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Christian Missions and Christian Unity
By Henry P. Van Dusen

THE greatest task of Christian statesmanship in our time is to give concrete fulfillment to What is implicit in this association [of the International Missionary Council and the World Council of Churches] in such a way that everything that is meant by lie mission of the Church and everything that is meant by the unity A the Church shall be conserved and strengthened." ¹ It was to be expected that the man who held the post of Chairman of the first of the two Councils mentioned above and who served on the Central Committee of the other should have a large voice in the determination of that "fulfillment." It was by no means inevitable that his voice should speak with wisdom or that his influence should decisive. But a careful examination of John Mackay's speeches and writings over the past decade reveals that here, as with so many her central issues for the Christian Church in our day, his mind said in fact perform the role of "prophet," foreseeing and forecasting developments of both thought and action which should and did take place. More than that; while it is notoriously difficult to identify decisive factors in complex historical evolutions, especially in the perspective of their immediate aftermath, I shall hazard the judgment at history will discover that at one crucial point at least his influence as conclusive.

I

From the earliest informal conversations in the mid-1930's, exploring the possibility and desirability of creating a World Christian body representative of the Churches, the relationship of such a body to the Christian World Mission and its agency, the International Missionary Council, was in the forefront of attention . ²

This was inevitable, if for no other reason in light of the solid fact

¹ John A. Mackay, Editorial, THEOLOGY TODAY, April, 1952, p. 6.
² This and the following paragraphs draw upon an article, "World Council and IMC-One Two Organizations?" in the National Council Outlook, February, 1957, pp. 11 ff.

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of history which is universally recognized that the modern ecumenical development in almost every one of its many and varied phases had its origin within the missionary enterprise or within the life of its children, the Younger Christian Churches. The Edinburgh World Missionary Conference of 1910 led to the emergence not only of the International Missionary Council as its direct outcome but hardly less as an indirect result to the Faith and Order Movement, one of the parents of the World Council of Churches. Its influence in preparing the way for the other parent, the Life and Work Movement, was almost as great. It is a truism that Christian missions have been both the precursor and the progenitor of Christian unity.

Concern for the right relationship of these two major expressions of ecumenicity was earliest and strongest among those whose initial loyalty was to missions. That concern has been twofold-on the one hand, that the effort for Christian unity embodied in the World Council should be informed by the vision, dynamic, and commitment of Christian missions at its heart; and on the other hand, that the world mission as represented by the International Missionary Council should not be crowded into the background by the newer and more officially ecclesiastical World Council of Churches.

From the first projection of the World Council, measures were devised to assure the fullest possible communication between and collaboration of the two bodies. A joint Committee was formed with John R. Mott as its first Chairman to further regular consultation between the two Councils. One of the senior secretaries of the International Missionary Council, William Paton, was appointed to serve also as the first Associate General Secretary of the World Council in order that the closest association of the two bodies might be assured through this personal link. The intervention of World War II retarded the functioning of the joint Committee, and the untimely death of Dr. Paton removed the personal embodiment of the intended collaboration.

With the end of the War, however, there began a sequence specific steps which over the past fifteen years have drawn the Councils into ever more intimate, more manifold and more significance cooperation. It is important to note that every one of these stated was taken, not in deference to some a priori conception, but as direct response to demands arising from the discharge of concrete and urge responsibilities.

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In 1946, two years before the World Council formally came into being, the manifest need for an organ to guide and speak for the entire world Christian movement in the international scene led the two bodies to join in creating the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs (C.C.I.A.) which has served them both with ever-enlarging influence and effectiveness through the past decade.

At the time of the First Assembly of the World Council at Amsterdam in 1948, both bodies voted formal "association" and modified their official titles to read: "THE WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES in association with THE INTERNATIONAL MISSIONARY COUNCIL," and the obverse.

At a consultation in Bangkok in 1949, the two councils created a Joint East Asia Secretariat to represent them both in relationships to Churches and missions throughout that vast sub-continent.

At the Willingen Assembly of the IMC in 1952, the World Council's Division of Inter-Church Aid was authorized to act for both in Administering relief and emergency inter-church aid in Asia and Africa. As the area of ICA's operations has broadened to embrace whole world and the scope of its activities extended from "emergency" relief to continuing inter-church service, the interest and participation of the IMC in ICA have increased, with an appropriate arrangement of representation in its direction.

At the Second Assembly of the WCC at Evanston in 1954, the and study programs of the two Councils were completely satisfied in a single Division of Studies to serve them both.

