Current General Secretary Samuel Kobia, announced in 2008 he would not seek another term and the WCC has said his successor will be named at the end of August, during a meeting of the church council’s main governing body, its central committee.
A February 24 statement released by the WCC reported the search committee moderator, Agnes Abuom of the Anglican Church of Kenya, as saying the quest for a general secretary “remained on track.” Applications and nominations closed on February 24.
In early February, Abuom said several WCC member churches had already nominated candidates. The WCC has not published a list of names. However, according to a statement on the Web site www.parkwave.net the Presbyterian Church of Korea has nominated the Rev. Park Seong-Won, a Korean theologian, to lead the church grouping that now has 349 member churches — principally Anglican, Orthodox, and Protestant — representing 560 million Christians worldwide. Park, a member of the WCC central committee, was formerly on the staff of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches.
The Web site also includes links to articles and statements about Park, and to a YouTube video entitled, “An Ecumenical Agenda”, portraying Park calling for an alternative to, “the dominant model of the world economy.”
One of the members of Abuom’s committee, Gregor Henderson of the Uniting Church in Australia, stepped down from the search committee, leading to speculation he may be one of those vying for the post.
The WCC communications department said it was not empowered to say why Henderson, also a WCC central committee member, had not been replaced by one of the two potential substitutes on the selection committee, due to secrecy around the selection process. It referred questions to Abuom.
In December, the (Lutheran) Church of Norway announced it had nominated Olav Fykse Tveit, general secretary of the Norwegian church’s council on foreign and ecumenical relations. Media reports in 2008 had named Mvume Dandala, a South African cleric who was then general secretary of the Nairobi-based All Africa Conference of Churches, as a possible successor to Kobia. It was announced in late February, however, that Dandala was going into politics to head the Congress of the People, a breakaway party from South Africa’s ruling African National Congress.
Media reports also named Prawate Khid-Arn, who is from Thailand and is general secretary of the Christian Conference of Asia, as a possible candidate for the WCC post.
The WCC general secretary is the organization’s chief executive officer and serves as a spokesperson for the church group, interpreting, and promoting its strategic vision.
A Methodist from Kenya, Kobia was elected in 2003 to lead the WCC. He cited “personal reasons” at the WCC central committee meeting in February 2008 for his decision to step down.
At around the time of that meeting a controversy arose about Kobia obtaining a doctoral degree from a non-accredited institution in the United States. The WCC leader said the news about the institution, Fairfax University in Louisiana, had come as a shock to him.
There also was criticism from a German church leader that the WCC was failing to make its presence felt sufficiently in the world and that Kobia had an extensive and expensive travel schedule.
The governing body agreed to appoint an acting general secretary from January 2009, pending the election of a successor. However, in September 2008 another WCC governing body, the executive committee, which reports to the central committee, agreed to extend Kobia’s contract.
At the time of the September meeting, Bishop Martin Schindehütte, a committee member from Germany, described the extension of Kobia’s term of office as acceptable because it had been linked with “new perspectives for the future.”
These included the setting up of a working group to make proposals for reforming the WCC’s structure and organization, and the commissioning of a report from the auditing and consulting firm KPMG. The main governing body of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), its council, later reported that the audit was into the use of financial resources in a number of programs coming under Kobia’s supervision.
WCC communications director Mark Beach on February 23 told Ecumenical News International that KPMG had been asked to examine programs of leadership training from 2003 to 2004, and the general secretary’s visitation program from 2004 to 2007.
Beach said that the final report was presented by a KPMG representative to the WCC executive committee on February 18. Its contents “remain confidential” as it was presented in a closed session, Beach noted. He said, “The executive committee accepted the report as satisfactory.”
