Rev. Dr. Eugene Blake, Gen. Sec., World Council of Churches is Mandeville lecturer
March 15, 1972
The Rev. Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches and one of the world's most effective spokesmen for the cause of Christian unity, is scheduled to be the second speaker in the 1971-72 Mandeville Lecture Series at the University of California, San Diego.
Dr. Blake will speak Tuesday, March 28, in Room 2100 (second-floor auditorium) in the Basic Science Building at the UCSD School of Medicine. The lecture will begin at 8:00 p.m. and is free and open to the public.
The Mandeville Lecture Series, sponsored by The Mandeville Foundation, Inc. since 1966, brings speakers of world renown and importance to the UCSD campus. Anthropologist Margaret Mead is scheduled to speak Tuesday, April 4. The focus of this year's series is: "The Human Condition: Man's Immediate Future."
Dr. Blake has served as General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, with offices in Geneva, Switzerland, since 1966. He succeeded Dr. W. A. Visser It Hooft, who had been General Secretary since the founding of the WCC in 1948. The World Council represents 252 member churches of the Protestant, Anglican, Orthodox and Old Catholic tradition in 90 countries and territories with an estimated membership of 400 million people.
Dr. Blake has been one of American Protestantism's leading statesmen giving many years of active leadership to the international ecumenical movement before joining the staff of the World Council. He was a member of WCC committees from 1954 to 1966 and served as chairman of the Council's largest agency, the Division of Inter- Church Aid, Refugee and World Service, from 1961 to 1966. From 1954 to 1961 he was chairman of the World Council's Finance Committee.
Dr. Blake was born November 7, 1906, in St. Louis, Missouri. He holds an A.B. degree, with honors in philosophy, from Princeton University (1928), where he also played guard on the varsity football team for three years; and a Th.B. degree from Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey (1932). He also studied theology at New College, Edinburgh, Scotland and holds numerous honorary degrees from colleges and universities, including Princeton, Yale, and Fordham.
In February, 1967, Princeton presented him with the Woodrow Wilson Award, the highest general distinction Princeton can give to an alumnus. The honor is conferred annually upon a Princetonian effectively exemplifying "Princeton in the Nation's Service," a phrase coined by President Wilson.
His first assignment with the church was as Assistant Pastor of the Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas (Dutch Reformed) in New York City from 1932 to 1935. He served as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Albany, New York from 1935 to 1940 and as pastor of the Pasadena (California) Presbyterian Church from 1940 to 1951. He served as Stated Clerk (chief executive) of the United Presbyterian Church of the USA for 15 years before being named General Secretary of the World Council in 1966.
He was elected president of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA in 1954, serving until 1957, and continued as a member of its General Board until 1966. He was a delegate to both the Second (Evanston, 1954) and Third (New Delhi, 1961) Assemblies of the World Council of Churches; to General Councils of the World Presbyterian Alliance held in 1948, 1954 and 1959; and to WCC Faith and Order conferences held in Lund, Sweden and Oberlin, Ohio, in 1952 and 1957 respectively.
He was the top staff member of the World Council at the Fourth Assembly in Uppsala, Sweden in July, 1968.
Dr. Blake's proposal for church union, made in 1960 in a sermon at Grace Cathedral (Episcopal) in San Francisco, has developed into the Consultation on Church Union now involving 10 churches in the United States. He has gained prominence both in the United States and abroad for his ardent advocacy of the civil rights movement, particularly through his chairmanship of the National Council of Churches' Commission on Religion and Race.
His personal commitment to ending race prejudice has caused him to go to jail in Baltimore, Maryland, for leading a protest march against a segregated amusement park on July 4, 1963, and to walk with Dr. Martin Luther-King at the head of the civil rights march on Washington in 1963.
His leadership in the civil rights movement has been recognized in awards given by the Roman Catholic Interracial Council, Chicago, Illinois (January, 1964) and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, New York (February, 1964).
One of Dr. Blake's main concerns since assuming leadership of the World Council has been how to harness the churches' resources to attack the gap between rich and poor nations and the needs of starving peoples. He is convinced that modern technology has the "know-how" to give all men a decent life, but that this will come about only when all the nations of the world think it is important.
(March 15, 1972)