The Third Assembly of the World Council of Churches

The ecumenical movement that produced the World Council of Churches was never a single river. Two currents fed it separately for decades: the Faith and Order and Life and Work conferences, arguing and cooperating their way toward a conciliar body that finally constituted the World Council itself at Amsterdam in 1948, and the International Missionary Council, a wholly separate organization coordinating the era's Protestant foreign missions, tracing its own lineage back to the 1910 Edinburgh missionary conference. The two bodies had cooperated for years without merging, run by different staffs with different institutional loyalties and, in places, different theological instincts about whether mission or unity came first.

New Delhi ended the separation. The International Missionary Council folded into the World Council of Churches as its new Division of World Mission and Evangelism, a single structural home for work that had run in parallel channels since before either institution existed in its 1961 form. The merger settled, in favor of union, an argument that had run through the whole twentieth century ecumenical movement: whether evangelism was a specialist's task properly kept administratively separate from church unity, or whether a divided church was itself an obstacle to the gospel it wanted to preach, and belonged in the same house as the effort to heal that division.

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.