Philip A. Potter: a tribute.

Brown, Stephen ; VanElderen, Marlin

Probably no single individual was more prominent in the World Council of Churches over the period of its first fifty years than Philip Potter. In 1948, as a recent seminary graduate and newly appointed overseas mission secretary for the Student Christian Movement of Britain and Ireland, this 27-year old Methodist from the small Caribbean island nation of Dominica addressed the WCC's inaugural assembly in Amsterdam on behalf of the young people present. Half a century--and seven WCC assemblies--later, he was a fitting choice to share the platform with South African president Nelson Mandela during the festive celebration in Harare, Zimbabwe, of the Council's 50th anniversary. Between those two moments, Potter spent 24 years on the staff of the WCC in Geneva--six years as youth secretary (1954 to 1960), six years as director of world mission and evangelism (1967 to 1972) and 12 years as general secretary (from 1973 until retirement at the end of 1984).

Philip Potter was born on 19 August 1921 in Roseau, Dominica. An excellent student and cricketer, his initial work experience suggested a legal career: a job in a solicitor's office was followed by a period as assistant to Dominica's attorney general. All the while, he was active in the church; and in March 1943 he sensed a calling to pastoral ministry. After a year as a lay pastor serving a dozen village communities on the nearby island of Nevis, he began his theological education at Caenwood Theological College in Jamaica. Here he was introduced to the Student Christian Movement, and he became secretary of the Jamaica SCM. In July 1947 he attended the second World Conference of Christian Youth in Oslo. He received a B.D. with honours from Richmond College, University of London, in 1948, and after two years on the staff of the SCM of Britain and Ireland, Potter served for five years as a missionary in the Cap-Haitien Circuit of the Methodist Church in Haiti, ministering to poor and illiterate peasants. He was ordained there in 1952, but his sendee in Haiti was cut short for medical reasons. Two years later he joined the WCC in Geneva as secretary, then director, of its youth department. During this time he married Doreen Cousins, whom he had met while studying at Caenwood College, in 1956. She was a musician and composer who would be one of the editors of the new edition of the ecumenical hymnbook, Cant ate Domino, published in 1974.

Following his tour of duty in the WCC youth department, Potter joined the staff of the Methodist Missionary Society in London as secretary for the Caribbean and West Africa. During these years he also chaired the World Student Christian Federation. Active in the then International Missionary Council, he was one of the architects of the new world mission and evangelism division of the WCC when the IMC merged with the WCC in 1961. A growing interest in biblical theology nurtured his hopes for a career as a theological teacher, and only reluctantly did he agree to return to Geneva in 1967 to become director of the WCC's Commission on World Mission and Evangelism. In August 1972, the WCC Central Committee elected him to succeed Eugene Carson Blake as general secretary.

After his retirement from the WCC at the end of 1984, Potter married Barbel von Wartenberg of Germany, a former director of the WCC's sub-unit on Women in Church and Society (Doreen had died in 1980). From July 1985 to August 1990, they lived in Jamaica, where Potter served as chaplain of the University of the West Indies and lecturer at the United Theological College. In September 1990, they returned to Germany, where Barbel worked as a congregational pastor and then as general secretary of the Council of Churches in Germany before becoming, in 2001, the Lutheran bishop in Liibeck, a city on the Baltic Sea, which would become their home. Potter continued to follow the WCC's activities, and, at the Council's ninth assembly in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2006, was the only person among the several thousand in attendance who could make the claim of having attended every WCC assembly since the first in 1948. Though in declining health, Potter visited Geneva in 2009 to attend the launch of the Philip Potter Fund of the World Student Christian Federation to support ecumenical leadership formation among young people. The previous year, he received South Africa's highest civilian honour for foreign nationals, the Oliver Tambo Award, for his efforts to combat racism and apartheid in southern Africa.

