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Dr W.A. Visser 't Hooft, first general secretary of the WCC, 1966. © WCC/John P. Taylor
By Theodore Gill
When the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches (WCC) convenes in plenary sessions during the course of its current meeting, the 150 representatives of member churches and assorted observers gather in the W.A. Visser ’t Hooft Hall, the main meeting room of the Ecumenical Centre in Geneva, Switzerland. The room is named for a theologian from the Netherlands who served as the first general secretary of the WCC from 1948 to 1966.
Plans for the establishment of a global council of churches had been in progress for more than a decade prior to its First Assembly at Amsterdam in the summer of 1948. The WCC presence in Geneva dates to the beginning of 1939 when Visser ’t Hooft opened the original office of “the World Council of Churches in Process of Formation.”
The WCC Central Committee meets in 2014 during the 75th anniversary year of this institutional precursor to the WCC. Today’s committee follows in the footsteps of the Provisional Committee of the WCC in Process of Formation, which held its first two full meetings during 1939. Key questions addressed in those sessions were the organizational future of the WCC, the deteriorating international situation as Europe moved toward war, and the role of youth in the leadership of the ecumenical movement.
Until the end of 1938, Visser ’t Hooft had been general secretary of the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF). Even before that, he had been known as a Christian youth leader through involvement in the Student Christian Movement in the Netherlands and in Europe. His memoirs report that his youthful reputation threatened to become an obstacle when he was nominated to become the first general secretary of the nascent WCC:
It was only many years later that I
heard that serious question had been raised about my age. Was I not too
young for the responsible post of General Secretary? According to
William Temple’s biographer, it was Temple who insisted that this was
not an insuperable obstacle.
At that same time William Temple, then the Archbishop of York in the
Church of England and shortly to become the Archbishop of Canterbury,
also formulated a classic explanation to concern over whether a “World
Council” would exercise administrative authority or control over the
lives of its member churches:
It is not a federation as commonly
understood, and its Assembly and Central Committee will have no
constitutional authority whatever over its constituent churches. Any
authority that it may have will consist in the weight it carries with
the churches by its wisdom.
Tentative plans were made by the Provisional Committee for an
inaugural WCC Assembly in 1941, but events later in 1939 would require
that this date be postponed until the restoration of peace.At the turn of 1938-39, Visser ’t Hooft was with a delegation of the WSCF to the world conference of the International Missionary Council (IMC) in Tambaram, Madras, India. The IMC, eventually to merge with the WCC in the 1950s, had invited this delegation of young people to ensure the engagement of youth in planning for Christian mission and evangelism.
Ecumenical leaders were well aware of global injustice and the imminent threat of war. Many were especially concerned with the church struggle in Germany. While still serving the WSCF, Visser ’t Hooft had been visiting colleagues and friends in Tübingen and Stuttgart on Kristallnacht in November 1938 when he saw synagogues in flames. He pushed the WSCF, and later the WCC, to speak out against such Nazi atrocities and to collaborate in Geneva with the World Jewish Congress.
Seventy-five years ago this month in Geneva, an ecumenical consultation on the international situation was co-sponsored by the WCC and its partner the World Alliance for Peace through Friendship among the Churches.
Visser ’t Hooft recorded that the international consultation submitted a report to the WCC administrative committee, which in turn “decided to send the report to the churches, again calling special attention to the section on the tasks of the Church in time of war – true Christian prayer and preaching centred on the righteousness of the Kingdom; maintenance of brotherly relations between the churches in spite of propaganda; preparation of a just and lasting peace; counteracting hatred; ministry to prisoners of war and refugees.”
Visser ’t Hooft commented: “A cynic might well have asked if there were any chance that in case of total war the churches would remember these good intentions.” But he added that this was quite a different tone from that employed in most church statements during the build-up to the previous war, just 25 years before: “A comparison of the attitude of the churches in the first world war with their message in the second shows that ecumenical intercourse had made a real difference.“
The last major conference of the churches prior to World War II was the World Conference of Christian Youth, held at Amsterdam in late July and early August 1939. The event was sponsored by the WSCF, the ecumenical youth commission of both the WCC and World Alliance for Peace through Friendship among the Churches, and the World Alliance of YMCAs and YWCAs. Visser ’t Hooft recalled: “On the basis of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer had told me in March and what I heard from other German friends, I told…the organizing secretary that we would probably have to cancel the meeting. But I was wrong by one month.”
When the war came in September 1939, there was talk that Germany might invade Switzerland. WCC leaders seriously discussed moving the offices to New York City, as the USA was still a neutral nation at that time. But Visser ’t Hooft committed himself and the WCC in Process of Formation to a witness of presence in Geneva, at the heart of war-torn Europe, come what may.
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