WCC Racism Grants Issue Still Smolders

Amid continued turbulence over the World Council of Churches’ decision to fund nineteen anti-racist organizations, a controversial, unpublished and unpresented 30,000-word report surfaced at the fall meeting of the British Council of Churches (BCC) last month in south Wales.

The general conclusion of the Mason Report, quoted to the BCC in an International Affairs Department report, is that because “oppression and injustice” are so rife in southern Africa, “the only means of protest left” to many Africans “are violent ones.”

The WCC grants have aroused unusual controversy worldwide because some recipient groups include guerrilla fighters attempting to overthrow white minority governments in Africa (see October 23 issue, page 37, and October 9 issue, page 39).

Spokesmen said the Mason Report would be published later and that because of division over the document the International Affairs Department wasn’t able to “agree formally to submit it to the council.”Also before the BCC meeting was the burning issue of arms sales to South Africa. A long resolution approved by the council urged the British government to “draw back from its intention of supplying certain arms to South Africa.” In early November the government had not yet announced a firm decision on the matter. The BCC expressed general support for the WCC grants.

It didn’t at first appear that the debate was heading that way. To the assurance that WCC money would not be used for military purposes, Congregationalism’s general secretary, John Huxtable, said the Church’s task was to reconcile, not to take sides. “Money given for cars releases money for bombs and rifles,” said A. R. Shillinglaw of the Church of Scotland, which not infrequently finds itself in the minority on controversial topics.

A series of speeches on the wider issues, however, carried the day. The fate of the ecumenical movement was at stake, warned Canon David Paton, whose voice has been heard in the councils of the Christian Peace Conference.

Meanwhile, these developments:

• In what appeared to be a challenge to the policies of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKID) and the United Evangelical Lutheran Church in Germany (VEKLD), the Synod of the Evangelical Church of Hesse-Nassau voted $30,000 for the WCC anti-racism program. (In recent action the EKID Council voted to postpone its final decision on whether to support the WCC program, and a VELKD declaration warned against turning the Church “into a platform for political fights for power.”)

• The Methodist Church of South Africa, with multiracial membership, rejected Prime Minister John Vorster’s cadi for South African churches to break with the WCC because of the guerrilla grants. Earlier, the Congregational and Presbyterian churches of the country took the same course. The Evangelical Lutheran Church didn’t discuss the issue, and the Anglicans were to debate it in Capetown this month.

• The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in western Australia supported the WCC program. Two Australian native groups are to receive WCC money ($25,000).

The West German newspaper Die Welt deplored the decision of the Evangelical Church of Hesse-Nassau, saying German church-tax funds will now finance guerrilla warfare and that by this “the Church gets even more entangled in the jungle of power politics.”

And in Munich, at the Synod of the Lutheran Church in Bavaria, the chairman of the VELKD mission committee called the WCC program one of the “most deplorable decisions in modern church history.” According to Religious News Service he noted that the WCC “had not devoted a single word to the persecution of Christians, which has now reached global proportions.”

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