At Evanston, the Joint Committee of the WCC and IMC was reconstituted and enlarged, and it was provided with a full-time secretary in the person of Norman Goodall. At the same time, this Committee was charged, among other duties, " to study the advantages disadvantages, and implications of a full integration of the International Missionary Council and the World Council of Churches." These are among the considerations which led the joint Committee at its meeting in 1956 to recommend to its parent bodies that the time had arrived for a fresh consideration of this question and to pest permission, which was granted by both Councils, to prepare a draft plan for possible "integration." A year later, in presenting such a Draft Plan, first to the Central Committee of the WCC at New Haven and then to the Assembly of the IMC at Ghana, the Joint Committee went an important step farther by posing the basic query. Should the two world bodies become integrated into a single

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organism?" It then recorded its own affirmative answer to than question.

This is the proposal which is presently under study and referendum by the member-churches of the World Council and the constituent councils of the IMC. Indications are that it will receive sufficiently overwhelming endorsement by the memberships of both Councils to assure its adoption, and that the projected "integrated" Council will actually come into existence by the end of 1961.

II

It was during the immediate post-Amsterdam period that John Mackay began to make his voice heard and his influence felt in guiding the way forward in the interpretation of mission and unity au in the developing relationships of the two world Christian bodies. ³

This does not imply that he had been wholly absent from earlier ecumenical developments. On the contrary, he had been an important leader and Chairman of one of the five Sections of the 0 ford Conference on "Church, Community, and State" in 1937. it was who coined the phrase, tautological but provocative, "Let the Church be the Church!" which came to be identified as the water word of that Conference. The phrase occurred in the preparatory paper which he wrote for the Section he was to chair, although' found no place in the formal findings except as it is echoed in the "Message": "The first duty of the Church, and its greatest service to the world, is that it be in very deed the Church."

The second issue of THEOLOGY TODAY had opened with an editorial, which does not require the familiar initials "J. A. M." to identify its author, under the caption "Let the Church Live on the Frontier." After discussing political and cultural frontiers, it came finally to the missionary Frontier: "That is where the ultimate problems of the Christian Church are today. Knowing what it is, sure of its faith, radiating its light, the Christian Church must deal with the supreme question of an adequate missionary approach to the world. Basic to any such approach is Christian unity. . . . The unity of the Christian Church is imperative. " ⁴ Thus Christian

3 It is interesting to note that in the massive and comprehensive A History of the Ecumenical Movement: 1517-1948 (edited by Ruth Rouse and Stephen C. Neill) there is a single reference to Dr. Mackay, in connection with the Oxford Conference of 1937; and in W. Rich Hogg's Ecumenical Foundations, tracing the history of the International Missionary Cow only three references.
⁴ THEOLOGY TODAY, Vol. I, No. 2, pp. 149,150.

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unity was for him, in the first instance, a requirement for a more worthy and effective Christian mission.

On the very eve of the first Assembly of the World Council of Churches about to convene in Amsterdam in the summer of 1948, the Editor of THEOLOGY TODAY returned to the theme. "A Theological Foreword to Ecumenical Gatherings," taking note of powerful impulses toward Christian unity of which the birth of the World Council was the most notable evidence, set forth certain "foundation truths" for sound unity among Christians. The climactic point was captioned: "The Goal of Ecumenicity is Evangelical Catholicity." It declared, "For evangelical catholicity, fellowship, rather than any form of organization . . . is the manifestation of ultimate ecumenical reality." And it concluded with a characteristically "lyrical" and evangelical challenge: "The Church of Jesus Christ must be a pilgrim Church, whose discovery and proclamation of Christ must lead to live on the missionary road." ⁵ Especially in the light of its living, this statement must be recognized as voicing a warning, if not a misgiving, regarding the organizational developments culminating in the World Council.

III

A year before Amsterdam, Dr. Mackay had been elected Chairman of the International Missionary Council. A year after Amsterdam, he succeeded John R. Mott as Chairman of the joint Committee of the IMC and the WCC. ⁶ He now appears to have set himself with new earnestness to think out the right relationships between Christian missions and Christian unity and between the two Councils. At the outset, this took the form of a firm and resolute insistence upon a redefinition, a more comprehensive definition, the key-term "ecumenical."

Friends and admirers of John Mackay have long recognized the crucial role which certain phrases come to hold as foci and then verbal symbols of his deepest convictions and regnant concerns. They ring as refrains through his speech and serve as motifs of his message. One thinks of the contrast between "the road" and "the balcony" in his earlier writings, of the insistence upon the "pilgrim Church" forever moving toward "the frontier" a little later in his thinking, and, most recently, of his reclamation and elaboration of

⁵ THEOLOGY TODAY, July, 1948, pp. 149,150.
⁶ It is surprising that the Official Report of the Amsterdam Assembly indicates no report a the joint Committee.

