Potter Power

Down with the old "The World Council of Churches has become an ecclesiastical United Nations, a place for power plays." So lamented a leading U.S. orthodox theologian, John Meyendorff, last week during a meeting of the council's 140-member central committee in Jamaica. What worried Meyendorff and some others was that the council's approach to Christian unity has become too political. The central committee reaffirmed the council's Program to Combat Racism, despite church protests over its $85,000 grant to Rhodesia's Patriotic Front for "humanitarian programs." The front's guerrillas have been held responsible for killing a number of Christian missionaries, as well as black Rhodesian noncombatants.

The vote was an endorsement of the policies of the Rev. Philip A. Potter, 57, a West Indian Methodist who has been General Secretary of the council since 1972 and is an outspoken advocate of church action against "political and economic oppression." The Patriotic Front grant especially disturbed the huge Evangelical Church in Germany (E.K.D.). The West Germans carry special clout in the financially strapped W.C.C., since they provide up to 40% of the council's income. An E.K.D. spokesman warned in October that the violence issue was "liable to blow the whole ecumenical movement apart."

The Germans favored splitting off the administrative costs of the antiracism grants from the regular W.C.C. budget so that individual denominations could dissociate themselves from the program. Others wanted to end the grants. After lively debate, the central committee voted in favor of Potter's proposal for a long-term "consultation" over the antiracism program. Apparently left in force is a 1971 central-committee dictum that the W.C.C. does not "pass judgment on those victims of racism who are driven to violence as the only way left to them to redress grievances." Potter declared that most of the dissenters had come from "certain Western countries which are most heavily involved in maintaining the racist systems in southern Africa."

Another signal of the W.C.C.'s change of direction, and the one that triggered Meyendorffs dismay, was the ouster of Swiss Reformed Theologian Lukas Vischer as head of the council's Commission on Faith and Order, which seeks ecumenical unity through theological discussion. Although Vischer personally supported the antiracism grants, he was a symbol, to increasingly influential Third World activists within the W.C.C., of an old-fashioned theological approach to ecumenism. The commission, which is the only major W.C.C. agency with official Roman Catholic members, strongly urged that Vischer be reappointed to a job he has held since 1966. The Potter camp invoked a rule limiting tenure of top officials to nine years; the decision not to extend Vischer's contract was narrowly upheld by the central committee.

The central committee appears confident that no important churches will quit the W.C.C. in protest over its politicized approach. The greater danger is not a walkout but a gradual erosion of interest by disaffected members in the West.

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