“Barth felt that the church had almost lost its soul in making adjustments to historical trends,” Visser’t Hooft once said. “He called the church again to be itself.” He recalled that the unofficial slogan of the men who launched the ecumenical movement was “Let the Church be the Church.” And this, said the Dutch leader, “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.”
