Douglas Horton (clergyman) - CCC Leadership

CCC Leadership

All the while, Horton engaged his interest in inter-church relations by participating in bodies that eventually became the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches. He demonstrated a peculiar desire to, in the "Faith and Order" components of world ecumenical discussion, advance the notion that God desired for those Protestant churches separated for generations due to minor conflicts over theology and, more speciously, ethnic and socioeconomic differences to overcome the alienations of the past and join forces to bring a stronger Christian witness to a world beset by wars, poverty, and increasing indifference or hostility toward spiritual matters. Horton was undergirded in his thinking to a considerable measure by the influence of neoorthodoxy, espoused by the likes of Karl Barth, one of whose books Horton translated into English.

Due to his acumen and the keen ecumenical leanings of the CC Churches, Horton became the denomination's minister and general secretary in 1938, which gave him the leadership of the main national decision-making entity within the group. In that position, Horton would make his greatest contribution: overseeing the process of his church entering into a full organizational merger with a denomination governed by presbyterian polity, the Evangelical and Reformed Church.