There were tensions for other Orthodox churches as well. In the US, controversy simmered
within the Greek archdiocese, the largest Orthodox jurisdiction in the country, with more than
500 parishes and an active membership of 750,000. At issue was the leadership of Archbishop
Spyridon, appointed in 1996, particularly after the dismissal of four faculty members at Holy
Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology. And concerns continued to be expressed,
including at a November conference of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe, that Turkey was not respecting the guarantees provided for in the Treaty of Lausanne
(1923) concerning the security of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Greek minority
community in Istanbul.
Under the auspices of the WCC's Office of Church and Ecumenical Relations, a second
Orthodox-Evangelical dialogue was held in April; and the statement from evangelical
participants at the Harare assembly welcomed the WCC's support for these ongoing
conversations and spoke of the shared commitment of evangelical and Orthodox Christians "to
the triune God and a biblical Christology".
Within the WCC, Faith and Order concluded its work on two short study documents on
subjects singled out for attention by its world conference in Santiago de Compostela in 1993:
the first stage towards a common statement on "The
Nature and Purpose of the Church" and an "instrument for ecumenical reflection" on the
subject of hermeneutics, focusing specifically on
the tasks of interpretation that arise in the quest for the visible unity of the church.
The changes in the Anglican communion were also
attested to by the fact
that 11 of the bishops were women; the first Anglican woman diocesan bishop, Penny
Jamieson of Aotearoa New Zealand, was chosen in 1990, two years after the previous
Lambeth conference. Also present were nearly 40 observers from other churches and
ecumenical bodies, including the WCC.
Confusion about its status in the eyes of the Roman
Catholic Church dimmed some of the lustre of what was hailed as a ground-breaking joint
declaration between the Lutherans and Roman Catholics on the doctrine of justification, which
had been at the centre of the break between Martin Luther and Rome in the 16th century.
Early in the year, more than 140 German Protestant theologians signed a petition calling for
the declaration to be rejected, saying that it did not (as it claimed) represent a consensus on
the basic truths of the doctrine of justification within which remaining differences were
acceptable. Nevertheless, most German Lutheran churches endorsed the declaration, and in
June the Lutheran World Federation Council gave the text unanimous backing -- a step which
Mgr John Radano of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity described as "a
great moment in our relationship". However, a week later the official Vatican response to the
declaration referred to a series of "divergences" between Catholic and Lutheran doctrine,
some of which it said concerned "aspects of substance" -- so that certain 16th-century Roman
Catholic condemnations of some points of Lutheran doctrine outlined in the joint declaration
might still apply. The resulting unclarity dashed hopes for a formal signing of the declaration in
1998. A signing ceremony was finally arranged for October 1999.
WCC general secretary Konrad Raiser attended a service in Chicago in October to mark the
formalizing of a relationship of full communion among four US denominations: the
Evangelical Lutheran Church of America and three Reformed churches -- the Presbyterian
Church (USA), the United Church of Christ and the Reformed Church in America. The
agreement allows members of any of the four denominations to receive communion in any of
the others, as well as exchange of ministers among the churches. This latter provision will
make it possible for shrinking parishes of the different churches to share a minister --
especially important in rural areas, where much of the membership loss of mainstream US
Protestant denominations has taken place.
Later in October a colloquium in Geneva marked the 25th anniversary of the Leuenberg
Agreement, which formalized communion between Reformed and Lutheran churches in
Europe. During the meeting the general secretaries of the World Alliance of Reformed
Churches and the Lutheran World Federation pledged to work more closely together and to
promote further growth in communion between their two traditions.
The church in society
The events that made headlines around the world during 1998 affected the life and witness of
WCC member churches in many places. Through its programmatic work and its participation
in Action by Churches Together (ACT), the WCC was involved in many of these situations.
Ongoing monitoring of events -- in consultation with church leaders and ecumenical
organizations -- led to several public statements by the Executive Committee at its meetings in
February and September and messages and letters from the general secretary at other
times.
A WCC delegation visited Iraq in late January to follow up longstanding concerns about the
toll exacted on its civilian population of the international sanctions imposed on the country
after the Gulf War. On the basis of its report, the Executive Committee adopted a statement
which both spoke out strongly against stepped-up military action against Iraq and appealed for
a thorough review of the sanctions, saying that they were causing Aserious violations of the
human rights of the Iraqi population by denying them... adequate food, clothing, housing,
medical care, education, social services and employment".
