National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America

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National Council of Churches. The National Council of Churches of Christ in America (commonly known as the National Council of Churches [NCC]), an association of major Protestant denominations, was founded in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1950.It was rooted in earlier Protestant interdenominational efforts, including the Evangelical Alliance, 1837; the Civil War Christian Commission; the revivals of Dwight L. Moody; and the late nineteenth century Student Volunteer Movement. The Federal Council of Churches, founded in 1908, served as the principal institutional expression of Protestant ecumenism in the United States until the NCC superseded it in 1950. The NCC, initially representing twenty‐nine denominations, also assumed the foreign and domestic missionary responsibilities of earlier interdenominational groups. The NCC reflected the ecumenical drive within mainstream American Protestantism during and after World War II and perhaps also, in a more secular context, the “consensus” attitudes of the 1950s as well as the expansion of large‐scale administrative and managerial practices throughout American institutions.

Led initially by holdovers from the Federal Council of Churches, the NCC also gave programmatic priority to the social activism of the Federal Council. Throughout much of the 1950s, as the NCC struggled to establish its own identity, it muted somewhat its liberal public voice, but the early 1960s brought a return to activism reminiscent of the early twentieth century Social Gospel era. Younger white leaders as well as pressure from African Americans like Martin Luther King Jr. pushed the ecumenical agency, and mainstream Protestantism generally, to the left, especially concerning racial issues. Nudged by the NCC, church people played important roles in the 1963 March on Washington, in lobbying for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in supporting civil rights activists in Mississippi, and in assisting King in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 as a prelude to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In the late 1960s, the NCC's influence began to wane. The council adopted stances often at variance with former allies, especially with the Lyndon B. Johnson administration over the Vietnam War, Black Power with African Americans, and with the burgeoning women's movement; such conflict created deep fissures within the liberal churches and thus in the council, as in the larger liberal society. Declining membership in the member churches affected revenues and forced cutbacks. The post–1970 conservative shift nationally was reflected in the religious world in the growth of evangelical churches and the decline of mainline Protestantism, including the National Council of Churches.
See also Baptists; Civil Rights Legislation; Civil Rights Movement; Methodism; Missionary Movement; Religion; Sixties, The.

Bibliography

Dean M. Kelley , The National Council of Churches and the Social Outlook of the Nation, 1971.
James Findlay , Church People in the Struggle: The National Council of Churches and the Black Freedom Movement, 1950–1970, 1993.

James F. Findlay Jr.

National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America cooperative agency of 35 Protestant, Orthodox, and Anglican denominations. Formed in 1950, with headquarters in New York City, the National Council of Churches is the chief instrument of the ecumenical movement in the United States with a combined membership of around 52 million. It is the national counterpart of the World Council of Churches . Not a governing body, it promotes through a number of activities general spiritual welfare and interchurch cooperation. It has four principal divisions: Education, Communication and Discipleship; Church World Service and Witness; Prophetic Justice; and Unity and Relationships. Under the sponsorship of the NCCC the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible was released in 1990 after 15 years of intense work.