Two Streams Become One

The ecumenical movement that produced the World Council of Churches was never a single river. Two currents fed it separately for decades: the Faith and Order and Life and Work conferences, arguing and cooperating their way toward a conciliar body that finally constituted the World Council itself at Amsterdam in 1948, and the International Missionary Council, a wholly separate organization coordinating the era's Protestant foreign missions, tracing its own lineage back to the 1910 Edinburgh missionary conference. The two bodies had cooperated for years without merging, run by different staffs with different institutional loyalties and, in places, different theological instincts about whether mission or unity came first.

New Delhi ended the separation. The International Missionary Council folded into the World Council of Churches as its new Division of World Mission and Evangelism, a single structural home for work that had run in parallel channels since before either institution existed in its 1961 form. The merger settled, in favor of union, an argument that had run through the whole twentieth century ecumenical movement: whether evangelism was a specialist's task properly kept administratively separate from church unity, or whether a divided church was itself an obstacle to the gospel it wanted to preach, and belonged in the same house as the effort to heal that division.