Guide to the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America General Board Records

According to the 1963 revision of the NCC Constitution, "The governing body of the Council between meetings of the General Assembly shall be the General Board which shall have the full power of the Assembly except the power to amend the Constitution or to elect communions to constituent membership in the Council." (Art. VIII Sec. 1). The General Board was composed of representatives of member churches on a proportional basis and some of the members of the governing bodies of the various Divisions of the NCC, and certain other minor categories (see the section on membership in the constitution, Art. VIII Sec. 2 in the later versions). Meetings were held from twice to four times a year. One of the most important and time-consuming tasks of the General Board was the issuing of pronouncements on various issues and establishing procedures for the publication of statements by subordinate bodies of the NCC (see By-Laws, Art V Sec. 10).

The General Board had a number of committees under it, some on a permanent and others on a temporary basis. Three Standing Committees were constitutionally required to report to the General Assembly through the General Board. Namely, Constituent Membership, Constitution and By-Laws, and the Program and Arrangements Committee for the General Assembly. Other Standing Committees reported to the General Board alone. In the various versions of the By-Laws the number of Standing Committees varies from five to eleven. In this Record Group material from the Standing Committees follows the material from the General Board itself, and begins in Box 5. The Committees appear in the order they are given in the By-Laws (Art. VI). There is no material from the Legal Committee. Since the Committee of Ministry to Service Personnel was a functional committee later associated with a Joint Commission of the Council, its records are found with the Joint Commission. The Business and Finance Committee had subordinate committees reporting to it. Material is especially full for the Constitutions and By-Laws Committee, the Nominating Committee and the Policy and Strategy Committee. The records of the Nominating Committee include biographical data sheets on persons elected to the various bodies of the Council.

The General Board had the power to constitute other committees (By-Laws, Art. III). There were many of these, existing for varying lengths of time, some of them subordinate to existing committees. No effort is made to differentiate them, and they are filed alphabetically beginning in Box 10. Of general interest are the relatively complete files of the Committee of Ten on Headquarters Location, which proposed the establishment of the Inter-Church Center in New York, and the Task Force on Options, which proposed the radical restructuring of the Council after the turbulent Detroit General Assembly in 1969. Also of interest is the Committee on the Maintenance of American Freedom, which in the early Fifties struggled with the issues of Communism and anti-Communism and proposed that an ideological test for employment on the NCC staff be applied. The General Board did not adopt this proposal.

In the restructuring of 1972 the functions of the General Board and those of the General Assembly were merged in a very large Governing Board which meets semi-annually.