World Federation for Friendship Work of Churches

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The World Alliance for Friendship Work of Churches (also World Alliance for International Friendship Work of Churches ; English initially World Alliance of Churches for Promoting International Friendship , from 1920 World Alliance for International Friendship Through the Churches ) was an organization that sought to make a positive contribution by the churches to Trying to keep the peace. He is considered one of the roots of the ecumenical movement .

prehistory

In the margins of the Second Hague Peace Conference in 1907 agreed Eduard de Neufville , a committed in the French-reformed municipality Frankfurt banker, and Joseph Allen Baker , one of the Quakers belonged Direction liberal lower house deputy , that the churches of their two countries should contribute to peace. A first step was mutual visits by high-ranking church representatives. The 133 delegates on the first "peace trip" to Great Britain in 1908 included a. the Prussian court preacher Ernst von Dryander , the general superintendents Wilhelm Faber , Theodor Kaftan and Heinrich Möller , the Alsatian consistorial president Friedrich Curtius and the theology professors Martin Rade , Otto Baumgarten , Leopold Witte , Hermann von Soden and Carl Mirbt ; in addition, Catholics such as the Berlin provost Carl Kleineidam and the Caritas director Lorenz Werthmann and free church members such as Friedrich Wilhelm Simoleit . The delegation that visited Germany in June 1909 included bishops from various churches, but also parliamentarians and trade union representatives. In order to organize the further work, church committees for the maintenance of friendly relations were founded on each side . The entrepreneur Friedrich Albert Spiecker took over the chairmanship in Germany ; The secretary was the young Berlin pastor Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze , who from 1913 was the organ of the committee for the journal Die Eiche. Quarterly published on the maintenance of friendly relations between Great Britain and Germany . On the British side, the magazine was called The Peacemaker ; Archbishop Randall Davidson was chairman, and MPs Baker and Willoughby Dickinson were the driving force .

During a visit to the United States in 1911, Baker and Siegmund-Schultze won the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ (the forerunner of the National Council of Churches ) to join this initiative. The idea of ​​an international church conference was made possible by the industrialist Andrew Carnegie , who founded the Church Peace Union in early 1914 and made a generous amount available for international peace work. After the Swiss Church Conference had invited to a peace conference of the churches in January 1914, it was agreed to convene an international conference in Constance in August .

The founding meeting in Konstanz in 1914

153 delegates from 12 countries were registered for the conference, which was to take place from August 1st to 5th, 1914 in the Insel-Hotel in Konstanz. The largest delegations came from the USA and Great Britain; the response in the German churches was comparatively low. Since the beginning of the conference coincided with the mobilization on the eve of the First World War, only about 80 people could arrive, who also had to leave on August 3rd to get out of the country safely. They passed an appeal for peace prepared by Dickinson, which was sent by telegram to the heads of state in Europe and the USA, and agreed to establish an umbrella organization for the Christian peace committees in the individual countries. The main idea was:

“If the work of reconciliation and the promotion of friendship is an essential Christian task, it is advisable that the churches of all countries use their influence on the people, the representatives of the people and the government in order to establish good and friendly relations between the peoples, so that they on the Ways of peaceful civilization bring about the state of mutual trust that Christianity has taught mankind to strive for. "

- Item 1 of the resolution of the Konstanz Conference

Most of the foreign delegates then traveled by special train via Cologne to the Dutch border and on to London. The World Federation was formally founded there by the British and American delegates. An agreement was reached on the name World Alliance of Churches for Promoting International Friendship and an executive committee was elected, which, in addition to Baker, was chaired by Dickinson, Siegmund-Schultze, the Americans William P. Merrill and Frederick Lynch , Louis Emery from Switzerland and Jacques Dumas from France belonged. Dickinson, who also served as honorary secretary until 1928, was assigned to the American Quaker Benjamin Battin , professor at Swarthmore College .

The further development until 1919

Despite the war, national committees were set up in many countries to work on spreading the message of peace, but also to provide practical help for prisoners of war and internees. In Great Britain representatives of the Free Churches and the Church of England worked closely together; besides Baker and Dickinson were u. a. the Quaker Henry Hodgkin and the future Archbishop William Temple involved. The Peacemaker was replaced by Goodwill magazine in 1915 . The German committee founded in the spring of 1915 was headed by Spiecker; Siegmund-Schultze became secretary, who now also ran the journal Die Eiche as an organ of the World Federation. The committee was particularly active in the USA, with Merrill and Lynch at its head; Henry Atkinson was Secretary General from 1918 to 1955. In Denmark and Sweden, the leading Lutheran bishops Harald Ostenfeld and Nathan Söderblom took over the chairmanship of the respective committees.

