Moving counter-clockwise from top, the images are 1: Geneva, Switzerland, 1994: Desmond Tutu at the WCC (Peter Williams/WCC); 2: 1963: Martin Luther King at the "March on Washington" on 28 August (Keystone); 3: Noordwijkerhout, Netherlands, June 1980: Consultation on racism (WCC).
A renewed
For its studies of many facets of racism, from the economic to the educational to the theological, but especially for the support it gave to liberation movements in southern Africa, PCR was hailed by many who suffered directly from racism. But it came in for sharp opposition in many church and secular quarters. Its work forced churches to take seriously the cost of acting and not just speaking on behalf of the renewed community for which the Uppsala assembly called:
human
community
The scourge of racism was much on the minds of the assembly delegates. US civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, who was to have preached the opening sermon in Uppsala, had been assassinated four months earlier. Invited in King's place, the African American novelist James Baldwin asked whether "there is left in Christian civilization the moral energy, the spiritual daring, to atone, to repent, to be born again".
Torn by our diversities and tensions, we do not yet know how to live together. But God makes new. Christ wants his church to foreshadow a renewed human community. Therefore, we Christians will manifest our unity in Christ by entering into full fellowship with those of other races, classes, age, religious and political convictions, in the place where we live.