THE NORTHERN ADVOCATE Registered for transmission through the Post as a newspaper. MONDAY AUGUST 23, 1948. At Amsterdam Today

Northern Advocate, 23 August 1948, Page 4

THE NORTHERN ADVOCATE Registered for transmission through the Post as a newspaper. MONDAY AUGUST 23, 1948. At Amsterdam Today

What has beer, described as the greatest ecclesiastical event since the Reformation was inaugurated yesterday, when the first Assembly of the World Council of Churches opened at Amsterdam.

No less than .145 of the world’s major churches are represented by delegates at the conference, the exceptions being the Orthodox Churches of Russia and Bulgaria, and the Roman Catholic Church, which, however, is represented by observers.

Twelve hundred delegates, from 42 Countries, were present at the opening of the conference, the first task of which is to draft a constitution for the World Council of Churches, and to relegate to committees proposals submitted by the various churches throughout the world.

How did the conference come about?

The Rev. Alan A. Brash, who is ore of the New Zealand delegates, gave the following answer to the Presbyterian Church paper “Outlook”: “In 1854 Bishop Selwyn furloughed in Britain after 12 years’ pioneering among Maoris and settlers. Preaching before the University of Cambridge he asked: “Is it unreasonable to hope that the power which will heal the divisions of the Church at home may come from her distant fields of missionary work? This is how, indeed, the movement towards a united, cooperative Christendom has come about.”

Mr Brash recalls that in the years in which Selwyn spoke the first “Union Missionary Conference” was held in New York, and by 1910 it had become the first World Missionary Conference, which was held at Edinburgh. This conference set up a standing body, known as the International

Missionary Council, which hold its next conference at Jerusalem in 1928. About 50 delegates to that conference were of the “Younger Churches, 1 ' as Christian communities begun by missionaries were becoming known. ■At the next conference, held at Madras in 1938, more than half of the 470 delegates came from such churches.

This fact convinced the conference that the time had come for a World Conference, not of missionary bodies and their converts, but of churches, and, as a consequence, representatives of 80 churches met at Utrecht later in 1938 and drew up a draft constitution for a “World Council of Churches,” to be established in 1941 if the proposal were approved by member churches.

The outbreak of World War II made impossible the holding of the proposed conference in 1941, but—developments in New Zealand provide a case in point—the movement was nourished to such purpose that, though technically “in process of formation,” the World Council has, under the guidance of its Provisional Committee, acted as though fully formed, thus laying the foundation for the great movement now being consummated at Amsterdam.

What now can be expected to come from the conference? Professor John Bennett offers the following answer: “The Assembly does not have the right to speak for the churches to the world or the ecclesiastical authority to command the assent of the churches themselves. Its utterances will have weight in virtue of the fact that they will come from a representative gathering of Christian leaders. They will give guidance in proportion to their inherent wisdom and to the moral authority of those responsible for them.”