Abstract
In featuring as its cover story the 1961 gathering of the Third Assembly of the World Council of Churches in New Delhi, the American news weekly Time was chiefly impressed with the challenges and difficulties facing the churches seeking ecumenical unity:
[M]any of the sectarian dicta and dogmas that once stirred great debates in Protestantism are dead letters. In America the ethnic loyalties and local ties that once buttressed such sectarian doctrines have almost dissolved in the comings and goings of the most restlessly transient population in the world. In Europe the state churches – both Protestant and Catholic – that once were part of the fibre of society, stand cold with empty pews and silent with declining vocations. The uncertainty at the center has been matched by the pressure from outside. The march of Marxism, the idolatry of science, the determinism of Freud, the stigma of [Christianity] being a ‘white man’s religion’, the resurgence, with the rise of the new nations, of the ‘national’ religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism and Islam – all are helping herd the scattered Christians into one corral. This is not true Christian unity, but it is producing a sense of unity and a growing recognition of an urgent common need – to rethink fundamentals and to change traditional ways.1
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Notes
On ‘New Delhi 1961’, see World Council of Churches, The New Delhi Report (Norwich: SCM Press, 1962);
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See Gerrie ter Haar, Halfway to Paradise: African Christians in Europe (Cardiff: Cardiff Academic Press, 1998).
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Moreover, most migrants, at least in the Netherlands, thought of themselves as citizens of their adopted cities more than of their adopted country; M. Hurenkamp and Evelien Tonkens, Wat vinden burgers zelf van burgerschap? Burgers aan het woord over binding, loyaliteit en sociale cohesie (The Hague: NICIS, 2008), pp. 29–34; see www.handvestburgerschap.nl/uploads/8f/a8/8fa813178449a9c7ca0dcdad34ba64ef/Nicis_wat_vinden_burgers_van_burg erschap.pdf.
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Kennedy, J.C. (2012). Protestant Ecclesiastical Internationals. In: Green, A., Viaene, V. (eds) Religious Internationals in the Modern World. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137031716_13
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