NEW WORLD MOVEMENT

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIX, Issue 21957, 8 May 1941, Page 8

NEW WORLD MOVEMENT

ADDRESS BY THE REV. M. W. WILSON Although during the present century the most significant world movements would seem to be those of Communism on the one hand and the various national “fascisms” on the other, it was probable that historians a few hundred years hence would have a different perspective, said the Rev. M. W Wilson of Tlmaru, at a meeting of the Temuka-Geraldine Ministers’ Association on Tuesday morning. The oecumenical, or inter-church movement, might well have a more profound effect on world history. x .. . Mr Wilson went on to point out that for the first time since the great Church Councils in the early centuries, the title "oecumenical” could rightly be used. After these councils had occurred the great schism between the Eastern and Western Churches. Up till the time of the Renaissance and the Reformation there had been a unity of faith, worship, and communal life through Europe under the Western Church. In Reformation days there was a great revival of life and thought within the Church, and yet a tragedy also in that this unity of life was broken asunder. It was noteworthy that the new movement for world church co-opera-tion followed on the great growth of missionary activity. It was really at the Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910 that the oecumenical vision took shape. Since then, at first Under the leadership of Bishop Brent of the United States, it had developed along four lines—the Faith and Order Movement with world conferences at Geneva 1920; Lausanne, 1927; and Edinburgh, 1937; the Life and Work Movement at Stockholm, 1927, and Oxford, 1937; the World Missionary Conferences at Jerusalem, 1928, and Madras, 1938, and the Christian Youth Movements which had their first conference at Amsterdam, 1939 Out of all there had emerged the World Council of Churches with an Assembly meeting every five years and a Central Council every year. Mr Wilson emphasised the fact that the movement did not aim at a future Church uniformity, but gave expression to the- real unity already achieved. Although the Roman Catholic Church was not yet working in it, that Church had sent its official observers to the Conference at Edinburgh. Within the movement itself there were still wide variations of thought and system, but it had been already shown that these were not mutually exclusive. The Church as a whole offered to mankind a faith in which the nations might rediscover unity, and was already manifesting her own unity through the new movement. Already the life of many of the separate churches had been enriched and deepened through their new fellowship, and actual unions in Canada, Scotland and especially on the mission fields, had taken place. "How splendid,” wrote a Continental Church leader recently, “that God gave us December, 1938, before May, 1940!” No Nazi censor, said Mr Wilson, would understand his reference; yet it typified a new hope and confidence of profound importance in the days to come.