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Swiss Theologian Karl Barth has had a vast influence on Visser 't Hooft. "Barth felt that the church had almost lost its soul in making adjustments to historical trends," he says. "He called the church again to be itself." He remembers that the "unofficial slogan" of the men who met at Edinburgh and Oxford in 1937 to launch the ecumenical movement was "Let the Church be the Church." And this, he says, "did not mean that the church should run away from the world. It did mean that the church was not merely an echo of trends in the world." The ecumenical impulse is not "to collect churches as you collect stamps, but a movement of all faiths to put the church on a higher level. The biggest part of the ecumenical movement is to get all the churches involved in a great common task, and then they are forced together."
World War II had the unexpected effect of casting Visser 't Hooft in a new role—underground leader. Even before the war began, rescuing Jews and others from Hitler's Germany was one of his prime concerns. Karl Barth once told him of an imprisoned pastor Barth was especially worried about, and Wim remembered a beer-drinking session he had had in 1933 with a blackshirted Nazi who turned out to be Heinrich Himmler. So Churchman Visser 't Hooft wrote Nazi Himmler. recalling the incident, and succeeded in having the pastor released.
When the war started, Visser 't Hooft discovered that the smuggling of refugees to freedom combined naturally with the smuggling of information in and out of Holland for the Dutch government-in-exile in London. The apparatus' agents were equipped with microfilm in pens and with clandestine short-wave radio. His two sons remember with displeasure the furtive characters who were constantly turning up at the house, in Geneva; when one arrived, the children were always sent out of the living room—which during the war was the only heated room in the house. In those days the embryo World Council of Churches maintained an office of expert forgers to make false documents and identity papers.
One of Visser 't Hooft's pet projects after the war was the creation of an Ecumenical Institute in Switzerland for the training of leaders in the church unity movement. In the U.S. one evening, at dinner with Financiers Thomas W. Lamont and John D. Rockefeller Jr., he described the plan to Rockefeller, who replied: "You must ask for more money." Rockefeller later contributed about $1,000,000 to set up the Ecumenical Institute at Boissy, which last year graduated 36 students of 23 nationalities from its 20-week course.
A Taut Ship. In Geneva, Visser 't Hooft runs a staff of about 179, housed in a rambling cluster of chalets and barracks (until 1963. when the Council's new headquarters will be finished). Here he chain smokes his way efficiently through the day in a combination of informality (staffers phone or barge in on him directly, without going through his secretary) and protocol (he is acutely aware of any breach of seniority in seating at a conference or dinner table).