A Wartime Committee Built by Many Churches Acting Together

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Christian Aid's roots lie in Christian Reconstruction in Europe, an ad-hoc committee the major British and Irish churches belonging to the British Council of Churches formed in 1943, before the Second World War had even ended, to plan for the relief effort peace would require. The committee's first public appeal to congregations came on 13 May 1945, the Sunday after Victory in Europe Day, calling on the British public to turn thanksgiving for peace into an act of charity for a devastated continent. The appeal raised more than 80,000 pounds sterling, used to provide material and spiritual aid to partner churches across war-torn Europe, and was successful enough to be repeated the following year under the name Churches in Europe Day.

By 1949 the effort had been absorbed into the British Council of Churches as the Inter-Church Aid and Refugee Service, the institutional lineage that in time became Christian Aid. The organization that resulted answers to no single denomination: it remains the shared relief and development agency of 41 sponsoring churches across Britain and Ireland today, a structure that traces directly back to an ad-hoc wartime committee built by many churches acting together rather than one church acting alone.