Understandably, the approach of an assembly in Africa drew special attention to tensions and
conflicts in several African countries. Two of those conflicts -- in the Democratic Republic of
Congo and in Sudan -- were perhaps uppermost in the mind of the assembly participants. The
war in the Congo had not only dashed the short-lived hopes of a new beginning for the former
Zaire after the devastation wrought by the corrupt dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, but it
also threatened to rekindle the genocidal terror that erupted in the Great Lakes region of
Africa several years earlier. Moreover, the decision by Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe
to send several thousand troops to back up the beleaguered forces of Congolese president
Laurent Kabila had escalated discontent in Zimbabwe itself and opened up a rift in the
Southern Africa Development Community, with South African president Nelson Mandela
taking a lead in calling for a negotiated settlement while Angola and Namibia as well as
Zimbabwe followed the path of military intervention.
The suffering caused by the protracted civil war in Sudan was brought home vividly to
assembly participants by a sermon from Sudanese Catholic bishop Paride Taban -- and by the
subsequent news reports of a terrorist bombing at Taban's diocesan cathedral. The WCC was
involved throughout the year in efforts to arrange a peace agreement through contacts with
church leaders from both North and South Sudan.
A pastoral visit to Sierra Leone in early 1998 underscored the horrors of the growing use of
child soldiers in conflicts in several parts of the world. The assembly adopted a statement
condemning all use of children in warfare and calling on churches, especially in Africa, to work
for the elimination of this scourge.
In mid-May the WCC sent a letter to the prime minister of India expressing profound concern
over its underground testing of nuclear weapons; two weeks later a similar letter went to the
prime minister of neighbouring Pakistan after its own tests. The situation of the Christian
churches in both countries was also a matter of ecumenical concern, growing out of
widespread media reports of attacks on Christian communities and churches in some parts of
India and of the persecution of Christians alleged to have violated Pakistan's stringent
blasphemy laws.
A long-running if little known conflict in the South Pacific island of Bougainville ended in a
peaceful settlement in which Bishop Leslie Boseto, one of the WCC's presidents, played a key
role.
There was considerable turmoil in Indonesia in 1998. Growing social unrest brought an end to
decades of rule by President Suharto but also brought widespread suffering and death. The
WCC took part in a round-table meeting convened by the Communion of Churches in
Indonesia to consider the human rights situation in the territory of Irian Jaya and the demands
of the people there for the exercise of the right to self-determination. Hopes grew, then faded,
for a resolution of the long-running conflict in East Timor.
Measured by the civil unrest, Indonesia was probably the country worst affected by the
financial crisis that swept through much of East Asia. But economic uncertainty and instability
were by no means restricted to one region of the world. Zimbabwe was one of several
countries in Africa where economic and financial crises combined with deteriorating political
situations to create dangerous conditions. And perhaps nowhere did the nexus of economic,
political and social instability create more alarm -- at least at some points during the year --
than in Russia.
For the WCC, these developments underscored the importance of international ecumenical
attention to two closely related issues: globalization and international debt. Both subjects were
the focus of extensive consultation with a range of ecumenical partners before the assembly
and had a high profile during discussions in Harare, leading to their being listed among the
half-dozen priority concerns identified for future WCC work by the Programme Guidelines
Committee. Prior to the assembly, ramifications of globalization were addressed in a WCC
initiative to raise awareness in the churches of the implications of a proposed Multilateral
Agreement on Investment (MAI) being worked out in largely closed-door negotiations under
the auspices of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Information about the MAI was shared with member churches and ecumenical partners, with a
special emphasis on those in OECD countries. The WCC materials underscored the threats to
national sovereignty and to fragile national economies, and urged greater participation by civil
society organizations in the negotiating process.
A report to the Executive Committee in September summarized a number of other significant
overall trends in international affairs affecting the lives of the churches and demanding careful
attention from the ecumenical movement internationally. One was the disturbing continued
growth in religious intolerance, often combined with ethnic hatred. Consultations were held
with key Christian leaders in several predominantly Muslim countries to seek discreet ways of
helping them to share experiences, learn from one another and work out strategies for
improving relations through dialogue with neighbours of other faiths. Efforts to foster an
atmosphere in which such dialogue could be initiated were complicated by a growing
campaign of advocacy for "persecuted Christians", receiving substantial support from the
religious right in the US, which lobbied for laws to impose US economic and other sanctions
against governments judged responsible for this practice. The WCC addressed some of these
issues in a joint statement with ecumenical partners to the UN Commission on Human
Rights.
