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Violence in the name of religion echoed in the distance, demanding a response, through the November 2015 meeting of the 25-member Executive Committee of the WCC in Bogis-Bossey and nearby Geneva, Switzerland as it planned the work of the Council in the coming years.

Commemorating the Armenian Genocide of 1915-23 was to have been the principal focus of the service of Sunday morning prayer on 15 November in the cathedral church of Saint-Pierre at the summit of Geneva’s old town. Following terror attacks in Beirut and Paris killing and wounding hundreds of civilians over the preceding days, the prayers of the Protestant Church of Geneva and the WCC Executive Committee took on a new dimension.

The Executive Committee, a 25-member governing body of the WCC, is meeting from 13 through 18 November at the Ecumenical Institute in Bossey, Switzerland to consider a series of programmatic reports and proposals for the criteria to be used in priority setting amid the continuing work of the WCC.

"In COP21 we decide whether the glass is half full or half empty, but the glass must be transparent", tweeted climate activist Yeb Saño at the end of a day full of activities engaging leadership and staff members of the WCC, the Lutheran World Federation and ACT Alliance, at the Ecumenical Centre, in Geneva, Switzerland.

Even before Rev. Dr Solomon Mepaiyeda heard about the Ecumenical Institute at Chateau de Bossey, he knew he wanted to study at a reputable ecumenical institution. “I wanted to contribute to collaborative efforts among Nigerian churches,” said Mepaiyeda, a member of the Anglican Church.

In Taizé, the week-long Gathering for a New Solidarity, for solidarity with the poor and excluded, reached its climax on the weekend of 15-16 August. The ecumenical community is celebrating in 2015 the seventy-fifth anniversary of its foundation by Roger Schutz, as well as the one hundredth anniversary of his birth (on 12 August 1915). Also 16 August was the tenth anniversary of his death.

A message focusing on the theme “Ora et labora”, meaning “pray and work”, was shared by the WCC general secretary Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, at the 75th anniversary of the Taizé Community, commemorating the life of the community’s founder Brother Roger.

As the WCC promotes the vision of a “pilgrimage of justice and peace”, four students from the Ecumenical Institute in Bossey, Switzerland, share their understanding of justice and peace and how they embarked on a pilgrimage of their own.

New forms of ecumenical formation, as well as ways of enhancing ecumenical contributions from young people in churches and societies, were discussed by fifteen young theologians in a meeting convened by the WCC.

These pilgrims are laughing a lot. After intensely debating everything from church unity to the very meaning of the word “pilgrimage” last week, some members of the WCC Central Committee embarked on a three-hour hike on Sunday afternoon that revealed the not-so-serious side of the WCC governing body.

For Roma Ann Nisha Prodhan of the Church of North India the value of being at peace is rooted in recognizing disagreements but finding ways to keep moving forward together as a community and fellowship of churches.

As young people help to facilitate the meeting of the WCC's governing body, they are pursuing a collective pilgrimage of their own.

Addressing the urgency of witnessing to the gospel in current ecumenical and multi-religious situations, the WCC will develop materials to assist churches engaged in both ecumenical dialogue and inter-religious dialogue.

People have the right of access to archives of public bodies, argued Trudy Huskamp Peterson, an archivist from the United States, in her recent talk organized by the WCC Archives in Geneva, Switzerland. She said public access to information is particularly relevant for archives documenting human rights violations.

With a growing awareness of plurality in theological education as a result of the changing faces of Christianity, and the reality of churches co-existing with other religions, members of the executive committee of the World Conference of Associations of Theological Institutions affirmed their commitment to cooperate closely, share information and build collaborative networks to strengthen world-wide initiatives in ecumenical theological education.

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 WCC.

In an ecumenical harvest, a spate of European and North American church bodies are entering agreements recognizing each other’s baptisms.

The WCC Executive Committee, currently meeting in Switzerland, is working to translate the mandate of the WCC 10th Assembly into strategic plans and visible actions, focusing on the churches’ efforts toward a “pilgrimage for justice and peace”.

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity has been globally celebrated this year with prayers, reflections, ecumenical services and events focusing on Paul’s question in Corinthians 1 “Has Christ been divided?” a theme for this year’s prayer materials, prepared by the Canadian churches.

In a talk organized by the Archives of the WCC, Elisabeth Baumgartner, a Swiss lawyer and head of the project “Dealing with the Past” at the Swiss Peace Foundation (swisspeace), stressed the importance of archives and documentation in dealing with the past, which she said is pertinent to the institutional and informal mechanisms seeking justice, reconciliation and conflict resolution.