NCC plan to broaden ecumenical group OK’d
The Layman Online, January 30, 2003
The National Council of Churches wants to weave a coat of many more theological colors to stretch its shrinking wardrobe beyond mainline Protestantism.
Meeting in El Paso on Wednesday, the steering committee for the fledgling effort, tentatively called Christian Churches Together in the U.S.A., decided to invite a wide range of church bodies over the next several weeks to join the movement. If the membership campaign succeeds, the group would become the successor of the NCC.
While it is ostensibly broadly ecumenical, Christian Churches Together also is an attempt by the National Council of Churches to shore up its sagging revenues and, perhaps, rescue it from pending bankruptcy. Since auditors revealed in 1999 that the NCC had plunged deeply into deficit spending, the organization has been whittled down to one-fourth of its size and has lost one of its principal funding sources, Church World Service.
Church World Service, a widely supported ministry of financial, food and instructional aid, is now independent.
In El Paso, the steering committee of church representatives from 30 denominations, principally the NCC constituency, decided to invite others to join an alliance that would represent five segments of U.S. Christianity: evangelical/Protestant, historic Protestant, Orthodox, racial/ethnic and Roman Catholic. The Catholic church and most evangelical and Pentecostal denominations have shunned membership in the NCC because of its emphasis on social and political activism.
That has not changed. Within hours after President George W. Bush delivered his State of the Union speech Tuesday, Robert Edgar, a former Democratic congressman and now the general secretary of the NCC, published a blistering attack of Bush’s domestic and international agenda on the NCC Web site.
The Presbyterian Church (USA) and the United Methodist Church are the two major contributors to the NCC. Despite its declining revenues and the need to trim the 2003 budget by nearly $1.53 million, the PCUSA has not reduced its commitment to the NCC – about $500,000 in cash and an unknown amount in the value of staff and other services. PCUSA Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick has been a strong advocate of PCUSA support for the NCC.
Thirty church representatives, including Kirkpatrick, announced the plans for Christian Churches Together in April 2002.