Presidential address

James I McCord ¹

Mr Chairman, members of the general council, let me take a few moments to speak to you. It would be pretentious to call this an address. It is a report on the state of the Alliance from the vantage point of one who has been a member since 1945 and who has served as president since 1977. Let me begin this report by expressing my profound gratitude to the members of the staff of the Alliance in Geneva. As you know, it is a small but dedicated staff. Many congregations of our member churches have staffs that are twice as large as ours in Geneva, but I have never seen one of them able to do one half as much as is done in Geneva by those to whom I should like to pay tribute now: to the general secretary, Edmond Perret, the secretary for theology, Richmond Smith, the secretary for cooperation and witness, Aldo Comba. To them and the other members of the staff: we are all in your debt.

Ottawa was chosen by the executive committee as the site of the first formal general council since the uniting council in Nairobi in 1970, when the merger of the International Congregational Council and the World Alliance of Presbyterian Churches was effected. It was a logical match, and has proved to be a happy marriage. A mini-general council held in St Andrews, Scotland, to celebrate the centennial of the Alliance provided a forum for review of the programme of the Alliance and an update of its agenda. Perhaps the most extensive work reported there had to do with the theological basis of human rights, a report that has become influential not only in ecclesiastical circles, where for the first time there is a document putting human rights in the wider theological context. It was proper to hold the 1977 celebration in Scotland where the Alliance was born, just as it is proper to hold the 1982 general council in Canada, the home of two of its member churches: the United Church of Canada and the Presbyterian Church in Canada. Each church has produced a long line of distinguished leaders in the affairs of this organization, and I personally owe a great debt of gratitude to both churches. It has always seemed to me that a Canadian has the best of both worlds, the form and the style of the old and the dynamism and vision of the new.

The life of the churches

Let me turn now for a moment to the churches and see if there are significant developments and movements that should engage our attention. Such a quick survey would indicate that the mission of the church in our generation continues, and in many parts of the world there is a remarkable growth in the churches. This is especially true in east Asia and in Africa. We met as an executive committee in Korea in the summer of 1979, and were impressed with the vitality of the Korean church that has been able to double in membership during each of the last two decades, and is predicted to do the same in this decade. We are impressed by the way the church, in spite of the political problems in Taiwan, continues to grow there; and with the growth of the church in Indonesia, a country that is so well represented in this meeting. I salute the Indonesian delegates now, for today is their national birthday, it is the Indonesian day of independence. But nowhere has the miracle of growth been more astounding than in China, a church that many thought had been wiped out during the revolution, for it is estimated that its membership is from 2 to 5 times more than it was when the revolution began. In Africa there continues to be astonishing growth, with a prediction that the largest number of Christians on any continent by the end of this century will be in Africa.

What does all this mean? It means first of all that God is faithful to his promise; that his word goes out and does not return void and empty, but his word accomplishes the goal toward which it is sent. And it means in the second place that no language or culture or race has any monopoly on the gospel. The church can take root and flourish in any land or in any culture. A second development that is equally impressive is the staying power of the church where the church lives under the cross. One thinks in particular of eastern Europe, but not just eastern Europe, in which the life of the church is constantly scrutinized and monitored, pressures abound, and anti-religious propaganda is everywhere. And yet in the face of this the church is doing more than simply hold its own; there is a remarkable revival of interest in the church by young people, especially this student generation.

A third observation is the heightened religious consciousness of youth, also in the west. This is the positive side of the counter-culture. Its negative destructive side has been well advertised, but the positive side is far more influential. This is the rejection of a three-dimensional world view that denies the realm of the spirit, that simply tries to encase the human spirit in a container, that refuses to let it grow. It is the objectifying culture that is being rejected. And you can see the positive results today in the growing concern in the area of ecology, recognizing the limits of this planet, many of them having already been overstepped, and a sensitivity to those who go callously overstep them all the more. It can also be seen in the peace movement, in the desire of young people for a world in which not only is destructiveness absent, but all of the positive qualities of "shalom" will be present, that general wellbeing of the human being and the human being's society.

