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In a 1974 lecture titled “The Love of Power or the Power of Love,” Potter described the oikoumene as “the sphere of God’s Reign, and his is the reign of love, the re-uniting of humanity from separation.”
The ecumenical movement, he said, is “God’s call to us to become participants in his purpose of bringing the whole oikoumene under his power of love.”
This issue of The Ecumenical Review offers reflections on the meaning of the oikoumene for the ecumenical movement. Articles range from the struggle against racism, to the ecumenical engagement for human rights; from the challenge to the oikoumene from climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic, to “unheard voices” in discussions of human sexuality; the need to address the sensual side of knowledge, cultures, religion, and theology; as well as how churches can become models of “unity in reconciled diversity.”
The issue also includes a set of tributes to Potter, the WCC’s first general secretary from the global South, who was born 100 years ago on 19 August 1921 and who died on 31 March 2015.
In the editorial, Stephen G. Brown notes that Potter’s lecture on the “power of love” offers insights for the forthcoming WCC assembly in 2022, where for the first time “love” forms part of an assembly theme: “Christ’s love moves the world to reconciliation and unity.”
The Ecumenical Review is published four times a year by Wiley on behalf of the WCC.
Read an Open Access article from the latest issue by Claudia Jahnel: “The universal word speaks only in dialect”: Postcolonial Impulses for an Ecumenism of Sensual Unity and an Aesthetic Ecumenical Theology
Table of contents of latest issue
Free sample issue: “Christ’s Love in the Midst of Pandemic: Moving the World to Reconciliation and Solidarity.”
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