The assembly that constituted the World Council of Churches had been scheduled for 1941. It met in Amsterdam in August 1948, so the churches that gathered to constitute a common body were doing so three years after coming out of a war in which many of them had been on opposite sides, occupied, complicit, resistant or destroyed, and in some cases all of these at once.
A hundred and forty-seven churches joined. The basis of membership was a single sentence: a fellowship of churches which accept our Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour. It was deliberately minimal, because anything longer would have excluded somebody, and it was still not minimal enough for everyone.
The constitution adopted gives the council no power to legislate for its members. It cannot define doctrine, it cannot discipline a church, and it cannot act on a member's behalf without that member's consent. This is the essential difference between an assembly of this kind and a council in the older sense: it was built to be council-shaped and to have none of a council's authority, and that was the condition of anyone joining at all.
The four sections of the assembly reported on the universal church and God's design, the church's witness, the church and the disorder of society, and the church and the international disorder, which is a fair index of what the churches of 1948 thought was most urgent.