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Trauma healing, ‘hurting hearts’ focus of workshop in South Sudan

A workshop co-facilitated by the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the South Sudan Council of Churches in South Sudan on 1-3 May drew 18 people to explore resources churches use to aid in trauma healing. Participants also discussed potential common approaches that could unite churches in their response to people faced with trauma.

A tribute to Rev. Dr Rena Joyce Weller Karefa-Smart

The life of Rev. Dr Rena Joyce Weller Karefa-Smart is being remembered and commended this week by the WCC fellowship after her passing last week. Karefa-Smart was the first Pan African woman to graduate in 1945 from Yale Divinity School. She was a champion for global ecumenism over the course of a long and distinguished career. An attendee of the first WCC Assembly, she was also a procession leader and author of the liturgies at the second WCC Assembly in Evanston, Illinois (USA).

Doing his best without being the best

Last week, the chairperson of the WCC Ecumenical Water Network, bishop Arnold Temple from The Methodist Church Sierra Leone, came to Stockholm to participate in the World Water Week, which is the world’s leading annual water event where experts and decision-makers from all over the world gather to strengthen the systems and processes that govern access to – and protection of – fresh water.

Bishop Arnold Temple urges respect for the right to water

You wouldn’t pay two thousand times more than the value of a cup of coffee, so why pay that for a glass of water? That’s one of the reasons why members of the World Council of Churches’s Ecumenical Water Network (EWN) are encouraging you to consider joining the “Blue Community” and to stop using bottled water in places where tap water is safely and freely available.

Plenary on children took place at WCC Central Committee meeting

A plenary discussion on support by religious communities for the rights of children, and a first draft of the statement of “principles for child-friendly churches,” captured the imagination of the Central Committee of the WCC on 27 June. The document will now undergo further revision and be resubmitted at the next WCC executive committee meeting.

African churches commit to working for the elimination of statelessness

“Statelessness renders people’s vulnerability to abuse and to denial of their rights invisible to national authorities. In this sense the right to a nationality is a threshold issue for access to protection of all other human rights - almost a 'right to have rights'”, said Peter Prove, director of the World Council of Churches (WCC) Commission of the Churches on International Affairs (CCIA), following a regional training workshop on birth registration and gender discriminatory nationality laws in Africa, organized by the WCC in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 11–13 May.