Week of prayer remembers pioneers, invites witness
Christians around the world celebrating the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity this year are remembering the 1910 World Missionary Conference in the Scottish capital of Edinburgh as a key initiative that led to the ecumenical movement.
"The unexpected intuition to flash forth from the conference was the awareness that Christian disunity is destructive to the very mission of the Church, and the corresponding search for Christian unity began," said the Rev. John Gibaut, director of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches.
He was preaching on 18 January in a service at the Ecumenical Centre in Geneva, Switzerland, to mark the beginning of the annual week of prayer, which is jointly sponsored by the WCC and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.
"The insight of our ecumenical pioneers in the Edinburgh Missionary Conference in 1910 is that witness to the things of Christ’s resurrection will only be effective if Christians are united with one another," Gibaut said, "be it the churches acting together in Haiti this week and in the coming years, the churches responding to human division and unjust structures, the churches responding to the environmental crises, the churches responding to war and violence, the churches responding to cynicism and despair with the good news of the Gospel. In all these things, we bear witness to the Risen Christ, together."
