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St. Louis, Mo.; the Executive Committee of the U.S. Conference of the World Council of Churches in Manhattan; the U.L.C.A. Board of Education in Washington, D.C.; the Joint Commission on Lutheran Unity in Chicago; the Consulting Committee of the U.L.C.A.'s Department of Press. Radio and Television in Manhattan; the Assembly of the International Missionary Council in Ghana, West Africa; an inspection trip for the U.L.C.A. Board of Foreign Missions and a Pastors' and Workers' Conference in Liberia; a sermon at Manhattan's Cathedral of St. John the Divine; the Consulting Committee of the Military Chaplaincy in Manhattan; the opening of the School of Missions of the U.L.C.A. in Chicago; the annual meeting of the National Lutheran Council in Atlantic City; the Executive Committee of the World Council of Churches in London; the Officers Meeting of the Lutheran World Federation in Frankfurt. In June he is scheduled to preach in Warsaw; in August he will meet in Western Europe with leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Ecumenical Man. Fry's acquaintance is more international than that of many a diplomat. He is in fact a new kind of Protestant leader—the Ecumenical Man, testing ways and means to denominational unity and interdenominational understanding. Not all of Fry's fellow Lutherans—and not all Protestants—care for the picture of Ecumenical Man and his works. They feel that Protestantism's special genius lies in a kind of spiritual individualism, and that the attempt to organize "unity" may produce a half-baked replica of a church hierarchy that would eventually try to dictate members' beliefs. The attempts, in committees, councils and assemblies, to hammer out agreement among Protestant groups may eventually (so the critics fear) submerge all sharp theology in a syrup of good will and compromise.
Fry disagrees. Says he: "The World Council exists to hold Christianity together, to keep the means of communication open, to keep conversations going, even if there is no success in our lifetime. When I was in Budapest preaching an unadorned sermon, I could see the immediate application of my words—face after face lighted up. The Gospel becomes a startlingly immediate thing. Our people in Eastern Europe don't know whether we've remembered them or forgotten. They need to feel the touch of the rest of the Christian family."
If Luther were alive today, Fry thinks, he would labor mightily to knit the divided Protestants together again. "American Protestantism of a generation or two ago," Fry says, "would have appalled Martin Luther with its fragmentation—some groups exaggerating one or another aspect of the Scriptures, others almost ignoring the Bible entirely in their emphasis on emotional experience or human fellowship. The spirit of the ecumenical movement is the spirit of Luther to the extent that it is a movement back toward the center of the Christian faith."