Samuel McCrea Cavert

Nationality

U.S.A.

Date of Birth

1888

Date of Death

1976

Political
Preference

Cavert was born in Charlton, New York, as the son of a farmer-businessman. In 1915, he graduated from Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He was ordained a minister in the Presbyterian Church. After World War I, Cavert joined the Federal Council of Churches and eventually became its general secretary. In 1928, Cavert was a delegate to the World Missionary Council gathering in Jerusalem and in 1937 to the Conference on Life and Work of the Churches at Oxford University. A year later, in 1938, he was a delegate to a meeting of churchpeople in Utrecht where the constitution was drafted for the World Council of Churches. It was Cavert who suggested the name ‘World Council of Churches’. During the Second World War, he participated in the Commission for a Just and Durable Peace and he was present when the CCIA was founded in 1946. From 1945 onward, he worked in Geneva as a staff member of the WCC, particularly devoted to the reconciliation with the German churches through the Stuttgart Declaration, at which signing he was present. Thanks to his vast network of European contacts through the ecumenical, he also became a liaison officer for the US government in Europe at the time when Truman shifted his foreign policy to the security and economic reconstruction of an integrated Western Europe.

In 1948, Cavert was instrumental in the organization of the World Council in Amsterdam 1948 as its organizing secretary. In 1950, he was named the general secretary of the National Council of Churches in America and moved back. In this work, he was assisted by Roswell P. Barnes.