News
The aim was to contextualize the work of the WCC Faith and Order Commission and its Sixth World Conference “Where now for visible unity?” held in Wadi El Natrun, Egypt, in October 2025.
Rev. Prof. Dr Stephanie Dietrich, moderator of the WCC Faith and Order Commission, spoke on “Faith and Order in the Future: Decolonizing Ecumenical Hermeneutics and the Search for Visible Unity.”
She addressed the question of what kind of Faith and Order is needed for a church with a shifting centre of gravity.
“This is not merely a methodological question. It is an ecclesiological question,” she said. “It concerns how the churches discern truth together, how they listen to one another, and how they seek visible unity in a fragmented world.”
Rev. Canon Dr Carlton Turner of the Church in the Province of the West Indies offered a keynote entitled “Decolonisation and the Inner Journey of the Church: A Caribbean Observation.”
Turner, who serves with the Queen`s Foundation For Ecumenical Theological Education Birmingham, UK, and is a member of the WCC Faith and Order Commission, reflected that the world is plunged into constant instability.
“For me, decolonisation is meant to be an inner process of awareness of the complex legacies of colonialisation in shaping the present world in which we live,” he said. “White supremacy is a kind of psychopathology that still operates within the psychic life of the region.”
Image
Rev. Canon Dr Carlton Turner of the Church in the Province of the West Indies.
Philipp Öhlmann
Roman Catholic Bishop Dr. Gerhard Feige of Magdeburg, chairman of the Ecumenical Commission of the German Bishops' Conference, offered a greeting in which he urged us to regard "visible unity" not as a distant goal but rather as something that can already become visible and tangible today through our concrete actions.
“In recent decades, we Christians in the East German diaspora in particular have developed a sense of how important it is to stand together and witness together in a society that is distant from religion and forgets God,” he said. “Perhaps decolonization in the ecumenical context means nothing other than the overcoming of the confessionalization that was carried into the colonies by our ancestors.”
The colloquium also featured the presentation of two key texts: “Call to all Christians: Message of the Sixth World Conference on Faith and Order” and “Deepening Unity, Journeying in Love, Restoring Hope: Ecumenical Affirmation.”
International colloquium will offer de-colonial lens on theology (WCC news release, 22 June 2026)