Several conflicts in which religious intolerance was a factor continued. A Guatemalan Catholic
bishop was assassinated the day after releasing a church report on violations of the human
rights of the country's indigenous people. In Indonesia and Sudan, churches were burned. And
deepening tensions in Kosovo offered increasingly dire foreshadowings of what lay ahead in
1999.
Terrorism and retaliation was another concern. Ten days after mid-August bombings caused
hundreds of deaths at the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, US missiles struck an
alleged training camp for Islamic extremists in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in the
Sudanese capital Khartoum. The US response highlighted concerns about how to overcome
terrorism within a commitment to the international rule of law and the recognition,
underscored by the work of the WCC's Programme to Overcome Violence, that violence
begets violence in an ever-more dangerous cycle.
Participants in a panel on human rights at the
Ecumenical Centre in Geneva to mark the 50th anniversary of the WCC; left to right,
Metropoloitan Georges Khodr (Lebanon), Ms Estela de Carlotta (Argentina), Swiss president
Flavio Cotti, Dr Janice Love (USA), Archbishop Desmond Tutu (South Africa) and Ms
Sadako Ogata (Japan). |
|
The issue of terrorism and
retaliation is thus closely related to another subject widely discussed during the year:
international mechanisms and instruments for bringing offenders to justice. Steps towards the
creation of a new international criminal court moved ahead despite opposition from the United
States. |
The issue of punishment -- or impunity -- for those who
have violated human rights continued
to feature on the agenda of the WCC. While war crimes tribunals in the aftermath of the
genocide in Rwanda and the conflict in the former Yugoslavia proceeded slowly, public
awareness of the issue was bolstered in mid-October when British police arrested the former
Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet, who was under treatment in a London hospital, in
response to a request that he be extradited to Spain to face charges of killing Spanish citizens
during his 18-year rule.
The Fellowship of Christian Churches in Chile called on
the WCC to show solidarity with the principle that Pinochet should be judged; and at a press
conference during the Harare assembly the moderator of the WCC's Commission of the
Churches on International Affairs, Janice Love, told journalists that a British government
decision on 9 December not to stand in the way of Pinochet's extradition to Spain was a
"cause for celebration" and "a profound step forward in the recognition of international
law".
A joint initiative was undertaken by the WCC general secretary and Cardinal Daneels,
president of the Roman Catholic peace movement Pax Christi International, to underscore the
importance of the UN's 1999 review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But the major
WCC focus in the area of disarmament was on small arms. The WCC was represented at a
meeting in Oslo to launch a Norwegian initiative for international action in this area and later
joined the All Africa Conference of Churches in supporting an initiative to declare a
moratorium on the import, export and manufacture of light weapons in West Africa. Some 25
church representatives and arms control specialists attended a WCC consultation on
"micro-disarmament" in Rio de Janeiro; and staff also travelled to Toronto for a conference of
non-governmental organizations on the subject.
Production of charcoal from palmtrees - often a cause
of deforestation - plays a part in climate change. |
|
A study document on
Mobility: Prospects of Sustainable Society, growing out of the WCC's ongoing work
on climate change, focused on how the increasing volume of "greenhouse gases" produced by
automobile and airplane exhaust emissions contributes to climate change. |
The report identifies
other negative consequences of "motorized mobility" as well, including highway deaths,
damage to public health and the injustices faced by the elderly, children, people with
disabilities and those on low incomes who do not have access to individual motorized
transport. It urges churches to re-evaluate their own "mobility culture", noting that
missionaries and ecumenists are faithful clients of the airlines.
Activities around the concerns of indigenous peoples
included regional and global consultations and exchange programmes focused on spirituality,
gospel and culture, land rights and self-determination, leading up to a two-day meeting in
Harare just before the assembly, attended by some 40 indigenous participants.
