The First Assembly of the World Council of Churches

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.

The obvious objection to a council of churches is that joining one looks like conceding the argument. If an episcopal church that holds valid orders to be necessary sits down as an equal member with a church it regards as lacking them, has it not admitted that the question does not matter?

The council answered this two years later, at Toronto, in a statement that made the whole enterprise workable. Membership in the World Council does not imply that a church regards the other member churches as churches in the true and full sense of the word. It does not imply that any doctrine of the church is being accepted, or that relativism about doctrine is being adopted. Each church retains its own understanding of what the church is and of where it is found.

That formulation is what lets bodies that deny each other's orders, sacraments and ecclesial standing sit in the same room and work together without either side conceding anything. It is a negative agreement, an agreement about what agreement is not being reached, and it has held for three quarters of a century.

The membership has grown well beyond 1948. Most of the Orthodox churches came in later, the Russian Orthodox Church at the New Delhi assembly of 1961, and the centre of gravity has moved decisively towards Africa and Asia. The Roman Catholic Church has never been a member. It sends observers, works with the council on particular commissions, and has consistently declined to join a body whose basis of membership is deliberately less than its own understanding of the church.