By Patricia Lefevere
Harare, 10 December (ENI)--Some of the 4500 ecumenical enthusiasts in the Zimbabwean capital this week for the World Council of Churches' eight assembly can declare proudly that they have attended three, four or even five WCC assemblies, which are held once every seven years.

But an American clergyman, Dr J. Robert Nelson, a United Methodist from Houston, Texas, has amassed thousands of "frequent flyer knots" on the ecumenical boat. Dr Nelson has attended all eight, beginning in 1948 in Amsterdam, followed by Evanston (US) in 1954, New Delhi in 1961, Uppsala in 1968, Nairobi in 1975, Vancouver in 1983 and Canberra in 1991.

Dr Nelson jokes that as a small boy his mother took him to the first Faith and Order conference in Lausanne in 1927. But, at the age of 78, he admitted to being "too young" to have even been "in utero" at the 1910 Edinburgh world missionary conference where the ecumenical ship was launched.

In 1948 curiosity about the formation of the World Council of Churches drew him to Amsterdam where he and his wife, Pat, found the streets and canals decorated with Dutch flags.

"How grand that the Netherlanders are so welcoming to the churches," he thought, until he found out that the decorations were for Queen Juliana's coronation.

Nelson had travelled to Europe in 1947 to spend a year at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, after graduating from Yale Divinity School, in the US, in 1944. But the wealth of theologians he met at Amsterdam and the high level of debate about "the universal church and God's design" prompted him to extend his stay in Switzerland to write a doctoral thesis on the nature of the church.

"My whole career was one lucky break after another," Dr Nelson said. Visits to Geneva gave him a taste for ecumenical debate, and he received a warm welcome from the WCC's first general secretary, W. A. Visser 't Hooft. Soon he went to Tubingen to continue his theological studies in German, then to London where he met Anglican theologians Oliver Tomkins and Leonard Hodgson.

"I wrote my entire dissertation in the British Museum Reading Room," Dr Nelson said, adding that Protestant theologian Emil Brunner, who had taken a deep interest in his research, added a preface when the thesis was published as a book.

When he returned to America to be a chaplain for the Wesley Foundation, he received a letter from Tomkins hinting at the possibility of a job at the WCC. Soon afterwards, Dr Nelson took up the post of secretary of the Faith and Order Commission, and moved with his family to Geneva.

"I was so flattered that I forgot to ask what the salary was during the interview," he said.
Dr Nelson went to Evanston in 1954 as secretary and worked in Geneva until 1959.

His own church, the United Methodist Church, sent him as a delegate to the WCC's next three assemblies in New Delhi, Uppsala and Nairobi. He attended Vancouver, Canberra - and now Harare - as a visitor.

For Dr Nelson, New Delhi remains the greatest assembly ever held. At that gathering many Orthodox churches were received as members of the WCC and, for the first time, Roman Catholic officials attended as observers, although two priests had come to Evanston incognito. The assembly also produced the New Delhi statement on unity, drafted by Bishop Lesslie Newbigin, of the Church of South India. It comprised the first major effort since the 1950 Toronto statement to deal with the nature of the church.

At Delhi, Dr Nelson said, the "essentials of church unity were laid out in wholly scriptural terms. There was great enthusiasm in the assembly", and also an important agreement on revising the basis of the council to contain the Trinitarian reference proposed by the Eastern Orthodox.

Like theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Dr Nelson describes himself as "an optimist without illusion and a pessimist without despair" when it comes to Christ's call to oneness. "The visible unity of the church is attainable," he said. "It's not a solution, but an indispensable hope." [681 words]

This article was first published in Jubilee, the daily newspaper of the WCC's eighth assembly.

Photographs of the assembly are available from Photo Oikoumene

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WCC Assembly Web Site

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