Meetings with people provide energy for ecumenical peace work

Many young people had tasks in the service with various altar boy/girl assignments, and the church was packed with a couple hundred participants. Afterwards they invited me to lunch where we could continue talking about life and history, where seriousness and laughter were mixed in between. When you are the one who stands out, it is extra wonderful to meet welcoming and generous people. It was both a meeting across ecumenical boundaries and boundaries of experience. 

In the afternoon, large parts of the group went to the Apartheid Museum and to the Constitutional Hill. The Apartheid Museum is, as it sounds, a museum of South Africa’s challenging 19th and 20th century history, including the apartheid regime and the road to democracy. On the Constitutional Hill, we were given a guided tour of a prison where the cruellest facet of the apartheid regime showed its ugly face. It was very affecting and hard to digest, and completely necessary to visit. You could say that that place gave an example of the absence of meetings. 

The reason for my trip to South Africa was that, for a week, I participated as an advisor from the Church of Sweden in the WCC central committee meeting in Johannesburg. Members, advisors, observers, and staff participate in the weeklong meeting and, in total, 300–400 people meet. Important decisions are made for the WCC related to finances, future work planning, statements, and the upcoming WCC 12th Assembly. Within the Church of Sweden, we have prepared together with our central committee members for several weeks before the meeting in order to be able to contribute as well as possible to the processes that such a week entails. The World Council of Churches was formed in 1948, among other things, with the idea of ​​being a UN of the churches, and that spirit still remains. 

All these formal meetings are of great importance and, of course, necessary for the development of the World Council of Churches. But it is not those meetings that remain when the week is over. It is all the other meetings, those between people I have known for a while and which involve a dear reunion. It is meetings with new acquaintances that I get to know during coffee breaks, lunches, and dinners and still others who want to tell about their long relationship with the Church of Sweden. During the week that the central committee is held, I meet and talk with people who come from Orthodox, Anglican, Reformed, Methodist, or other Christian churches. I meet people from many parts of the world and of many ages, even though most of them are my own age. Together we celebrate the morning and evening prayers of different traditions. 

Although most of the informal meetings that take place during a week are about the work we are there to do, they also create a greater understanding of our different interpretations and backgrounds. This leads to better listening and a partly better formal meeting culture. For those who happen to say something hastily, it is easier to apologize when you know each other. 

If the World Council of Churches did not exist, we would need to create such a global ecumenical organization, in order to contribute to understanding and the pursuit of consensus and peace together with Christians from different orientations and countries. This is probably more important now than in a very long time. Although the informal meetings remain longest in my mind, the formal meetings are necessary to decide on this consensus and the pursuit of peace! 

All these different meetings – those are the World Council of Churches!