News
Father Ioan Sauca of the Romanian Orthodox Church and Peter Prove, a Lutheran lawyer and international affairs expert from Australia, have been named to key staff positions in the World Council of Churches (WCC).
Sauca, professor and director of the WCC’s Ecumenical Institute in Bossey, is the new WCC associate general secretary for ecumenical formation and education, and Prove is the new director of the WCC Commission of the Churches on International Affairs (CCIA). Each of the two ecumenical leaders is noted for long-time service in his field.
Sauca has served in the past as director of Ecumenical Church Relations, Press and Communication, and Religious Education in his home church in Romania and also taught missiology and ecumenism at the Faculty of Theology in Sibiu, Romania.
Sauca was responsible for Orthodox Studies and Relationships in Mission in the WCC from 1994, and in 1998 was appointed lecturer at the Ecumenical Institute. A graduate of the Ecumenical Institute himself, he holds a PhD in missiology from the University of Birmingham in England. His main field of scholarship is systematic theology, with particular emphasis on issues of mission and spirituality.
The CCIA director Peter Prove, educated at the University of Queensland, has recently stepped down as executive director of the Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance. He previously worked as assistant to the general secretary for international affairs and human rights at the Lutheran World Federation. As part of his extensive experience of relations with the United Nations, Prove has served as a member of the International Advisory Group on Universal Access of UNAIDS, and of the Advisory Group on Responsible Sovereign Lending and Borrowing of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
He was also president of the Committee of NGOs on Human Rights, Geneva, and a founding member of the International Dalit Solidarity Network and the International NGO Committee on Human Rights in Trade and Investment. Prove is currently serving on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Role of Faith.
The outgoing director of the CCIA, Dr Mathews George Chunakara, will continue in this position until 31 July.