Churches in Australia and Canada faced specific issues in relation to the indigenous population
in their own countries, the former in connection with renewed conflict over land rights, the
latter in connection with allegations -- leading to some 1400 civil lawsuits -- of abuse of
indigenous students in residential schools during the 1950s and 1960s. Konrad Raiser, who
had been publicly drawn into the controversy over Aboriginal land rights while visiting
Australia in late 1997, said before the Australian parliament resumed the debate in mid-March
that "there can be no reconciliation without justice. While not ignoring the rights of
pastoralists, there is also the necessity that nothing happens to damage further the rights of
Aboriginal peoples, for whom land is an essential element of communal identity and intimately
related to spiritual well-being." In October, the moderator of the United Church of Canada
issued a public apology to Canada's "First Nations" peoples for the complicity of the church in
the operation of residential schools for indigenous people, which were managed by the United
Church of Canada, the Roman Catholic Church and Anglican churches on behalf of the
Canadian government for more than a century. Australian churches organized a range of
activities to mark what was called "Sorry Day" (26 May) -- a public expression of apology for
their involvement in the policy of removing Aboriginal children from their families, which had
continued until the 1960s.
People in the news
In a year when the personal conduct of the President of the United States became a virtual
obsession in the media worldwide, it was perhaps not surprising that legal proceedings against
several prominent church figures on charges of personal financial misconduct occupied a
substantial share of the space allotted by the public media to coverage of religion. In early
1999 both South African anti-apartheid leader Allan Boesak and National Baptist Convention
USA president Henry Lyons were found guilty of charges of financial wrongdoing and given
prison sentences.
A number of prominent ecumenical figures passed away during 1998. A central figure in two
pivotal 20th-century ecumenical events -- the union of the Church of South India (CSI) in
1947 and the merger of the International Missionary Council with the WCC in 1961 -- Bishop
Lesslie Newbigin died on 30 January at the age of 88. Newbigin, who went to India
as a missionary in 1936, was the first director of the WCC's Division of World Mission and
Evangelism after the merger with the IMC, then returned to Madras to become CSI bishop
until his retirement in 1974. In December 1996 he made a stirring unscheduled address at the
WCC's conference on world mission and evangelism in Salvador, Brazil. On 10 April
Archbishop Serapheim, primate of the Church of Greece for 24 years, died in Athens
at the age of 85. In a statement WCC general secretary Konrad Raiser described the late
archbishop as "a spiritual man of extreme simplicity and sincerity, sensitive to the needs of
today's society, a straightforward interlocutor, fully aware of the difficulties of ecumenical
relationships and yet fully supportive of any effort aiming at the unity of the church". Anglican
Archbishop Trevor Huddleston, the English-born church leader who was an early and
influential figure in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, died on 20 April at 84.
Huddleston, about whom Desmond Tutu said, "if you could say anybody single-handedly
made apartheid a world issue, then that person was Trevor Huddleston", was the basis for the
central figure in Alan Paton's famous novel Cry, the Beloved Country. On 30 June, Fr
George Dunne died after suffering a stroke at the age of 92. A longtime advocate of
social justice and opponent of racism in the USA, the Jesuit priest was named by Pope Paul VI
and then-WCC general secretary Eugene Carson Blake to be the first director of the joint
Roman Catholic-World Council Committee on Society, Development and Peace
(SODEPAX). Graeme Irvine, an Australian Anglican who was president of World
Vision International from 1989 until his retirement in 1995, died on 6 September. He was 67.
Indian church leader Shanthi Solomon, founder of several ecumenical organizations in
Asia, died on 15 October at the age of 78. She is perhaps best known for having started the
Fellowship of the Least Coin in 1956, an international movement of prayer and reconciliation
rooted in the idea of encouraging women to pray regularly for peace and reconciliation and at
the same time to put into a box the smallest coin of the currency of their country.
* This text
appears in the WCC's Yearbook 1999, available from WCC Publications.
Included in this useful reference book are lists of the member churches of the WCC (with
addresses, telephone and telefax numbers), national and regional ecumenical bodies,
specialized ecumenical organizations (including Christian World Communions), members of
the WCC Central Committee and staff. In addition to this review of the main events in the life
and work of the WCC in 1998, another article introduces the structure
and governance of the Council. Also included are the texts of the WCC Constitution and
Rules, incorporating amendments adopted at the eighth assembly in Harare in December
1998.