At the end of August 1915 there was even a meeting of the international committee in Bern, at which representatives from the warring countries Great Britain, Germany and Italy could also take part. Because it was not possible to make the churches themselves bearers of the World Federation, the name was changed again to World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship Through the Churches ( Promoting dropped out in 1920). In addition, the principles of Konstanz were confirmed and statutes were established.

As the war progressed, it became more and more difficult to maintain the international orientation. It was not until 1917 that there were renewed initiatives for a mutual agreement. On the Protestant side, the Swedish Archbishop Söderblom advocated a larger international conference that was to be connected to a meeting of the World Federation. However, only representatives from the neutral countries came to the conference, which took place in Uppsala in December. Efforts to get a new edition in 1918 were unsuccessful.

It was not until the autumn of 1919 that the International Committee of the World Federation could meet again. About 60 representatives from 14 countries met in Oud Wassenaar near The Hague and agreed on several resolutions calling for the recognition of international law and the rights of national and religious minorities and supporting the League of Nations . Further steps towards peace were to be discussed at an international church conference, for which Söderblom successfully promoted. However, since there should also be other social problems and a growing together of denominations, the World Federation could not offer the appropriate framework. Separate committees were formed to prepare for the Stockholm World Conference of Churches of 1925, from which the movement for practical Christianity emerged .

The 1920s

In the years that followed, the work of the World Federation was somewhat overshadowed by the movement for practical Christianity, even if it was quite successful. After the Orthodox churches had also joined, some successful peace conferences were held in the Balkans. Peace education work was also carried out intensively in youth seminars. In the churches of the countries that fought on different sides in World War I, however, only minorities campaigned for reconciliation. The question of war guilt caused conflicts again and again, including at the 4th meeting of the World Federation in Beatenberg in the canton of Bern in August 1920. Archbishop Randall Davidson was elected President here.

The German Working Committee of the World Federation was of great importance for the beginnings of ecumenical work in Germany . After starting out as a “Circle of Friends” in 1915, it institutionalized itself in 1920 through a statute. Spiecker was president until 1929, and from 1920 he was also one of the vice-presidents of the international association. Particularly active members were u. a. the Baden pastor Hermann Maas and the President of the Reich Court Walter Simons . The full-time secretary was still Siegmund-Schultze, from 1921 temporarily supported by the Methodist theologian Theophil Mann . This reflects the close cooperation between regional and free churches, which at that time did not exist anywhere else in Germany. The contacts with the German Evangelical Church Committee (DEKA), the executive body of the Federation of Regional Churches, were not particularly good. DEKA made the preparation of the World Conference on Practical Christianity in 1925 its own business, but held back on the parallel preparations for the first World Conference on Faith and Order . Therefore, the German Working Committee of the World Federation took it in hand to put together a German delegation for the 1927 Conference of Lausanne.

After the World Church Conferences in Stockholm in 1925 and Lausanne in 1927, the World Association for Friendship Work also organized a large-scale “World Conference for Peace and Friendship” in Prague in August 1928. The main topics were disarmament, the outlawing of war according to the Kellogg-Briand Pact , which was signed almost at the same time, and the creation of an international arbitration system based on the League of Nations. A resolution demanded "that the peoples henceforth affirm their fraternal solidarity and their obligation to purposeful cooperation and thus renounce the complete freedom from obligations." An appeal was made to the churches to declare to their governments that they do not support war before the outbreak of which not all possibilities of peaceful conflict resolution had been exhausted. Some churches, even the Lambeth Conference of 1930, made statements to this effect, so that the Prague conference can be regarded as the culmination of the work of the Alliance.

From 1930 to 1948

The increasing tensions of the 1930s affected the work of the World Federation. At the Cambridge meeting in September 1931, pessimistic voices were raised. Dickinson assumed the presidency after Archbishop Davidson's death. In 1935 he was followed by the Danish Lutheran Bishop Valdemar Ammundsen , who died the following year. In the meantime, the cooperation with the “Ecumenical Council for Practical Christianity”, to which the continuation committee of the Stockholm World Conference of Churches had been transformed, had been intensified. From 1933 the French Henri-Louis Henriod acted as joint general secretary. Numerous conferences were held together, the two youth commissions merged.