The years Potter served as WCC general secretary were turbulent ones. The energy of the WCC's Uppsala assembly in 1968, with its optimistic and forward-looking theme "Behold, I Make All Things New!" had given the Council a new profile at the frontiers of the struggle for development and against racism. There were vigorous new initiatives in education for liberation, in the understanding of what it means to be "the church of the poor," in confronting sexism in church and society, and in the relation between faith and science. But to some in the churches, particularly in Western Europe and North America, the WCC's engagement in social issues involved too much action and too little reflection.

The ecumenical movement had from the beginning made sincere (if often paternalistic) efforts to transcend its own domination by the churches from Europe and North America. But the presence in the WCC of what were once described as "younger churches" became increasingly evident during this time. And with Potter as general secretary, this profile was sharpened in a symbolic way. Forceful and eloquent, with a commanding physical presence and an unequalled ecumenical experience Potter was both a reminder of and a spur to risky and threatening changes in a movement and institution whose origins had been in established or quasi-established churches where a Western ethos prevailed.

Much of the uneasiness centred on the Council's highly visible efforts to combat racism. Potter was not the originator of the WCC's Programme to Combat Racism, or "PCR"; Eugene Carson Blake was general secretary during the 1968 assembly in Uppsala, the apex of the Council's engagement for prophetic ministry in the world, and the meetings in Notting Hill and Canterbury the following year, where the vision of engagement against white racism took institutional shape. But it was Potter who was at the helm when a 1978 grant to the Patriotic Front of Zimbabwe touched off a firestorm of criticism. The grant was released only a few days before one of the groups making up the Front shot down a Rhodesian airliner, killing all passengers. In late 1978, Time magazine carried an article on the grant with a picture of Potter beside a caption that read "We can't help it if missionaries get killed". Only by reading the story could one discover that the quote came from an unidentified "guerrilla commander". The Presbyterian Church of Ireland withdrew from the Council while the Salvation Army and a German regional church suspended their membership. At the WCC's central committee the following year, Potter, a lifelong pacifist, spoke of an "information and communication gap" that needed to be squarely faced by the WCC. On the issue of the PCR itself, however, he defended the grants as "expressing the inescapable commitment of the churches to the cause of justice in the midst of the ambiguities of history".

During Potter's leadership of the Council, the WCC also sought to challenge gender discrimination in church and society. One of the important milestones in this effort was a women-only conference in Berlin in 1974 on "Sexism in the 1970s". Potter's decision to accept an invitation to open the gathering, in the face of widespread indifference to the issue in the wider church, demonstrated the importance he attached to the conference. The recommendations of the Berlin meeting to the WCC's fifth assembly in Nairobi (1975) led to the study process on the Community of Women and Men in the Church as a joint activity of the WCC's programmes on Faith and Order and Women in Church and Society. This study process identified the search for gender justice in theology, participation and relationships, as critical to the renewal of the human community. Its affirmation that the building of the community of women and men is central to the nature and mission of the church has continued to guide the programmatic work of the Council. In Potter's own remarks at the WCC's Jubilee celebrations in Harare, he would speak of a "new and hopefully more creative stage" that had been reached in "recognising the God given equality of women and men".

Though the Programme to Combat Racism was perhaps the most visible face of the social and political involvement of the WCC during Potter's stewardship of the Council, it was only one of the conflicts in which the WCC was caught. The Cold War was then at its height. The exiling of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from the Soviet Union in 1974 focussed world attention on the issue of human rights in the USSR and Eastern Europe. The following year, at the WCC's Nairobi assembly, a major controversy erupted on religious freedom in the USSR after the publication in the assembly newspaper of an appeal by two Russian church figures seeking WCC assistance for Christians persecuted in the Soviet Union. Officially, this appeal was referred to a committee for consideration; unofficially, its ramifications were felt everywhere. Finally, after tumultuous debate, the assembly asked the general secretary--Philip Potter--to ensure that the issue of religious liberty be the subject of "intensive consultations" with the WCC's member churches in Europe and North America. In his own statements on human rights, Potter refused to be drawn into an argument between the West (which pointed to violations of civil and political rights under Communism) and the East (which claimed that capitalism represented a denial of economic and social rights). He insisted that Christians could not accept the separation of human rights along the lines of the ideological divisions of the world. "Human rights are as indivisible as the Gospel itself," he remarked.

