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Biography of Eugene Carson Blake by Theodore Gill Eugene Carson Blake, born in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, November 7, 1906. Died Stamford, Connecticut, USA, July 13, 1985. Eugene Carson Blake, who in 1966 succeeded Willem A. Visser ’t Hooft as the second general secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC), was a Presbyterian pastor who had served his church as head of communion, 1951-66. He also held the post of president of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America (NCCCUSA) from 1954 to 1957. Following his graduation from Princeton University in 1928, Blake spent a year teaching at Forman Christian College in Lahore (then in India, later Pakistan) and experienced the worldwide dimension of Christianity as a basis for dialogue with other cultures and religions. Blake returned to the United States to be married, followed by a move to Scotland where he studied theology at New College, Edinburgh for a year before enrolling as a candidate for the ministry at Princeton Theological Seminary. In the 1930s he served parishes in New York City and Albany, New York. Later, as pastor of the 3,500-member Pasadena Presbyterian Church in California, he enrolled as a registered visitor to the first assembly of the World Council of Churches in 1948, paying his own way to Amsterdam in order to be a part of what he believed would be “a great moment in Christian history.” In 1951, Blake was elected stated clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. and served in the same position following the 1958 church union that inaugurated the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. He retained his ecumenical convictions, serving on a variety of boards and commissions and as president of the NCCCUSA. In 1960, preaching a sermon at Grace Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco, Blake called on American churches to seek visible unity in one church, “truly catholic and truly reformed.” He made this proposal on his own behalf, in a personal response to the demands of the moment: I hasten to make it clear that at this stage this is not an official proposal. My position as Stated Clerk of my Church’s General Assembly gives me no authority to make such a proposal officially on behalf of my Church. I speak this morning as one of the ministers of my Church privileged and required to preach under the Word of God… I speak as one minister of Jesus Christ who believes that God requires us to break through the barriers of nearly five hundred years of history, to attempt under God to transcend the separate traditions of our Churches, and to find a way together to unite them so that manifesting the unity given us by our Lord Jesus Christ, His Church may be renewed for its mission to our nation and to the world ‘that the world may believe.’ Blake’s sermon precipitated the formation of the Consultation of Church Union, the precursor of Churches Uniting in Christ. In the 1950s and 60s, Blake became known as an ardent supporter of the U.S. civil rights movement. While stated clerk, he was instrumental in integrating the workforce in the national Presbyterian offices. As a president of the National Council and member of the central committee of the WCC, he joined in planning the churches’ support for civil rights. On the Fourth of July 1963, Blake was one of nine religious leaders arrested near Baltimore, Maryland, as they demonstrated for the racial desegregation of an amusement park. The following month, he represented the NCCCUSA in the leadership and on the podium of the historic March on Washington where Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his speech known for the refrain, “I have a dream.” In his own remarks, Blake spoke on behalf of predominately white churches: I think there is a new spirit abroad in the Churches. We have come to know that we can no longer let the burden of the day be borne alone by those who suffer the discrimination we contest. We who are white have been at best followers, certainly not the leaders. If I am asked why we are here today, I will gladly answer. I will be considerably embarrassed, however, if I am asked why we are so late. Activists and officials in the World Council of Churches came to know Blake not only through his growing public reputation, but as a member of the WCC’s central committee, the smaller executive committee, and eventually as chair of the finance committee where he was valued as a highly competent administrator and advisor. General secretary W.A. Visser ’t Hooft also came to rely on Blake as a U.S. citizen who sincerely wished to improve relations between East and West during the cold war. He was a member of a WCC delegation to Moscow in 1956, and in the following year Visser ’t Hooft took Blake to Czechoslovakia as his trusted companion on a sensitive mission of church diplomacy. As Visser ’t Hooft, the founding WCC general secretary, approached retirement, the search process for his successor moved more by fits than starts. At the 1965 central committee meeting, that governing body deadlocked over the nominating committee’s recommendation. Paul Crow later wrote, “In