Embattled Head of National Council of Churches Quits

When the embattled administrator of the nation’s preeminent ecumenical agency, the National Council of Churches, announced his resignation this week, he confirmed what many church leaders said was inevitable, given his no-confidence vote a month earlier.

The Rev. Arie Brouwer said his decision to resign as general secretary effective today was not prompted by any pressures on him but by a recognition that it is “a time for change” in the position, which he has filled since January, 1985.

In a letter to the council’s governing board, Brouwer referred to the board’s tumultuous May meeting in Lexington, Ky., and said, “I subsequently decided that I could not continue as general secretary of the NCC because, under those circumstances, I could not carry further the work which is essential to my vocational fulfillment.”

Brouwer had earlier been accused by critics of treating the council’s staff in an authoritarian manner. But opposition to Brouwer grew when he delivered a no-holds-barred speech to the board in which he accused critics of “character assassination” and a “lust for retribution.”

A minister in the Reformed Church in America, Brouwer narrowly retained his job at the May meeting when the members split--the vote was 57-57 with 13 abstentions--on a motion to “seek out new leadership.”

The resignation comes at a particularly sensitive time for the financially and politically beleaguered body, which represents 32 denominations with a membership in excess of 40 million. Last month, the board also approved a plan for a massive overhaul and streamlining of the council’s structure, intended in part to help overcome the financial woes of the agency, which saw its effective income drop by 53% from 1975 to 1987.

Some denominational representatives who responded to news of Brouwer’s resignation said his decision could give the council an opportunity to press on with the important business at hand, rather than devoting so much time and energy to the question of leadership.

Bishop Edmond Browning, who heads the Episcopal Church, said, “This is a time for new leadership in the council to help the churches of the United States to move forward into a renewal of the ecumenical movement. . . . We must leave behind the conflicts and uncertainties of the past and teach ourselves to prepare for pioneering in the future.”

James A. Hamilton, the council’s chief public policy and legal affairs official and its senior ranking staff official, has been appointed acting general secretary until an “interim general secretary” is named.