World Council of Churches

The World Council of Churches is presented as a postwar institution with roots in an earlier ecumenical movement, rather than as an organization whose founding or internal structure is described in detail. The book traces that history through the 1925 Life and Work conference in Stockholm and through the later engagement of figures including Dag Hammarskjöld and Douglas Steere.

Origins in the ecumenical movement

The 1925 Life and Work conference in Stockholm was one of the milestones leading to the World Council of Churches’ formation after World War II. Nathan Söderblom, the Lutheran archbishop of Uppsala and a pioneer of the ecumenical movement, was responsible for the conference. The account thus places the Council within a longer effort toward Christian cooperation, while distinguishing the earlier gathering from the organization that arose later.

Dag Hammarskjöld and the movement’s inheritance

Dag Hammarskjöld encountered the ecumenical movement early. His father governed Uppsala for almost twenty-five years, and as a child Dag played with the children of Nathan Söderblom. Hammarskjöld attended the 1925 conference as an usher. A story recounted by Henry Van Dusen later captured how thoroughly this upbringing had acquainted him with ecumenical ideas: when someone proposed that the World Council’s general secretary explain the movement to Hammarskjöld, he replied that he already knew it from growing up under Söderblom. The anecdote connects the Council’s institutional history to a personal inheritance, without suggesting that Hammarskjöld held a position in the organization.

Douglas Steere and practical ecumenism

Douglas Steere’s later work illustrates another form of connection to the Council. A leading Quaker of the mid-twentieth century, he was active in the ecumenical movement and served with both the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches. He was also much in demand as a Quaker Observer delegate to the Second Vatican Council. His international work included travel for the American Friends Service Committee, while his religious interests led him to organize dialogues between Christians and Buddhists in Japan and Christians and Hindus in India. In this account, the World Council belongs to a wider landscape of interchurch and interreligious engagement: Steere’s service with it accompanied, rather than replaced, work across other institutions and traditions.