If the question of human rights was one of the battlegrounds between East and West in which the WCC was entangled, the issue of nuclear weapons and disarmament was another. By the end of the 1970s, East and West were pitted against each other over the deployment of new nuclear weapons, an issue that mobilized a massive peace movement in Europe and North America. Many in the WCC's member churches in the northern hemisphere, themselves often split over the issue, looked to the Council for a clear stand. The WCC had a clear record of denouncing war, the arms race and militarism. Yet among churches in the southern hemisphere, the situation looked different. They feared that Christians in the north were in danger of focussing exclusively on the future danger of nuclear catastrophe, ignoring the suffering already faced by the overwhelming majority of the peoples of the south--making out of the concern for peace, an ideology of oppression that could be used to justify injustice. As the WCC's 1983 assembly in Vancouver approached, the issue threatened to split the ecumenical movement. It was thanks not least to Philip Potter that the gathering held together these two concerns, and the declaration that emerged from Vancouver has been described as the "climax in the process of interlinking peace and justice" within the WCC.

Vancouver revealed on a world stage a side of Potter already known to his colleagues and friends: his own deep spirituality. For many who attended the gathering, the high point was the assembly's daily worship, centred on a huge gold and white tent set up on the campus of the University of British Columbia. Few present would forget the image of Potter at the opening worship in the tent, as symbols of life from various cultures were brought to the altar. One, a small baby from recently-independent Zimbabwe, was handed to Potter, who took her into his arms, prompting applause from the congregation. (15 years later, on the platform of the WCC jubilee celebrations in Flarare, Potter would be reunited with the child, Mvuselelo Nyoni, by then a teenager.)

Yet if Vancouver marked the zenith of Potter's ecumenical career and influence it was also the scene of one of his greatest setbacks. In his memoirs, Konrad Raiser, then one of Potter's deputies, recalls how the newly elected central committee unexpectedly rejected Potter's candidate--Harry Ashmall, a Scottish layperson--as moderator and instead chose Heinz-Joachim Held, the head of the external relations office of the Evangelical Church in Germany, one of the churches in which the PCR had been most controversial. Suspecting that the move had been planned well in advance, Potter took it as a rebuff and announced he was bringing forward his retirement as general secretary.

Philip Potter was a man of action who preferred oral to written advocacy. Events moved so quickly and were so pressing and controversial, he said, that practically all his energies had been spent in posing and seeking to answer the question: "What is to be done?" He often remarked that he had been taught to have the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in another. But there was little doubt that, faced with an alternative between the Bible and the newspaper, which he would choose. His reports to the WCC's central committee were no dry bureaucratic accounts but demonstrated his skill as an interpreter of the Bible, bringing alive the biblical message as a source of challenge.

Above all, Philip Potter was a man who incorporated in his own life that "dialogue of cultures" about which he felt so passionate. Even though most of his life was spent outside his native region of the Caribbean, he remained aware of the diverse cultural influences of his descent, combining African, Carib, Scottish, Irish and French elements. "There is a tendency nowadays to regard the meeting of cultures, including theologies, as a source of division and conflict," he wrote in the foreword to a collection of his writings published to mark his 60th birthday. "I have discovered," he insisted, "that with humility, imagination, humour, and courage, this meeting of cultures is in fact the only hope for humankind to attain fullness of life in all its shared diversity in the Christ who contains and holds all things together."

Philip Alford Potter, born 19 August 1921, died 31 March 2015

DOI: 10.1111/erev.12146

Marlin VanElderen (d.2000) and Stephen Brown

REVISED by Stephen Brown, 20.04.2015

This is an edited and expanded version of a tribute to Philip Potter drawn up by Marlin VanElderen, who worked at the WCC as editor of the WCC magazine " One World" and as executive editor for all WCCpublications, from 1982 until his unexpected death in 2000. Stephen Brown was an editor at Ecumenical News International from 1994 to 2010 and is now a programme director at Globethics.net.