Kathleen Bliss

IN a large room desks are set out. Notices divide them into
members, substitutes, fraternal delegates, observers. Wires
trail across the floor from translators' desks labelled French,
German, Russian, to microphones and loudspeakers. Stacks of
duplicated documents stand ready. Any international gathering
anywhere in the world might be imminent, but for one fact.
Behind the dais hangs a great blue backcloth and on it floats
the familiar white ship with cross as mast: below the ship the
decorous waves, above it the word OIKOUMENE.

A meeting of the Central Committee of the World Council
of Churches affords its members eight days for intermittent
contemplation of this symbol, and few organizations have
been blessed with a symbol that wears so well, with its com-
bination of simplicity and mystery. Here is the ship of the
Church, not as our churches seem to be, loaded with devices
for propelling them along and steering them in this or that
direction. There is nothing to catch the wind, nothing to use
the tide: simply the cross and commitment to the waves. The
Church is given to the world, and the tides which carry it are
God's tides, but they flow through the world under the cross.
But these waves with their neatly structured symmetry are too
decorous by half to remind us of the Psalmist's connection

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