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"the Servant" category. Similar is his reflection upon "ecumenical" Another lead editorial in THEOLOGY TODAY (April 1952) took its theme "Ecumenical: the Word and the Concept." After treating briefly of the classical and original meaning of the term as denoting that which affects men everywhere throughout the globe," its familiar Christian usage to refer to "the seven ancient councils of the undivided Church," its recovery in modern times to give the name to "The Ecumenical Missionary Conference" in New York in 1900, its rejection in connection with the Edinburgh Missionary Conference ten years later, and its absence from the Stockholm, Lausanne, and Jerusalem findings, he declares: "It was at the Oxford Conference of 1937 . . . that the word reappeared in a significant context." The was in the Report of one of its Commissions. Since Dr. Mackay was its Chairman and since he has returned often to quote from it an to underscore its importance, it may be assumed that he was the initiator of this statement and perhaps the author of its text. There ecumenical" is set in contrast to "international." (The world Christian body with which he himself was mainly associated was termed "International"!) "The Christian Church is becoming truly ecumenical. The missionary movement of the past century . . has made the bounds of the Christian community co-extensive with the inhabited globe." Clearly, this was an attempt to identify "ecumenical" with the Christian world mission, although the Report went on to add, "The term 'ecumenical' refers to the expression within history of the given unity of the Church."

During the years between Oxford 1937 and Amsterdam 1948, the word "ecumenical" had come to be associated almost altogether with the movement for Christian unity and especially with its expression in the World Council of Churches. There is evidence that this evolution in usage troubled Dr. Mackay deeply. However, words an their use are significant principally as symbols of great realities. In this case, the realities were the two mighty developments which have given distinction to classical non-Roman Christianity in the modern period, namely, Christian missions and Christian unity. The time cried for a clearer definition of their inherent characters and, more important, for a sharper delineation of their proper relationships. This was attempted in a full-dress consideration at the meeting of the Central Committee of the World Council, three years after Amsterdam, at Rolle in August, 1951. In that discussion and in the

⁷ Quoted in THEOLOGY TODAY, July, 1954. p. 257.

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formulation of its conclusions, Dr. Mackay took a vigorous, determined and effective part. The fact that be has referred to it repeatedly in addresses and articles in the years since suggests the importance which it held in his own mind. This is one of the specific occasions on which his advocacy and his insistence were majorly influential upon the historic development.

The upshot of the Rolle discussions was one of the World Council's major pronouncements on "The Calling of the Church to Mission and to Unity." These sentences which Dr. Mackay has most often quoted reveal his conviction of the heart of the matter:

We, would especially draw attention to the recent confusion in the use of the word "ecumenical." It is important to insist that this word, which comes from the Greek word for the whole inhabited earth, is properly used to describe everything that relates to the whole task of the whole Church to bring the Gospel to the whole world. It, therefore, covers equally the missionary movement and the movement towards unity, and must not be used to describe the latter in contradistinction to the former. ⁸

One suspects that the prohibition of the last sentence especially resents the contention for which Dr. Mackay felt particular concern. Indeed this is clear from his own interpretation of the Rolle declaration. "The Ecumenical Movement, truly understood, cannot be confined to an endeavor to achieve Christian unity. . . . It is when the Christian Churches, recognizing their essential unity in Christ, begin to give this unity a missionary expression . . . that the problem of unity will be susceptible of receiving a Christian solution. ⁹ It is perhaps not without significance that his frequent ex positions of the Rolle statement omit all reference to one of its climatic sections. Discussing "Implications for the Future Structure and Relationship of the IMC and the WCC," which was then defined as "association," the query is put: "Should 'association' now give place to a new and much closer relationship?" There is no evidence that Dr. Mackay had up to this point thought his way through to an affirmative answer to that question.

IV

So matters stood when the Central Committee of the World Council assembled for its next meeting, this time at. Lucknow, India, over

⁸ Minutes and Reports of the Central Committee, Rolle, 1951, p. 65.
⁹ THEOLOGY TODAY, April, 1952, p. 5.

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Christmas-tide 1952. Dr. Mackay went to Lucknow as a member of the Central Committee. But that meeting was preceded by an East Asia Study Conference, two-thirds of whose membership of sixty were drawn from some eleven Asian countries. It considered, among other matters, the issues of mission and unity in the context of the Rolle document. Dr. Mackay was in attendance, though for the most part silent as the Asian delegates were encouraged to lea and direct discussion.

As one after another of them spoke, sometimes with intense earnestness bordering on passion, usually with marked ability and wisdom, always from profound dedication to Christ and his worldwide Church, declaring the anachronism of two parallel organizations representing that world movement which should be one, pleading that this anomaly be resolved by the union of the IMC and the WCC, one witnessed something which may not unfairly be described as "conversion" taking place in the thought of one of the senior and most influential Christian statesmen as he listened intently. Finally, in the closing moments, John Mackay arose to declare his conviction that the day had come when the two Councils should be joined and that immediate steps should be initiated to bring their union to pass.

