Word: council
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...know what you mean, ma'am," replied a local cleric impishly. "There's nobody here but us Christians." That seemed to be the case in the Oklahoma oil capital last week. For the first time in its history, the executive committee of the World Council of Churches held one of its semiannual meetings near the buckle of what used to be known as the Bible Belt...
...fervently anti-Communist evangelist Billy James Hargis flew back from a crusade in Rhodesia to meet the invasion of his theological turf with a series of Christian-leadership meetings at which he roundly denounced the World Council as far left and ungodly. Despite a freezing rain, the Rev. Carl Mclntire of Collingswood, N.J., head of the extreme-right-wing International Council of Christian Churches, personally picketed Nikodim while he was delivering a sermon at Tulsa's First Christian Church. Another veteran anti-Red, the Rev. Richard Wurmbrand, a Rumanian Lutheran pastor who spent 18 years in Communist prisons, interrupted...
Even though Blake and his colleagues occasionally looked like beleaguered Daniels in a fundamentalist's lions' den, their choice of Tulsa was a deliberate one. "We saw it not as a way of taking on Hargis," said a council spokesman, Faith Pomponio, "but as a way of communication with his people." In fact, most of Tulsa's Protestant clergymen were cordial, and Republican Mayor James Hewgley was almost lyrical in his welcome: "The Lord sent them here." Even Hargis paid the council a backhanded compliment. "The cause of religious fundamentalism," he complained, has been "set back...
Democratic Touch. The visiting churchmen had more important issues to face than Hargis-style hostility. In its two decades of existence, the World Council has grown into an organization of 232 Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox churches with a total constituency of more than 300 million people. Yet its ecumenical mission of Christian unity is increasingly taking second place to more pressing problems: the demands for social and economic justice by underdeveloped countries; the rising ,clamor of young churchmen for a greater voice in ecclesiastical policymaking; the drift of many dissident believers into "underground" worship, imperiling the very foundations...
...response to these pressures, the World Council is already changing its style and philosophy, largely as a result of Blake's prodding during his two years as its chief officer. He is a far more hard-driving administrator than his predecessor, Dutch Theologian Willem Visser 't Hooft. In Geneva, Blake, 62, presides over the council's starkly modern, three-story ecumenical center with all the dispatch of a top business executive. His brisk ways may occasionally irritate some Europeans (who make up a majority of the center's 336-man staff), but he also displays...