Pilgrims of just peace, reconciliation and unity

In September 2026, I had the privilege of representing the President's Office of the Uniting Church in Australia (UCA) at the International Ecumenical Peace Convocation in Seoul, co-organized by the World Council of Churches, the Christian Conference of Asia and the National Council of Churches in Korea. Christians from across the world gathered under the theme “World Peace and the Korean Peninsula: The Church as a Community of Healing, Reconciliation, and Peacebuilding” to discern what it means to be Christ's people amid war, division and deepening conflict. 

For me, it was more than a conference. It was a concrete experience of the WCC's Pilgrimage of Justice, Reconciliation and Unity — and a reminder of how deeply the Uniting Church's own self-understanding is bound up with that pilgrimage. 

Two pilgrimages, one journey 

The UCA's Basis of Union describes our church as “a pilgrim people, always on the way towards a promised goal.” We do not claim to have arrived; we are a people continually called forward, trusting the Spirit to lead us towards the reconciliation and renewal of all creation. In Seoul, this self-understanding met the WCC's own call to churches everywhere to walk a Pilgrimage of Justice, Reconciliation and Unity. They are not separate journeys. They meet whenever Christians cross boundaries to accompany one another, listen to the wounds of the world, and seek together the things that make for peace. 

The convocation marked the 40th anniversary of the historic Glion Consultation, where Christians from North and South Korea met during one of the most divided periods of modern Korean history and dared to imagine that their Christian identity could transcend political division. It also returned me to 1988, when as a Korean university student, I attended the service adopting the Korean Church's “88 Declaration” on national reunification and peace. Returning thirty-eight years later as a Korean Australian minister, I realised I had not simply come back to where I began — I had been travelling, on this same pilgrimage, all these years. 

Justice: touching the wound 

Rev. Prof. Dr Jerry Pillay, WCC General Secretary, opened the convocation recalling how North and South Korean Christians at Glion bore witness to an allegiance deeper than competing political systems. That proclamation felt urgently necessary as we visited the National Museum of Korean Democracy, a former interrogation center where democracy activists were detained and tortured. In one room was the photograph of a university student, almost exactly my own age, who died from torture there thirty-nine years ago. Division had taken the life, future and hope of a young man in his twenties — and, as panelists from Colombia and the Philippines reminded us, what happened in Korea continues, in different forms, elsewhere today. 

On the convocation's first day, Rev. Dr Mitri Raheb, speaking from the experience of Palestine, had challenged the gathering to recognise the danger of speaking about peace without “touching the wound.” Christians can write covenants about peace while still failing to touch the actual wound. For a global fellowship committed to justice as integral to the pilgrimage, his challenge named something essential: reconciliation without justice can become another way of asking wounded people to remain silent. 

Reconciliation: walking the DMZ 

Before the convocation's final closing service, we undertook a peace pilgrimage along the Demilitarized Zone, walking with this intention: 

“Today, I walk for myself, for my brothers and sisters, and for my neighbors. Above all, I walk in solidarity with all who suffer from war and climate disasters.” 

I was one of four participants who walked the Peace Trail, while most others walked the Eco Trail alongside us, separated by a barbed-wire fence — one path through a military-controlled area, the other civilian. Yet we shared the same sky, the same breeze, the same golden fields ripening towards harvest. As we waved to one another across the fence, anticipating the lunch we would soon share, the whole situation suddenly seemed absurd. The fence could determine which path our feet were permitted to walk, but it could not divide the sky, the wind, the fields, or the table towards which we were walking. 

A local resident who had composed a pilgrim's song for the DMZ trail told us our footsteps along that path could become a source of healing for all who long for reconciliation. That image has stayed with me: our footsteps can become healing. We do not know when reconciliation will come, and sometimes all we can see is barbed wire. Still, we walk — which is, perhaps, the only way any pilgrimage of reconciliation is ever actually made. 

Unity: from the Korean Peninsula to the world 

After we returned from the Demilitarized Zone, the convocation reached its official close with an Ecumenical Joint Worship for Peace and Reconciliation, building on the 2026 Seoul Peace Declaration adopted on Day 3, under the theme “From the Korean Peninsula to the World.” Rev. Philip Vinod Peacock, General Secretary of the World Communion of Reformed Churches, called the churches to practice the things that lead to peace, reminding us that peace begins with doing justice. 

Dr Raheb's plea for Palestine on Day 1, and Melissa Parke's challenge on Day 2 as Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, reminded us that peace on the Korean Peninsula cannot be understood in isolation. Korean peace is connected to peace in Palestine, Ukraine, Colombia, the Philippines and every place where people live with war, occupation or political violence. This is what unity within the pilgrimage looks like in practice: a pilgrimage that moves from the local to the global, and back again to the particular wounds of people and communities — refusing to let any one wound stand alone. 

The UCA's ongoing commitment 

The Uniting Church's relationship with the churches in Korea long precedes this convocation. Australian missionaries helped establish hospitals and schools in Korea and became involved in the Korean liberation movement during the Japanese colonial era. Later, the UCA journeyed alongside Korean churches in their struggles for democracy and human rights under military dictatorship. At our 15th Assembly in 2018, the Uniting Church resolved to support a peace treaty between the two Koreas, recognizing that a formal end to the Korean War could become an important circuit-breaker in the cycle of hostility. 

Our participation in gatherings such as this convocation is not peripheral to our life as a church; it belongs to our ecumenical vocation, and to our part in the WCC's Pilgrimage of Justice, Reconciliation and Unity — mission becoming partnership, partnership becoming solidarity, and solidarity becoming mutual accompaniment. As the UCA moves from our 17th Assembly theme, “Weaving Christ's love across cultures and boundaries,” towards a proposed 18th Assembly theme of a “Pilgrimage of Trust and Hope,” we find a natural continuity with the wider ecumenical pilgrimage the WCC has called the whole church to walk. Weaving describes how we belong to one another; pilgrimage describes how we move together. Trust requires us to touch the wound and tell the truth; hope is grounded not in optimism but in the crucified and risen Christ, who enables us to walk beside a barbed-wire fence and discover that it cannot divide the sky, our friendship, or the table towards which we are walking. 

A leaven of hope for a wounded world 

Bishop Jonas Jonson, in his keynote Just Peace and the Vocation of the Church, offered words that gathered much of what I had seen and experienced: 

“The vocation of the Church, today and tomorrow, is to live the faith as a leaven of hope and as a sacrament for the wounded world. The pilgrimage continues.” 

The prophet Micah gives the pilgrimage its horizon: 

“They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” (Micah 4:3) 

Walking beside the barbed-wire fence of the DMZ, that ancient vision no longer felt like a distant metaphor. It became a prayer. I do not know when these fences will come down, or when separated families will embrace again. But perhaps pilgrimage means we do not need to know when we will arrive in order to take the next faithful step — together, as churches walking the same road towards justice, reconciliation and unity. The pilgrimage continues.