ENI – Kenyan Methodist, Rev. Samuel Kobia, effectively resigned from his position as general secretary of the World Council of Churches in February during a regular meeting of the central committee. Kobia was expected to run for a second term.
The WCC has 349 member churches, representing 560 million Christians worldwide. Kobia was the first African elected to the post and he took office in January 2004 for his five-year term. Previous general secretaries were W. A. Visser't Hooft, from the Netherlands (1948-1966); Eugene Carson Blake, from the United States (1966-1972); Philip Potter, from Dominica, West Indies (1972-1984); Emilio Castro, from Uruguay (1985-1992); and Konrad Raiser, from Germany (1993 to 2003). Kobia was the third Methodist to hold the post.
Prior to the committee meetings Bishop Martin Hein, a member of the WCC governing body from the Evangelical Church in Germany had complained that the council was failing to make its presence felt sufficiently in the world. He suggested the WCC had been unable to develop “visions and perspectives that are able to be communicated,” and he said that Kobia was traveling too much outside Geneva.
A doctorate Kobia received from Fairfax University in the United States was determined to be a counterfeit and the WCC removed all reference to the degree from its website.