I am not suggesting that there is a return to the church in the west. I am suggesting, though, that this heightened religious consciousness is tremendously important. One reason there is not a return to the church is the emphasis that we place on pluralism today. There are so many choices. In fact, a recent book by Peter Berger, the sociologist of religion, is entitled The Heretical Imperative. The word "heresy," as you know, comes from the word meaning "to choose". The heretical imperative is the mandate to choose among all the welter of choices that beckon us today. Many persons have made a turn to the east. Berger raises a question at the end of his study. Maybe we should rephrase Tertullian: not what has Jerusalem to do with Athens but what has Jerusalem to do with Benares, with another way of engaging the really real, with another way of being in touch with ultimate reality, not in the confrontational, personal, prophetic way of the Old Testament and the New, but in the more passive, absorbing way of the east.

But another reason for the refusal of this movement to lead normally to a return to the church is the lack of evangelical intensity on the part of our churches. That sort of intensity characterized the early church. You remember Lietzmann in his History of the Ancient Church emphasized that it was the quality of life of the early church that was so compelling in the Roman environment. Later on in the early days of the ecumenical movement, Life and Work - one of the roots of the ecumenical movement - grew out of emphasis on such intensified life which the Christian life brings. It is this kind of evangelical intensity that the church needs to regain today.

But perhaps the greatest area for evangelism, certainly in the west, is among a generation of young people who have correctly turned their backs on a culture that is sterile, objectifying and three-dimensional, and are looking for a faith that is big enough to enable them to grow up into their full humanity.

But on the other side of the picture of the churches there are problems, problems mainly in the relation of church and state. We in the Reformed tradition believe that God has two servants in the world: one is the state and the other is the church. The state is the servant of God and the state is responsible for the preservation of peace and for the establishment of justice. The church is responsible among other things for reminding the state of its duties, its God-given duties, and also reminding the state of its limitations, that it is not God, that there is a God to which the state itself is subject. John Calvin in his "Institutes" actually developed a theology of revolution.

We find today, in the relation between church and state, first of all our churches that are caught up with oppressive regimes. We shall be hearing existentially about the situations where some of our ministers and leaders have been imprisoned by oppressive regimes; but then there are other areas in which church and state are too close, where it seems that they represent the same force, very much as in the Byzantine pattern, reflective of ancient orthodoxy. And here again, we shall be hearing about situations in which church and state are allied in a way that is theologically unhealthy. And then there are people who are caught up in war or revolution. We do not have present representatives from our church in Lebanon. I am happy that representatives from our church in Syria are present, but I share the grief of all of us at what has taken place in Lebanon, the country that aspired to be the Switzerland of the Middle East, to a role of neutrality, to a life of peace, and to see it now chewed to bits! And then we have learned that our representatives from Kenya also will not be present, because of the situation there. This is a poignant reminder of the hospitality we received from the member churches when we met in Nairobi twelve years ago.

Where we are theologically

Let me turn now from a look at the churches to see where we are theologically. In my opinion the theological scene has not been a happy one during the past two decades. There have been notable exceptions; yet when the violent eruption of irrationality occurred two decades ago, the church was theologically unprepared to deal with it. And what happened in all too many places was that the church succumbed to humanism. We baptized all varieties of secularism that raised their heads, so that whatever the secular humanistic doctrine might be, the church took it as the new Messiah - simply because we had no central faith of our own. We became like the Israelites when the spies returned after looking over Canaan and made their report. You remember they said: "The land does flow with milk and honey,", and Joshua and Caleb said: "We will be able to take it." But the majority reported: "No, they have walled cities; moreover there we saw the giants, the sons of Enoch who come from the giants, and we were in our own eyes as grasshoppers and so were we in theirs." For two decades the church theologically has been suffering from a "grasshopper" neurosis. I am not saying we have been psychotic, we have not been cut off entirely from reality; but we have been neurotic and dysfunctional. We have laboured under a burden of guilt which has undercut evangelism, undercut mission, undercut proclamation. As a Calvinist, of course, I believe in a guilt that is strong, that can be confessed, that God can forgive by cancelling our past and opening up for us a new future. But there is another kind of guilt that is simply sick. The result of this guilt is a form of paralysis, and too much of the past decade has seen this response of paralysis.

