During the significant early years of the World Council the General Secretary of the World Council was Visser’t Hooft. Hooft had served as secretary of the World’s Committee of the YMCA and then in the same office in the World’s Student Christian federation. In 1938 he seemed the natural choice to lead the Provisional Committee that shaped the World Council at Amsterdam.
One of Visser’t Hoofts’s pet projects after World War II was the creation of an Ecumenical Institute in Switzerland for the training of leaders in the church unity movement. Thanks to Visser’t Hooft’s diplomacy an assembly of the World Council of Churches became a colorful mosaic of cultures, continents and concerns.
[tags]BlogRodent, church-history, ChurchRodent, history, Willem-Adolph-Visser’t-Hooft, World-Council-of-Churches[/tags]
