The Assembly That Let In Churches From Behind the Iron Curtain

When the World Council of Churches constituted itself at Amsterdam in 1948, the Russian Orthodox Church was not there, and could not plausibly have been: the Soviet state that governed it treated an international ecumenical body headquartered in the West with open suspicion, and the church's own leadership had denounced the founding assembly in advance. Thirteen years later at New Delhi, that changed. The Russian Orthodox Church applied for membership and was admitted, together with the Orthodox churches of Romania, Bulgaria and Poland, bringing millions of Christians living under communist governments into formal fellowship with churches across the Cold War's other side.

The timing did not go unremarked. Some Western commentators wondered aloud whether the Soviet state had simply decided that a supervised ecumenical presence served its interests better than an ecclesiastical wall, and whether the Russian church's new openness was really its own choice. Orthodox delegates at the assembly and since have rejected that reading, insisting the decision to join reflected the church's own theological judgment about Christian unity rather than a policy handed down from outside it. What is not in dispute is the practical effect: New Delhi made the World Council of Churches, for the first time, a body that actually spanned the Iron Curtain rather than stopping at it.