In 1929, the Berlin general superintendent Georg Burghart was elected President of the German branch, which in itself could have improved the position of the World Federation in the regional churches. How much the increasingly influential National Protestant wing rejected the work of the World Federation became clear in 1931 when theologians Emanuel Hirsch and Paul Althaus launched a sharp attack on the German section. After Siegmund-Schultze was expatriated and deported to Switzerland in June 1933, the German section lost its most active champion. At the joint meeting of the World Federation and the Council for Practical Christianity in Fanø in August 1934 , there was clear support for the Confessing Church and against the Reich Church controlled by the NSDAP . Dietrich Bonhoeffer contributed to this , since 1931 one of the three youth secretaries of the World Federation, who also gave his famous speech Church and World of Nations in Fanø .

In August 1935, at the conference in Chamby, Switzerland, one of the main topics was helping the non-Aryan Christians persecuted in Germany. In 1936, considerations began to unite the World Association for Friendship and the Councils for Practical Christianity and for Faith and Order. After the founding of the World Council of Churches was decided in 1938 , the last major meeting of the World Federation took place in Larvik (Norway). With the beginning of the Second World War, work largely came to a standstill. Attempts to revive after 1945 were unsuccessful. Shortly before the inaugural meeting of the WCC in 1948, the Alliance was formally dissolved. His concerns were continued partly in the World Alliance for International Friendship through Religion , partly in the Churches Commission for International Affairs, which is supported by the WCC and the International Mission Council .

literature

  • Ruth Rouse , Stephen Charles Neill : History of the Ecumenical Movement 1517-1948. 2nd volume. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1958, pp. 136–151. 204-214 et al.
  • Stefan Grotefeld: Promoting peace through international friendship work of the churches from 1919 to 1933. The example of the German World Federation. In: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 1991, pp. 46–72.
  • Harmjan Dam: The World Alliance for Friendship Work of Churches 1914–1948. An ecumenical peace organization. Lembeck, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-87476-379-X .
  • Daniel Gorman: The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s. Cambridge University Press, 2012, ISBN 9781107021136 , pp. 213-258.

Web links

Remarks

  1. There is a list of most of the participants in the volume of reports by Wilhelm Bornemann : The Peace Trip of German Churchmen to England. Töpelmann, Giessen 1908, pp. 16-20.
  2. Karl-Christoph Epting : The first international conference of the churches for peace and friendship in Constance 1914. Christliche Verlagsanstalt, Constance 1988, ISBN 3-7673-3906-4 , pp. 5-9; there also the evidence for the following section.
  3. Quoted from Karl-Christoph Epting: The first international conference of the churches for peace and friendship in Konstanz 1914. Christliche Verlagsanstalt, Konstanz 1988, p. 19.
  4. On the national committees cf. Nils Karlström: Kristna samförståndssträvanden under världskriget 1914–1918. Svenska Kyrkans Diakonistyrelse Bokförlag, Stockholm 1947, pp. 338–367.
  5. Nils Karlström: Kristna samförståndssträvanden under världskriget 1914-1918. Svenska Kyrkans Diakonistyrelse Bokförlag, Stockholm 1947, pp. 367-375.
  6. Priit Rohtmets, Radmila Radič: The World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches and the Process of Religious and Political rapprochement between Bulgaria and Yugoslavia in 1920's and 1930's. In: Journal of Ecumenical Studies 50 (2015), pp. 583–605.
  7. ^ Karl Heinz Voigt : Ecumenism in Germany. From the founding of the ACK to the Charta Oecumenica (1948–2001). Vol. 1: International Influences and Networking - Beginnings 1848–1945. V&R unipress, Göttingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-8471-0417-9 , pp. 132-134.
  8. ^ Karl Heinz Voigt: Ökumene in Deutschland…, Vol. 1, pp. 171–191.
  9. Cf. Markus Geiger: Hermann Maas - a love for Judaism. Life and work of the Heidelberg pastor of the Holy Spirit and Baden prelate. Diss. Phil. PH Heidelberg 2014, pp. 101-133 ( PDF file ).
  10. ^ Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze: The world church conference of Prague. General report of the Congress for Peace and Friendship from August 24th to 30th, 1928. Ev. Press association, Berlin-Steglitz 1928.
  11. Quoted from International Church Journal 19 (1929), p. 57.
  12. ^ Cf. André Fischer: Between witness and zeitgeist: The political theology of Paul Althaus in the Weimar Republic. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-647-55786-1 , p. 571ff.