this crisis moment, when neither the election process nor the prospect of other names offered much hope, the name of Eugene Carson Blake – an experienced, trusted member of the Central Committee – surfaced and received almost unanimous support. The crisis was averted, and the WCC had a leader whose talents, while different from those of the first general secretary, brought genius and grace to the position.” Blake brought a wealth of experience to the general secretariat. His early skills as an administrator had been strengthened during the process of merging the institutions that became the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. As stated clerk, he had participated in meetings and programs of all his church’s boards and commissions. He had encouraged patterns of inter-church partnership in international mission. He had become familiar with liturgical renewal and varieties of Christian tradition through the compiling and adoption of a new worship book. He had been responsible for the implementation of General Assembly policies across a broad range of concerns and disciplines. Blake’s arrival in Geneva coincided with final preparations for the 1966 church and society conference focusing on rapid social and technological change. For the first time, a global ecumenical conference hosted as many representatives from the developing world as from the North Atlantic nations, in addition to a significant influx of participants from Eastern Orthodox churches that had joined the World Council at its New Delhi assembly in 1961. Radical change was embraced by many speakers. The conference was seen as controversial, particularly in the western media. In the summer of 1968, the fourth assembly of the WCC convened on the campus of Uppsala University in Sweden. Among the principal speakers and presenters were economist Barbara Ward, anthropologist Margaret Mead, novelist James Baldwin, and the folksinger and social activist Pete Seeger. As at the church and society conference, all regions of the world were represented both within the delegations and on the meeting’s agenda. For some critics, ranging from Orthodox commentators to Protestant evangelicals, Uppsala was characterized by a surfeit of ideology and a concomitant “lack of theology.” M.M. Thomas, a layman from India whom the assembly elected moderator of the WCC central committee, insisted that this conclusion was “only borne out of prejudiced definitions of theology.” One of the key issues raised at Uppsala was that of “white racism,” as Baldwin had called it. Following the assembly, Blake organized a WCC conference at Notting Hill in London under the chairmanship of U.S. senator and future presidential candidate George McGovern, who had been a United Methodist delegate to the Fourth Assembly. The conference’s purpose was to formulate concrete proposals, eventually resulting in the WCC’s Program to Combat Racism (PCR) and the Special Fund to Combat Racism. Eugene Carson Blake was instrumental in the formulation of the program and special fund against racism, and in seeing it through to adoption by the central committee at its Canterbury meeting late in 1969. This emphasis, and the new orientation it represented within the work of the WCC, would prove contentious and cause heated discussion and disagreement within many member churches. The year before his retirement, Eugene Carson Blake addressed the 1971 Faith and Order commission at Louvain, defending the struggle for justice and peace in the world as an intrinsic part for the churches’ quest for unity. Despite his own conviction that the Council’s path was correct, Blake warned: Unless it becomes clearer to our whole constituency than it now is that all that the World Council is and does arises out of the gospel, the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, an increasing and destructive polarization of the church may be expected. Nothing less will suffice than a re-examination of the principal traditional fields of theology as each bears upon the actual problem of the unity of the church and the unity of mankind. A generation later another general secretary of the WCC, Konrad Raiser of Germany, would recognize “that the destructive polarization of which Gene Blake spoke in 1971 did indeed occur and that it became a serious threat to the ecumenical movement.” In retirement Blake was nominated for the office of moderator of the UPCUSA’s General Assembly, but the position went to another candidate. He was subsequently recruited as the first president of Bread for the World, a U.S. citizens’ lobby for anti-hunger and anti-poverty legislation. He died at the age of 78 in 1985, just nine days after the death of his predecessor and close friend W.A. Visser ’t Hooft. Bibliography Eugene Carson Blake, “A Proposal Toward the Reunion of Christ’s Church,” Midstream 37 (1998), p. 285-98. R. Douglas Brackenridge, Eugene Carson Blake: Prophet with Portfolio (New York: Seabury, 1978. Paul A. Crow, Jr., “Eugene Carson Blake: Apostle of Christian Unity,” The Ecumenical Review 38 (1986), p. 228-36
Copyright Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). All Rights Reserved.
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