Theology has embraced romantic apocalypticism on the one hand, which means utopia today, or it has turned inward to an emphasis on the self, producing what Philip Rieff has called "The triumph of the therapeutic", in which we are no longer interested in matters of substance but only in matters of procedure, now interested only in the ego - the self. The only category of relation is a non-relation, it is manipulation. And therefore the whole reality of the neighbour is lost. "1" and "thou" in Buber's sense has been undercut by "1" and that impersonal environment that I shall manipulate for my own satisfaction. If I seem to be lugubrious, let me hasten to say that I see signs that we are moving beyond this unhealthy situation. Critics are writing about the emergence of a new ethic of commitment in which the personal again is being emphasized, in which the familial relation is being emphasized; a new generation of ethicists is writing about the classical virtues including civility, insisting that without these virtues a society cannot be healthy and ultimately cannot exist. In the midst of all this the churches themselves have remained remarkably stable. One evidence of this is the collection of confessions edited and published by Dr Lukas Vischer under the title of "Reformed Witness Today."

These confessions are vivid evidence of how Reformed Christians have struggled with contemporary problems and challenges from the depth of their theological and biblical convictions, and is one more argument for theology's being a church discipline.

Ecumenical dimension

My final area of report has to do with the ecumenical dimension of our life, a dimension that has always loomed large in the mind and the programme of the Alliance. The Alliance is one of the progenitors of the World Council of Churches. Its leaders were active in its formation. The Alliance questioned whether it should go beyond 1948 and made the decision that it would continue its existence, but that it would place all of its resources in the World Council's work and programme. This will account for the lean style of our organization since 1948. It was a deliberate decision that we would cooperate, and it is a decision that I think was a correct one. But now in 1982 we are in a new situation that is recognized by everyone. And this will call for reassessment of the role of the Alliance in the future.

In my opinion, if we did not have an organization like this today, we would be forced to organize one. One reason for the new situation is the advent of eastern Orthodoxy and Rome into the ecumenical movement. Perhaps Dr Visser 't Hooft is correct; the problems in the ecumenical movement today grow not out of failure but out of too much success. For the presence of Orthodoxy and Rome in the ecumenical life of the church we are grateful to God. The church will never again be the same. But now we must deal in many matters as a world family of churches with other world families of churches. Certainly this is true in dialogue. This is the only real way in which dialogue with any integrity can take place where theological and ecclesiological matters are the concern.

Again after the passage of these decades, the new situation demands a fresh look at the goals and methodology of the ecumenical movement today. In all this the Alliance has a vital role to play. But let us be realistic at the start of our council. This organization is not prepared today to fulfil such a role. We have not yet thought big enough nor have our dreams been large enough; we are not yet a significant factor in the life of our member churches - much less their congregations; we do not have the resources, financial or personal, to begin to meet the needs that are fully known. Many needs are being met. In many of our member churches the Alliance has a vital, indispensable role. But this does not begin to exhaust the opportunities for service, and service is the dimension to which the Alliance is committed. The centennial history written by Dr Pradervand is entitled A Century of Service. When we tested the theme of the conference for São Paulo "The servant Lord and his servant people," we discovered that this was crucial to the life of the church in every part of the world, and it is crucial to the future of this organization. The council will be a success only if each delegate goes home pledged to secure the needed resources for the expansion of this urgent ecumenical mission. I believe our ten days together will more than confirm what I have suggested. Thank you very much.

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