As recently as the 1990s, the National Council of Churches, the once great institution of mainstream liberal Christianity, still could make headlines. Under general secretary Joan Brown Campbell they raised money for burned black churches, (much of which forestalled the NCC’s own financial insolvency), stood with President Clinton during his confrontations with the new Republican Congress, and championed the return of little Elian Gonzalez to Castro’s Cuba. In the early 2000s, Campbell’s successor, former Democratic Congressman Bob Edgar helped keep the NCC alive with grants from secular liberal philanthropies.
But the NCC has continued to shrivel. Not long ago the NCC still had hundreds of employees (including its large relief agency, Church World Service), and was headquartered in New York at the imposing Interchurch Center on Riverside Drive, built by the Rockefellers as a headquarters for Mainline Protestantism next to Union Seminary and Riverside Church. By 2002, under Edgar, the NCC was reduced to thirty-eight employees and a budget of less than ten million dollars. Today, the NCC staff roster lists six persons and its latest budget is $1.4 million. And last year, the NCC quit New York after over half a century and relocated its sharply pared-down staff into the United Methodist Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.
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