Toward Reunion

Last week a call was issued to U.S. churches: on Sunday Aug. 22 they were asked to ring their bells once each hour from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. The bells will summon Christians to prayer. On that day, in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, 450 Christian men & women delegates will begin a meeting that has been called the most significant occasion since the Protestant Reformation--the first Assembly of the World Council of Churches.

The Amsterdam meeting had its beginnings back in 1910, when missionaries of many non-Roman Catholic churches met in Edinburgh to discuss their common problems and the possibilities of cooperation. Among them was a U.S. Episcopal bishop, the Rt. Rev. Charles Henry Brent. In the midst of the proceedings, Bishop Brent suddenly saw things in a new perspective. "I learned that something was working that was not of man in that conference,'-' he said later. "The spirit of God . . . was preparing a new era in the history of Christianity." He set to work to persuade his fellow churchmen that they should consider what they have in common.

In 1927 Brent and his friends succeeded in mustering representatives of 127 church groups in Lausanne, Switzerland, "for the consideration of questions touching Faith and Order." Meanwhile another interdenominational group had met in Stockholm under the leadership of Archbishop Nathan Soederblom, Primate of Sweden, to discuss the social, economic and political ills that plague humanity. Both groups called their next meetings in the same year--1937. Then both conferences voted to set up a joint body, to be called the World Council of Churches.

For 14 days this summer the World Council will meet officially for the first time. Churchmen with such polyglot titles as archbishop, archimandrite, catholicos, exarch, moderator, pfarrer, priest, minister, pasteur, professor and elder will worship and confer with laymen of almost every Christian faith but the Roman Catholic (see col. 3).

When the Council's first meeting ends there will be as many sects and denominations as before; there will be no "Protestant Pope," nor even a unified high command. But the hope is that a new peak will be reached in brotherly understanding, and that a long step will be taken toward church reunion.

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