Black "Pope"

When the World Council of Churches chooses a new General Secretary in Irving Wallace's current novel The Word, it is a contest of political skulduggery between two fiercely ambitious churchmen. When the election is held in real life--as it was last week at the W.C.C.'s Central Committee meeting in Utrecht--it is a much more orderly process, with the maneuvering smoothed over by ecumenical diplomacy. But in other respects the man who won the World Council's chief executive post last week outdid both of Wallace's fictional contenders. He is Philip Alford Potter, 51, a Methodist from the West Indian island of Dominica. By geography and persuasion he is a Third Worlder. He is also black.

Potter becomes the third man to occupy the office since the World Council was founded in 1948. Scholarly Dutchman W.A. Visser 't Hooft, one of the organization's founding fathers, held the post until 1966, when he was succeeded by noted U.S. Presbyterian Ecumenist Eugene Carson Blake. Now 65, Blake is due to retire this fall. Potter will then take up a five-year term as ecumenical spokesman for more than 250 member denominations of the World Council, including Protestants, Anglicans and Eastern Orthodox --some 400 million Christians in all. Since Protestants form the core of the organization, he will become (though in a vastly less powerful way than Rome's Pontiff) the Protestant "Pope."

Good Time. Potter should cut a dashing figure in his new job. Tall and strapping (6 ft. 2 1/2 in., 210 lbs.), he is a former school athlete who once won prizes in the 100-and 200-meter dashes and the broad jump. He still hikes out on geology field trips when he finds the time, likes to listen to Baroque music at home with his wife Doreen, the daughter of a Jamaican Methodist minister. During an interview in Utrecht with TIME Correspondent Richard Ostling, the General Secretary-elect puffed on cigarillos and sipped a beer. The grandson of a rum distiller, he explained that West Indian Methodists were not as legalistic about alcohol as U.S. Methodists officially were. "My own witness as a young man was not that I would not drink," he recalled in his rich West Indian accent, "but that I would have a little and have a good time anyway."

Trained at Jamaica's United Theological College and London University, Potter was pastor of a Methodist church in Haiti until 1954, when he joined the W.C.C.'s youth department. Haiti helped to mold his view that the word of God must be accompanied by social action. "How dare I go well fed to talk to hungry, unlearned people about the fact that they must be saved," he asks, "and not roll up my sleeves?" During the 1960s, he served a seven-year stint as field secretary for Africa and the West Indies for the British Methodist Missionary Society, and presently he is director of the W.C.C.'s Commission on World Mission and Evangelism.

As a seminarian, Potter was struck by the Bible-based, neo-orthodox theology of Karl Barth, whose understanding of Christianity, he says, "forces us to take radical positions." Theologians Reinhold and Richard Niebuhr and Paul Tillich were other influences on his thought. Mainly, Potter says, "my theology is biblical, not systematic or dogmatic. I have faith in Christ who was born son of man while being Son of God, which makes that faith historical." He is also broadly ecumenical: "Coming from a slave people in a poor, relatively unknown area of the world, I have a sense of belonging to all men beyond race and class."

While the election of Potter reflects the growing importance of Protestant Christianity in the Third World, it may also exacerbate some of the problems that Third World involvement has created for the council. During the past two years, the W.C.C. has been heavily criticized for its grants ($265,000 to date) to black liberation movements in southern Africa. An outgrowth of a 1969 World Council consultation on racism chaired by Senator George Mc-Govern, the grants were specifically earmarked for welfare purposes, but critics complained that they could as easily be used for guns. The issue is likely to remain a sore one if the W.C.C. expands rather than diminishes its involvement in such liberation movements, as it may under Potter. Coupled with his heavy emphasis on the social responsibilities of Christian missions, Potter's policy could prevent the council from winning the support of the Gospel-first evangelicals who still remain outside it. Christianity Today Editor Harold Lindsell, for instance, thinks Potter "will produce further movement away from the historic mission of the Church."

Potter counters that the church must learn what Christianity demands. "No innovative change takes place by evolution," he argues. "There must be some radical breaks. A lot of our people, especially in affluent countries, face Christianity as a painless thing, a comfort. They don't see it as a goad, or understand that we have to accept pain on behalf of justice and peace."

Both Potter and the outgoing Eugene Carson Blake acknowledge that the W.C.C. has not always spoken out as strongly as it should have on important issues. Blake especially regrets that council officials did not protest sooner about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, though the W.C.C. has made repeated protests against the war in Viet Nam. Still, says Potter, the council tries to make its voice heard most where it has an audience--where there is still what he calls "a strong Christian influence," as in the U.S., South Africa and Rhodesia. "When we speak as Christians to Christians," Potter maintains, "we speak as strongly as we can."

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