The Council

The Federal Council of Churches, which last week differed from Winston Churchill on the drift of world affairs (see INTERNATIONAL), is the biggest single body of U.S. religious opinion. Its 400 delegates are the nominal spokesmen for some 27,000,000 members of 22 Protestant and three Orthodox church groups. Each church group is represented in the Council by four delegates, plus another delegate for each 50,000 of its communicants. The Council's chief purpose: "to secure a larger combined influence for the churches of Christ in all matters affecting the moral and social condition of the people."

With some $350,000 a year, the Council finances commissions and publications on such matters as evangelism, race relations, radio, labor relations, "international justice & good will," etc. The Council itself spends no money on relief or missions, but it underwrites the budgets of several interdenominational religious agencies which do. Among them: Commission on Aliens & Prisoners of War, Committee on the Conscientious Objector, Committee on Overseas Relief & Reconstruction. Member groups are assessed not according to size but to income. Thus the Protestant Episcopal Church chips in a good deal more per person than the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

Outstanding Federal Council activity is its pronouncements on national and world affairs. Notable milestone: its endorsement, last year, of Dumbarton Oaks.

Too Modernist? The Council's constitution forbids the drawing up of any common creed, and bars from membership extremely "liberal" churches which deny Christ's divinity. In 1944, the Council voted against admitting the Universalist Church (45,000 members). Other sizable nonmember churches: Unitarian, Southern Baptist, most Lutheran groups.' Chief complaint of most Baptist and Lutheran groups, who are basically fundamentalist, is that the Council itself is too modernist, leftist and pacifist.

Last week, for example, five Columbus ministers, members of the rival American Council of Christian Churches (which claims to speak for 1,000,000 Protestants), attacked the Federal Council's condemnation of The Bomb as "un-American," charged that the Council's atomic warfare committee was loaded with "wheelhorses from such centers of pacifism and radicalism as Yale Divinity School, Union Theological Seminary, Chicago Theological Seminary."

Since its founding in 1908, the Federal Council has achieved a remarkable degree of unity on social and world affairs among at least half of those U.S. Christians whose faith embodies the very name of protest. The Council preserves its unity, however, by avoiding theological discussion, knowing full well that any real effort toward doctrinal unity would drive its 25 groups back into their own shells for good.

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