moved that the assembly be declared constituted and the formation of the World Council of Churches completed. The motion was adopted with no vote against, and the archbishop declared the council formed (World Council of Churches, First Assembly: Official Report, pp. 27–28). The report counts 147 churches from 44 countries, represented by 351 delegates (World Council of Churches, First Assembly: Official Report, p. 267, Summary of Statistics).

The constitution defines the council as “a fellowship of churches which accept our Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour” (World Council of Churches, First Assembly: Official Report, p. 197, Constitution, I). Willem Visser ‘t Hooft, its general secretary, told the assembly that it was a council of churches and not the council of the one undivided Church: an emergency solution and a stage on the road (World Council of Churches, First Assembly: Official Report, pp. 28–29). The assembly’s message to the churches says, “We intend to stay together” (World Council of Churches, First Assembly: Official Report, p. 9, The Message of the Assembly).

The Roman Catholic Church was not invited to send delegates, and in June 1948 the Holy Office refused permission for any Catholic to attend as an observer. The Church of Russia was absent too, and the general secretary asked that the door be kept open for it and for other Orthodox churches not yet represented (World Council of Churches, First Assembly: Official Report, pp. 30–31). Pius XI had laid down in 1928 that the Apostolic See could not take part in such assemblies, because the union of Christians could be promoted only by the return of the separated to the one true Church (Pius XI, Mortalium animos 8, 10).

In 1950 the council’s central committee, meeting at Toronto, said what membership did and did not imply. The council “is not and must never become a superchurch”, and a member church does not thereby treat its own conception of the Church as merely relative (World Council of Churches, Toronto Statement (1950), III.1, III.4). Nor does membership oblige a church to regard the other members as churches in the true and full sense of the word (World Council of Churches, Toronto Statement (1950), IV.4).