Two former Democratic Party partisans have taken the leadership of the liberal National Council of Churches and may hope to make it into a left-wing political powerhouse. The surprising news is not that they are men of the left but that they are aggressive political partisans. From the time the NCC was born in 1949, replacing the left-wing Federal Council of Churches after World War II, its leaders have been advocates of the social gospel. As it celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, the NCC is seeking to regain some of the momentum it has lost since liberalism s heyday in the 1960s.
Money is a problem.
This goes to famine relief in Ethiopia, survival kits for cyclone victims in Mozambique and help for AIDS patients in Africa. The CWS has more than three times the budget and twice the staff of all the other NCC operations combined. Some contributors don t like the increasing amount that the NCC extracts from CWS donations for other purposes. Certainly, the social and political positions NCC leaders have trumpeted through its Washington legislative office and a steady stream of political resolutions have wrought controversy within member denominations and criticism from others. Their radicalization came in the 1960s, says Alan Wisdom, vice president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a religious watchdog group founded to combat the perceived liberalism of mainline churches.