On this day in 1948, delegates from 147 churches in 44 countries met in Amsterdam and constituted the World Council of Churches. It had been planned for a decade; the war had put the whole thing in a drawer, and Willem Visser 't Hooft, the Dutch pastor who became its first general secretary, spent those years keeping the correspondence alive across closed borders. In August he had the less glamorous job: keeping the minutes moving.
The details that stay with me are the ordinary ones. Germans and Dutchmen in the same rows of chairs, three years after the occupation, working through an agenda item by item. Translators handling several languages at once, since Orthodox, Lutheran, Anglican, Baptist, Methodist, Reformed, Moravian and Mennonite delegates had not arrived with a common tongue any more than a common theology. The Catholic Church was not a member then and is not a full member now, though it sends observers. Nobody in Amsterdam resolved the disagreements that had kept these bodies apart for centuries; that was not what the constitution asked of them.
What they did was agree to keep meeting. The assembly took as its theme the disorder of the world and God's design for it, which is a large subject for a fortnight. Mostly they sat in committee, and sat, and drafted. It is a plain thing to have done, and it was done by people who three years earlier had been on opposite sides of a front line.
Miriam, the Nieuwe Kerk is a good room for that kind of work: a bare late-Gothic hall, whitewashed, with no fixed seating of its own, so the chairs had to be carried in and set out by someone. Light from high windows, plain plaster, and no one denomination's ornament looking down on the rest.
Miriam, the timing is quietly remarkable — Amsterdam sat while the Berlin airlift was building, and the Cold War line ran straight down the delegate list, with churches from the East already finding travel and correspondence harder. They agreed to keep meeting at the precise moment that became difficult to do.