I have earlier hazarded the judgment that, at one crucial point at least, Dr. Mackay's influence was conclusive. At least one of those present at Lucknow left those meetings confident that the merger of the IMC and the WCC was now assured. In view of the towering stature of the Chairman of the IMC, his preëminent leadership of the missionary movement, and his powers of advocacy and persuasion when once fully convinced to the rightness of a course of action in obedience to God's purpose, no other outcome was conceivable.

V

That expectation was to have its fulfillment at the Ghana Assembly of the IMC five years later. There, a Draft Plan for the full "integration" of the World Council of Churches and the International Missionary Council, prepared by the Joint Committee of the two bodies, was to receive decisive consideration. It was generally recognized that the action of the Ghana Assembly would determine the fate of the issue. As a continuing member of the Joint Committee although since Evanston no longer its Chairman, Dr. Mackay had an important hand in shaping the proposals. The Introduction to the Draft Plan embodied his conviction:

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The question is asked: Why should two world bodies, the International. Missionary Council and the World Council of Churches, become integrated into a single organism? The answer is this. A basic and long-forgotten truth is being rediscovered in our time, which might be stated thus: the unity of the Church and the mission of the Church both belong, in equal degree, to the essence of the Church. If the Christian Churches would be in very truth the Church, they must carry the Gospel into all the world. They must also strive to achieve the unity of all those throughout the world for whom Jesus Christ is Lord. This truth has already become manifest in the life of both world bodies. It has led them into association with each other and now obliges them to go further. They exist to help the Churches to witness to the wholeness of the Gospel and must, therefore, seek to express that wholeness in their own life.

When the Plan came before the Ghana Assembly, Dr. Mackay was in the Chair. But when Charles Ranson, who was to have spoken to it on behalf of the IMC, was suddenly called to London by his wife's death, it fell to Dr. Mackay to substitute for him. In clear and categorical phrases, uttered with characteristic feeling and eloquence, he described how the development of events in conjunction with reflection upon the unfolding of the Divine purpose had led him to the conclusion that the day had come for the interdependence of Christian mission and Christian unity to find expression through a single world Christian body. The overwhelming majority of the assembly followed their Chairman's lead to this conviction. This was the culmination of Dr. Mackay's determinative role in what he himself had singled out as "the greatest task of Christian statesmanship in our time."

VI

This paper has sought to sketch in outline what many believe to be one of the epochal developments in the history of the Christian Church-the progressive drawing together of the two most pregnant impulses within that Church in the modern period, the movement of world mission and the movement for Christianity, and the projected unification of the organizational agents of those movements into a single ecumenical Christian body. It has focused upon the services of one man. But the latter has significance, I believe, beyond his role in this specific development. In the part he has played there is disclosed something of the genius and greatness of the man.

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It is an almost habitual liberty of John Mackay to conclude as address or essay with a final personal word, what he once called personal postscript." That postscript is always, in another of his favorite words, "lyrical." The writer may be permitted the same license.

It has been my good fortune to know John Mackay for almost thirty years. Through most of those three decades we have be close associates, constant collaborators, and devoted friends-in the enterprise of theological education, in the missionary interests of American Presbyterianism, in the world outreach of the Church in the advance of Christian Unity, and in the far more intimate associations of group fellowship, theological, missionary, and ecumenical. I have heard him speak hundreds of times on diverse themes and in the most testing circumstances. I have read his books, articles, and essays. Three things about the man have impressed me above all others.

First of all, his utter integrity. Never, under any circumstance, whatever the pressures or temptations of the occasion, has he spoken other than his own deeply-held conviction, clear, undiluted, direct and action has always matched profession.

Second, that speech and action have been unfailingly forward-looking and forward-reaching, that is to say, truly prophetic. Some times when I have been asked how we two, from such contrasted backgrounds and allegiances, differed yet almost always discovered ourselves moving shoulder-to-shoulder, I have said that John Mackey was a "liberal conservative" while I was a "conservative liberal". But often the labels could have been reversed. In any event, time and again, he as been far in advance in vision, in radical originality in resolute courage. He has been a prophet because he has taken with utmost personal obedience his own favorite figures-the pilgrim (a pilgrim in thought and in life, moving ever toward the new); and the frontier (with high expectancy, with openness and eagerness unafraid).

Lastly, uncompromising dedication. Surely, that is the final word.

It has been my privilege to know with some intimacy almost all of the others who have had major roles in these developments. Comparison would be odious. I can but testify that, among them all there is no other to whom my reverence flows more spontaneous and gratefully; there is none whom I would rather claim as Christian comrade, fellow-pilgrim, through time and for eternity.