An American devoted to Jewish-Christian dialogue in the United States, I was the newest of the newbies when it came to living and working in the international, intercultural, and multi-ecclesiastical environment that was the World Council of Churches. But Stanley pointed the way for me through the tangle of WCC bureaucracy and, once he thought I knew enough, left me on my own to discover my peculiar role in the Council as a whole and in the Sub-Unit on Dialogue with People of Living Faiths and Ideologies (DFI).

The DFI -- an institutional consequence of the debate about "mission or dialogue" that had raged in the International Missionary Council and then the WCC since at least the IMC's meeting at Tambaram in 1938 -- was Stanley's creation. It was formally created by the WCC's Central Committee in 1971 at its meeting in Addis Ababa, following a dialogue meeting that Stanley organized in Ajaltoun, Lebanon in 1970.

The name of the WCC programme -- Dialogue with People of Living Faiths and Ideologies -- precisely set forth both its goal and delimitation. There was to be "dialogue" as opposed to "proselytism." "Mission" was thought to include dialogue and, according to some, dialogue was a "tool" of mission. Though hotly debated during the 1970s and 1980s, questions such as these became less prominent as the end of the twentieth century approached. But Stanley was clear: dialogue was in the service of Christianity, to be sure, but at the same time it had value in itself, both for Christian participants and for those of other faiths.

Next, the dialogue was to be with people; it was not a dialogue between or among religions. Although he was a bureaucrat and academic, Stanley firmly believed in what we might call "grass-roots" dialogue. It was "dialogue in community" among people -- individuals -- who lived and worked next to one another.

But there was a more theological aspect to the emphasis on "people" instead of on "religions" that was founded in the theology of Karl Barth. Arguably Barth was the most influential theologian of the twentieth century and he was no less influential among missionary thinkers than he was in other aspects of the ecumenical movement. For Barth, all religions, including Christianity, were human creations that fell short of the glory of God. Faith in Christ, on the other hand, transcended religions, calling them all into judgment. The debate over the role of other religions in Christian missionary thinking that had continued since Tambaram had taken the shape, at a tactical level, of "mission or dialogue?" Stanley, rejecting the "either/or" formulation, placed his emphasis on dialogue with people, an emphasis that included mission in the sense of "witness" (as opposed to proselytism).

At the same time, the Sub-unit was charged with fostering dialogue, not with just any people but specifically with "People of Living Faiths and Ideologies." The influence of Barth is obvious. The intended dialogue partners were to be people of faith, be they Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, or what have you so long as the faith was vibrant, alive. There was an assumption that people who identified with religions other than Christianity also had "faith," an assumption that may have gone beyond, or even been contrary, to Karl Barth's assertion about faith in Christ. But it avoided questions such as whether, for instance, Hinduism or Islam had theological significance for Christianity. The dialogue was simply among people of faith.

(The "...and Ideologies" part of the sub-unit's title was a specific reference to Marxism, an important political consideration in the 1970s that never really got off the ground in the WCC and was ultimately discontinued.

In 1979 a document was adopted by the WCC Central Committee that spelled out the dialogue theology to which Stanley Samartha devoted his life: "Guidelines on Dialogue with People of Living Faiths and Ideologies." Now, in 2001, many of the details in "Guidelines" may be dated but the theological thrust remains bright and clear. Buried near the end of the document (III,4) is the paragraph that continues to make dialogue the clarifying principle for countless practitioners of interreligious dialogue:

"One of the functions of dialogue is to allows participants to describe and witness to their faith in their own terms. This is of primary importance since self-serving descriptions of other peoples' faith are one of the roots of prejudice, stereotyping and condescension. Listening carefully to the neighbours' self-understanding enables Christians better to obey the commandment not to bear false witness against their neighbours, whether those neighbours be of long established religious, cultural, or ideological traditions or members of new religious groups." Stanley found me at the airport before I found him those many years ago. He finds me again and again, always with the welcome caution: Do not bear false witness.