"A Concentration on Christ"

"Who are you to have come here?" asked the black-robed pastor.

From 120,000 people came the answer, chanted in chorus: "We are Christians. We have come from many different traditions."

"What is it to be Christian?" asked the pastor.

From the crowd in Chicago's moonlit Soldier Field came the thunderous answer, drowning the rumble of nearby traffic: "It is to believe in God the Father, in His only Son, our Lord, who is the Hope of the World; and in the Holy Spirit."

"Why have you come?"

"We have come to worship God."

With this solemn dialogue between France's Marc Boegner and the crowd at Soldier Field, the World Council of Churches last week dramatized the unity of Christians in a mammoth "Festival of Faith."

Home for the World. The delegates to the World Council's second Assembly had come from 48 countries to Chicago's suburb, Evanston (pop. 73,641), where comfortable houses sit well back from the elm-shaded streets and unfenced lawns flow comfortably together like the town's friendly citizens. Evanston has the Garrett Bible Institute, Northwestern University, the new headquarters of Rotary International and teetotal Prohibition. Last week homey Evanston was doing its best to make a home for Christianity.

White, black and brown faces beamed at each other over clerical collars. Open-shirted youth leaders from Europe, ascetic-faced priests, smiling Oriental ladies gathered in knots on street corners. Incongruous beside the traffic lights and parked convertibles moved icon-like faces, brown and bearded, with heavy gold chains and swirling robes. Clutching blue Official Handbooks printed in French, German and English, they hurried from hall to meeting room to auditorium to teas, shuttled in 20 buses along the long straggle of Northwestern's campus to the plenary sessions at McGaw Hall.

McGaw, a new, enormous, hangar-like structure next to Northwestern's football stadium, was built for indoor sports. At the first plenary session the 4,000-seat public section was packed solid with sweating, shirtsleeved folk, but after the first long address in German (by Dr. Edmund Schlink--see below), the spectators began to melt away.

Toward the Center. There was much theological talk, but there was much, too, that could be understood by anyone. Such were the stirring words of the Archbishop of Canterbury, read for him (he was ailing) at Soldier Field by his friend Bishop Bell of Chichester. Excerpts:

"Movements may be as formless as a shifting fog, as destructive as a stream of lava, as senseless as a panic-stricken mob, as regimented to evil ends as Naziism, as suicidal as the movements of the Gadarene swine. The ecumenical movement is a movement of free men all in one direction. It is a movement of churches toward their own center, a concentration of Christendom on Christ. Because we see through a glass darkly, because we get in each other's way a good deal, because we are sinners and because we are involved in the world's sins as well as our own, there is plenty of confusion still. But we move forward . . .

"The ecumenical movement is, by the Grace of God, a seeking by all the churches of what cannot be had in any other way--a new manifestation of Christ to His church and so to the world which He died to save."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.