Life and Work Digital Collection

Welcome to the World Council of Churches (WCC) “Life and Work Digital Collection: A Century of Ecumenical Social Ethics and Action.” This digital collection is made up of more than 300 publications and up to 35,000 pages that embody more than 100 years of serious and sustained ecumenical reflection on ecumenical social ethics and action, since the Universal Christian Conference on Life and Work in Stockholm in 1925.

The Stockholm conference in 1925 was called into being by Archbishop Nathan Söderblom of Uppsala as a response to the carnage of the First World War and the need for the churches to play a central role in the rebuilding of society, and economic and political life as a sign in history of the coming kingdom of God.

The conference gave birth to the Life and Work movement, which became an integral part of the WCC at its foundation in 1948, leading to the commitment of the WCC to issues such as human rights, decolonization, racial, gender, and economic and political justice, the challenges of science and technology, environmental ethics and climate justice.

This project was made possible with financial support from the Lunds Mission Society and from the Church of Norway.

Search by book title

For the full text search on Internet Archive, click on "Full content search on Internet Archive" link and chose option “Search text contents”.

The Life and Work digital collection on Ecumenical Social Ethics and Action consists of two sets of material.

The first set, published from 1917 until 1948, are the communications, pamphlets, study documents, proceedings, and reports of the process leading up to and following the World Conferences on Life and Work in 1925 and 1937. They are foundational documents about how Christian churches gathered to witness together on issues such as economic justice following the First World War and the Great Depression, the struggles for decolonization, and the relation of churches and Christianity to the totalitarianism of the 1930s that led to the Second World War.

The second set relates to the work of the WCC on ecumenical social ethics and action after its foundation at its 1st Assembly in Amsterdam 1948, including the churches’ role in the “rapid social change” that accompanied the end of the colonial era; the movement of liberation and racial, gender, and political justice; the quest for a just, participatory, and sustainable society against the background of the threats to the natural environment and creation; the conciliar process for Justice, Peace, and the Integrity of Creation; and Christian faith and the world economy today.

On this page on the World Council of Churches website you are able to search for a specific document or documents by title. You are then able to sort the results by date or by title.

For more advanced searching please go directly to the Internet Archive where the documents are hosted: https://archive.org/details/wcclifeandwork

Once here, you are able to search by title or undertake a full-text search across all the documents in this collection.

Full-Text Search (FTS)

This allows you to search inside books and other text items.

It uses the OCRed text file derived from the processing of uploaded text formatted files such as PDF or scanned image zips.

It will search all texts on the site.

To use this on the site, select Search text contents in the drop-down that appears when you type a query in the input text field.

All documents can be browsed on the screen, or download in several formats, including PDF. For download options, scroll down and select the format on the right-hand side of the screen.