Religion: The Russians Join the World Council

It was as if the U.N. unanimously took in Communist China and all the new African and Asian nations in a single morning session. For the World Council of Churches is roughly an ecclesiastical equivalent of the United Nations, and last week at New Delhi, in the early hours of its third Assembly, the World Council accepted in full membership the Russian Orthodox Church and three other Iron Curtain Orthodox churches—plus the onetime missions of Africa and Asia.

The 18-day New Delhi meeting, which began last week, is the most portentous and significant of the World Council's three gatherings—more so than the founding Assembly at Amsterdam 13 years ago, or the second Assembly at Evanston, Ill., in 1954. The massive transfusion of new blood, filled with potent hormones, that the ecumenical movement absorbed last week may mark a new lease on life for non-Roman Christianity or bring on a critical case of confusion and decline.

"This conference can be either a Babel or another Pentecost," said Evangelist Billy Graham. Said General Secretary Willem A. Visser 't Hooft: "We have arrived at one of those decisive moments in the history of the church of Christ."

A Daring Action. Last week's piece of Christian history began with a procession under the warm Indian sun. Two by two they strode, 1,000 strong, into a striped tent called a shamiana, and New Delhi's Hindus, Moslems, Jains and Buddhists gaped at their diversity. Archbishops and patriarchs, metropolitans and primates, bishops, canons, pastors and professors—capped, cassocked, bearded, bareheaded, in flowing robes or academic gowns, in business suits or sarongs—bodied forth the range and outreach of Christianity. Among them: Anglican Arthur Michael Ramsey, Presbyterian Eugene Carson Blake, Lutheran Franklin Clark Fry, German Evangelical Otto Dibelius, Episcopalian Arthur Lichtenberger, Greek Orthodox Lakovos.

The 1,200 delegates, observers, staff members and special guests (plus 275 newsmen) met in a world unused to organized religion. A memorandum prepared by General Secretary Visser 't Hooft and Bishop Lesslie Newbigin of the Church of South India reminded them that the mysterious East was accustomed to a different brand of holy man. "To go to the capital city of India and proclaim that Jesus Christ is the light of the world is a daring action," the memo noted. "It is difficult for most people in India to take seriously a claim to religious insight which is not accompanied by an element of austerity in regard to such matters as food and living conditions ... It would be wise to limit the use of alcohol and tobacco, to avoid extravagant spending, and to accept with serenity any small discomforts or difficulties which one may encounter."

There were discomforts and difficulties aplenty for Westerners to practice their serenity on. A hotel shortage forced many of them to share their rooms with one or more strangers and to scatter about the city in embassies and dubious hostels, from which it was often a laborious journey by arthritic jitney to the sleekly modern Vigyan Bhavan (Hall of Science), built for the UNESCO conference in 1956.