World Council of Churches

The Council's roots lie in two separate ecumenical movements of the early twentieth century that had not yet merged when the First World War interrupted them. The Faith and Order movement, growing out of a proposal made at a 1910 world missionary conference in Edinburgh, sought agreement among churches on questions of doctrine and church order; the Life and Work movement, associated especially with the Swedish Lutheran Archbishop Nathan Soderblom, pursued practical cooperation on social and international questions while deliberately setting doctrinal disputes aside. Both movements held major conferences through the 1920s and 1930s and increasingly recognized that their work overlapped.

Plans to merge the two into a single World Council of Churches were already advanced by 1938, but the outbreak of the Second World War delayed the Council's formal founding for a decade. It was constituted at last at its first assembly, held in Amsterdam in August and September 1948, with 147 churches from 44 countries as founding members and the Dutch theologian Willem Visser 't Hooft as its first general secretary, a position he had effectively held in an unofficial capacity throughout the war years while coordinating ecumenical relief work from Geneva.

The Roman Catholic Church has never joined the World Council of Churches as a member, a position that predates the Council itself: Pope Pius XI's 1928 encyclical Mortalium Animos had already rejected the broader interwar ecumenical movement on the ground that unity could only mean churches returning to Rome rather than churches meeting one another as equals, a stance the Vatican did not formally soften until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Since Vatican II, the Catholic Church has sent official observers to Council assemblies and cooperates closely with its Faith and Order Commission, whose membership does include Catholic theologians, but formal membership has never followed.

The Council governs itself through an Assembly, its highest legislative body, meeting roughly every seven to eight years to set overall policy and elect a Central Committee that governs between assemblies. Its member churches remain fully self-governing, and the Council's pronouncements carry the weight of a shared statement rather than a binding decision, a structure deliberately chosen to make cooperation possible among churches with widely differing views on church governance, sacraments and doctrine.