The globalisation of the World Council of Churches

Following its third assembly in 1961 in New Delhi, the World Council of Churches developed from being a body with a mainly North American/European orientation to one with a global scope.The integration of the WCC and the International Missionary Council opened the council to the churches of Africa and Asia.  At the same time, the broader Orthodox participation that followed New Delhi meant a greater role for churches from Eastern Europe. In Latin America, the movement for liberation theology was emerging, charted by Protestants as well as Roman Catholics. The holding of the Second Vatican Council created a new openness in the Roman Catholic Church offering cooperation with the WCC not only in Faith and Order issues - but in the second half of the 1960s, at least, also on issues relating to society, development and peace. The civil rights movement in the United States and the student protest movements in North America and Western Europe impacted on the churches, and were reflected in the World Conference on Church and Society in Geneva in 1966 and the WCC's fourth assembly two years later in Uppsala.

An international conference from 4 to 6 March 2011 at the Ecumenical Institute in Bossey organized under the auspices of the  research project,  “On the Road to a Global Christendom: European Protestant Ecumenism and the ‘Discovery’ of the ‘Third World’”, is to examine this these changes from a global historical and ecumenical perspective. It will be of particular importance to analyze the historical, sociopolitical and theological developments in the 1960s and 1970s which contributed to this change (decolonization, liberation movements, revolutions, human rights, the Second Vatican Council, the rise of contextual theologies and so on.).

A call for papers has been addressed to researchers working on areas concerning the WCC since the 1960s, from a historical or theological perspective, or those researching the “getting global” of churches during the 1960s and 1970s from other angles.More details here (scroll down for English).