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In a letter to Patriarch Kirill of Moscow on 2 March, World Council of Churches acting general secretary Rev. Prof. Dr Ioan Sauca asked the patriarch to mediate so that the war between Russia and Ukraine can be stopped.

Middle East Council of Churches secretary general Dr Michel Abs welcomed World Council of Churches (WCC) acting general secretary Rev Prof. Dr Ioan Sauca on 14 December at the headquarters of the Middle East Council of Churches General Secretariat in Beirut. The president of the National Evangelical Union in Lebanon and president of the Council for the Evangelical Family, H.E. Rev. Dr Habib Badr, as well the General Secretariat team in Beirut, also received Sauca.

On 15 December, Rev. Prof. Dr Ioan Sauca, acting general secretary of the World Council of Churches paid a visit to His Beatitude John X, Patriarch of the Antioch and All the East at the patriarchal residence in Balamand, Lebanon.  

The World Council of Churches (WCC), with an open letter and prayer, shared its hopes for peace on the eve of the first summit between the U.S. and Russian presidents, which will take place in Geneva on 16 June.

The World Council of Churches (WCC) executive committee is inviting the ecumenical fellowship and all people of good will to join in a live-streamed prayer for the Holy Land on 20 May at 16:30 CET.

In a 21 September letter, World Council of Churches interim general secretary Rev. Prof. Dr Ioan Sauca congratulated Dr Michel Abs on being elected as the next secretary general of the Middle East Council of Churches.

The fatal blast in Beirut last month became yet another blow to an already plagued country. In recent months, a financial crisis with a free-falling currency and rising unemployment has further undermined the Lebanese economy. Add to that one million Syrian refugees and the COVID-19 pandemic, and the contours of a fragile nation facing monumental challenges emerge.

As 25 experts in geopolitics and theology gathered in Lebanon from 6-8 December, Dr Souraya Bechealany, secretary general of the Middle East Council of Churches (MECC), highlighted the vital importance of the process they were undertaking.

Archbishop Job of Telmessos, who serves as permanent representative of the Ecumenical Patriarchate to the World Council of Churches (WCC), met with the WCC News and describes receiving an extraordinary gift from Pope Francis on 29 June.

Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, chairman of the Russian Orthodox Church Department of External Church Relations, visited the WCC at the Ecumenical Centre in Geneva on 5 June, during a visit to Switzerland.

“Mission is not an action or activity we can choose. It is an expression of daily life. It belongs to the whole church and is not the function of just a few or of an agency,” says Father Ioan Sauca, deputy general secretary of the World Council of Churches.

The visit of the pope to the World Council of Churches (WCC) has special significance, given the current situation in the Middle East and North Africa, where Christians are suffering persecution, says a member of WCC’s senior governing body.

The leaders of the Joint Working Group (JWG) between the Roman Catholic Church and the World Council of Churches met 24-27 May in Targoviste, Romania, to discuss cooperation in peace building and the ecumenical challenge and opportunity posed by migrants and refugees.

Friday evening when the leaders of the G20 states will be meeting in Hamburg and discussing global economic, social, environmental and political issues, the churches in Germany are inviting people in Germany and all over the world to a common peace prayer.

The story shared by Fr Yakoub Babawe of the Oum-El-Nour Relief Committee of the Syrian Orthodox Church in Iraq’s city of Erbil moved and challenged participants at a recent meeting in Beirut.

Following the EU-Turkey refugee agreement, effective 20 March 2016, the Greek islands are again a changed place. Where refugees have arrived in great numbers in the past years, and where they have engaged a whole community of local, national and international aid workers and volunteers, the situation is now dramatically different.

This Christmas the St Luke Clinic in Tirana has come of age. Twenty-one years after it was founded it offers specialized medical assistance in an array of medical fields and its founding was the foundation of expanded church-run medical services in Albania.