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Moderator, Your Holiness, your excellencies, honourable conference participants, ladies and gentlemen,
It gives me immense pleasure to greet you at the start of this august conference and to welcome you to the Ecumenical Centre.
At its meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1971, the World Council of Churches Central Committee created a programme called Dialogue with People of Living Faiths and Ideologies (DFI). The Central Committee went on to remark that "the engagement of the World Council in dialogue is to be understood as a common adventure of the churches". It is rather curious that the Committee used the word 'adventure' in describing the nature of the new programme. What did they mean by 'adventure'? In the Oxford Concise Dictionary, the word adventure means
- an undertaking or enterprise of a hazardous nature, or
- an undertaking of a questionable nature.
But it also means an unusual or exciting experience.
It could very well be that the WCC was aware that it launched a programme whose outcome they were not certain of, especially because by doing so, they were opening up to people of different faiths. Some of them were surely afraid that it would lead to syncretism or a fusion of religions.
In looking back, we could say it was, rather, a farsighted initiative. What was considered an adventure almost 35 years ago is today no longer an undertaking of a questionable nature. Moreover, interfaith dialogue is a necessity in our world of rapid changes and because of the globalization process which has reduced the world to a global village.
At a time when the pace of change leads to increasing uncertainty, fear and insecurity, people yearn for assurance and affirmation as human beings. In such yearning, the search for identity becomes critical and urgent. And religion best provides the badly needed identity. The main challenge in a globalized context is how to live together our diverse identities in one world. Unfortunately, increased relations between communities have sometimes been marred by tension and fear. For many communities, this tension confirms the need to protect their individual identities and distinctiveness. Sometimes the difference between the legitimate search for identity and hostility towards neighbours of other religions and cultures is blurred.
There are many who would say with great conviction, and I am one of them, that the decision of the WCC to embark upon this adventure was an exciting experience, not a hazardous enterprise. The dialogue which the WCC has cultivated since 1971 has yielded many good fruits. We have established relations with organizations, groups and people of other faiths and we have become friends. We have seen how much common ground we share. We have been able to address together issues of common concern. The WCC has allies in other religious organizations and communities. This is important because we have come to realize the interreligious truth of an old ecumenical principle: that which we can do together, we should not do separately. We appreciate this learning and we are increasingly emphasizing that interreligious relations and dialogue should no longer be in the margin of the WCC but in its centre. It has become a core issue for us and this conference is one way of saying it.
This conference is called a Critical moment conference. We did not want to invite you merely to an interreligious conference where the main agenda is, as someone once said of dialogue, "mostly tea and sympathy". We wanted to offer a space for a reflection on a concern we share with many of you: how can we advance dialogue to be a truly relevant tool in our religious communities in encounters between people of different faiths?
Although interreligious dialogue has broken ground in establishing relations and promoting peace and understanding between people of different religions and cultures, yet many who are deeply involved feel that interreligious dialogue is at a critical moment. One of our tasks today is to make a critical assessment, identifying what we have learned so that we might begin to imagine the future.
We hope that this conference, this being together, this listening to the people with long experience and involvement in dialogue, and working in small groups will enable us to articulate what it would take to contribute to an even more dynamic space, place and quality of interreligious relations and dialogue.
On behalf of the WCC, I would like to welcome you all to this conference. Thank you for coming, thank you for accepting to set aside time to work with us towards what, we hope, will be some well thought-out recommendations for the future. I also hope that as people of different faiths we could address the findings of this meeting to the dialogue community, which we cherish and would like to strengthen.
Today we live in a broken, fractured and divided world; a world in which people are in dire need of healing, reconciliation, and above all, hope. If we, the people of faith, cannot give the world hope, then the future is hopelessly bleak. We can only be effective and successful in our search for hope if we work together. Alone, one can only travel a limited distance; together, we can go far towards restoring hope for another possible and better world in which all people may experience abundant life in dignity. My expectation is that this Critical Moment conference might be a small step towards a big hope for our world. Thank you.
*Rev. Dr Samuel Kobia from Kenya has been the general secretary of the WCC since January 2004.