c. 1999 Religion News Service

CLEVELAND _ Representatives of the 35 member denominations of the National Council of Churches, the nation’s premier ecumenical organization, are gathering here to celebrate the group’s 50th anniversary.

But the celebration, which formally begins Tuesday (Nov. 9) with a scheduled luncheon address by retired South African Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, is accompanied by a good deal of self-reflection as council officials and denominational representatives wrestle with yet another NCC fiscal crisis and with whether the council is the proper vehicle to lead the Christian unity movement into the next millennium.

Before the week is out, officials hope to have taken some steps toward repairing the financial situation, the severity of which was underscored by a United Methodist Church decision to temporarily withhold payment of some $340,000 in an expression of unhappiness with the council’s fiscal practices.

The NCC has a $4 million deficit of approved but unbudgeted expenditures _ primarily for consultants hired to help resolve NCC monetary and structure woes.

More tenuous, and likely to remain unresolved at the end of the anniversary celebrations, is the issue of how the church unity movement represented by the NCC can be broadened to include participation by the Roman Catholic Church, more evangelical denominations and agencies, and the Pentecostal movement _ groups whose participation is made difficult by the NCC’s current organizational structure, which is modeled along that of mainline Protestant denominations.

These two problems _ structure and finance _ will be the first challenges faced by the council’s incoming leadership: the Rev. Andrew Young, a United Church of Christ member who will be installed as the NCC’s new president, and the Rev. Robert Edgar, a United Methodist and former Pennsylvania congressman currently the president of the Claremont School of Theology, who is set to become the council’s new general secretary.

Young will be installed Thursday at a banquet at which United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan is the featured speaker. Edgar will be presented Friday as the nominee to run the NCC on a day-to-day basis.

While some critics have called for the NCC’s dissolution, and even some supporters wonder about its current viability, the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, ending a nine-year run as NCC general secretary, said the council still has a vital role to play in the church unity movement.”I believe we have to be extremely careful to keep the NCC alive and to support it, because were the NCC to disappear before something new comes, I think we would have some major difficulties. … We can’t play with this.” Among those difficulties, she said, is whether a number of the current members of the NCC, including Orthodox bodies and major African-American denominations, would see the NCC’s demise as an opportunity to opt out of new ecumenical endeavors.

Born at the height of the Cold War, the council _ the prophetic standard bearer for religious liberalism _ has been a center of controversy from the start. It was accused of being soft on communism for its criticism of the excesses of anti-communism and its early and strong support of the civil rights movement.

Equally harsh _ and similar _ criticism was leveled at the council for its early support of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress at a time when the group’s anti-apartheid activities were seen as supporting violence.

Fifty years later, the council, returning to the city where it was born, finds itself facing many of the issues _ and complaints _ that have plagued it from its beginning, including criticism of its theological and political views, a financial crisis and what many see as a dysfunctional structure.”The NCC is a hindrance to the cause of Christian unity,”argues James Heidinger II, president of Good News, an organization of conservative United Methodists. He says the NCC’s”extremely liberal theological and political views have made `ecumenism’ a negative word for evangelicals.” Good News, and other evangelical and conservative groups in the umbrella Association for Church Renewal, have called for the dissolution of the NCC.

For Campbell, its an old story.”We have a sort of nostalgic view of what was,”Campbell said.”And that nostalgic view is that the ecumenical movement was enormously popular, well-funded and gratefully received.”The fact is, the NCC has all its life struggled with its acceptance, whether there is sufficient funds and it has always struggled with a bizarre _ and that is the only word for it _ a bizarre structure,”she said.

But even for friends of the council, the time has come to re-think its mission and structure.”The NCC’s immediate financial crisis is but the symptom of a deeper crisis,”the Rev. Wesley-Granberg Michaelson, general secretary of the Reformed Church in America, a NCC member, wrote in the current issue of The Christian Century.”Trust in the NCC by the leaders and constituency of many of its member communions has been severely eroded,”according to Granberg-Michaelson.

Granberg-Michaelson said the NCC still needs to face the underlying question of”what vision of an ecumenical future drives the council and can it be realized through its present institutional structure.” Council leaders hope to get a glimpse of that vision Wednesday when they initiate what is being called”The Great Conversation,”a forum that will include perspectives from those faith families outside the council as well as state and local agencies.”Cleveland,”an NCC brochure optimistically offers,”may well again be the birthplace of an ecumenical vision that more fully expresses our unity in Christ.” IR END ANDERSON