| MELBOURNE, Australia — The World Council of Churches (WCC), the world’s biggest inter-church grouping, must find new ways of relating to Christians in southern hemisphere nations if it is to remain relevant, the general secretary of the National Council of Churches in Australia (NCCA) has stated.
“The WCC has a top-down structure and rather bureaucratic procedures. That can disadvantage people who don’t come from a culture of European-style decision-making and democratic processes,” said the Rev. John Henderson, a Lutheran pastor.
“If you don’t know the system you don’t know where to enter it. So unless the WCC finds ways of better empowering Christians from the South, it will lose its relevance,” warned Henderson, in a statement released by the NCCA on April 8.
Henderson was announcing a visit to Australia later this year by the Rev. Sam Kobia, the WCC’s new general secretary, who is scheduled to be one of the main speakers at the Australian church council’s fifth national forum from July 9-13.
Kobia, an ordained minister of the Methodist Church in Kenya, was elected WCC general secretary in 2003 and took up his new post at the beginning of 2004.
The NCCA has 15 member churches, including the Anglican, Roman Catholic, Lutheran and Uniting denominations.
Henderson compared the World Council of Churches to the United Nations. Both were set up in the 1940s in a climate of hope for global unity in the post Second World War era, he said. But both organizations today faced a funding crisis and had difficulty in finding resources to match the needs of their programs.
The challenge facing the WCC had been partly created by the shift in the balance of the world’s Christians from Europe and North America to southern nations such as Africa, noted Henderson.
“There’s a question of a sort of reverse evangelism taking place, with Christians from Africa and Asia evangelizing people from what used to be regarded as Christian countries,” he said.
The WCC was founded in 1948 and now has 342 member churches, mostly from Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox church traditions, in more than 120 countries. The Roman Catholic Church is not a member but has representatives on some WCC bodies.
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