Henry Smith Leiper

Nationality

U.S.A.

Date of Birth

1891

Date of Death

1975

Political
Preference

Henry Smith Leiper was an American theologian and pastor at the Presbyterian Church and later the Congregational Christian Church. He was a missionary in China and the U.S. and served as Associate General Secretary of the World Council of Churches at its New York office from 1932 to 1952. In this capacity, he was in a triangle contact with William Paton in London and Visser ‘t Hooft in Geneva, sharing among them information on the countries occupied by Germany during the Second World War. In America, Leiper participated in the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace and became foreign secretary of the Commission’s parent body, the Federal Council of Churches. Leiper attended the Cambridge Conference in August 1946, a conference between church leaders to discuss world events where the CCIA was founded, and reported on this conference to the American public. As an American ecumenist, Leiper expressed hope that the Orthodox Churches of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe could be included in the ecumenical movement, a position opposing the Roman Catholic stance on the Soviet Union and communism at the time.