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The feast of the resurrection lies at the heart of the Christian faith. But finding a common date for that celebration has always been complex. Eastern and Western churches have used different calendars to calculate the date of Easter since the 16th century, and only rarely do they coincide. Fresh impetus to explore the hope of a common date for Easter comes in 2025, when all Christians will celebrate Easter on a common day. 2025 also marks the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, which addressed the need for a common celebration of the resurrection.

This publication contains four contributions from different church traditions on the search for a way to celebrate Easter on a common date every year that were presented at a webinar organized by the Commission on Faith and Order om “Easter 2025: Celebrating Together to Strengthen Unity.”

The organizers hope that these contributions may help animate the churches of the world and Christians in their contexts to work with one another towards a common celebration of Easter.

Aleppo Statement
It also contains the document “Towards a Common Date for Easter” produced at a consultation jointly sponsored by the World Council of Churches and the Middle East Council of Churches in Aleppo, Syria, in 1997, offering observations and specific recommendations for the churches.

The urgency of the climate catastrophe demands strong and effective responses. With fossil fuels driving over 75% of global CO2 emissions, we need to hold accountable those who still finance their expansion, harming us and future generations. 

This publication helps to empower people of faith and partners in WCC’s global constituency with the knowledge for legal action. It provides a menu of strategies particularly aimed at financial institutions, one of the most powerful levers to accelerate climate solutions. It is a call to answer the pleas of the scientific community and young people to tackle the root causes of harm to creation and protect future generation’s right to life.

“Our theology is born from our land, founded on our relationship with the Creator Spirit since time began; and it is this deep ancient wisdom that sustains and provides our resilience to survive,” writes Anne Pattel-Gray.

She effectively summarizes the Indigenous spiritual insights shared by the authors of this publication. Together, they reveal how Indigenous wisdom is essential to tackling the climate crisis and how that crisis is linked intrinsically to justice concerning land matters. 

As Shane Goldie notes, “The way we treat the Earth reflects how we treat ourselves and each other.”

Christ’s call to love our neighbours as ourselves includes ensuring that all have access to the resources needed to live and flourish. And yet, societal barriers to reproductive health prevent many individuals from accessing necessary care. Love, Justice and Reproductive Health: A Framework for Churches invites churches to consider reproductive health from a perspective rooted in Christ’s love. It introduces key areas and addresses prevalent disparities within reproductive health outcomes. The framework encourages churches to act on this issue, providing programmatic suggestions for them to embody Christ’s love and justice within their own contexts.

Please send comments and questions to [email protected]
The author, Rev Alexa Dava is ordained with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and serves as project officer for Human Dignity and Reproductive Health at the WCC.

Taken together, these two messages from international consultations, sponsored by the World Council of Churches, provide a valuable entry point for reflection on the self-understanding and mission of United and Uniting Churches in today’s world.
I. Going the Second Mile: A message of the 8th Consultation of United and Uniting Churches. Johannesburg, 29 October–5 November 2008
II. Living in Tents: A Message of the 9th Consultation of United and Uniting Churches. Chennai, 25 November–2 December 2015.
Two appendices provide documentary information about Faith and Order publications concerning United and Uniting Churches.

The Tumeweza compendium iss a vital resource for ensuring disability-inclusive sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) and gender-based violence (GBV) services in the United Republic of Tanzania. It highlights the significant strides made towards improving accessibility and inclusivity in healthcare services, particularly through the efforts at Selian Lutheran Hospital and Nkinga Referral Hospital. The lessons learned from these initiatives provide a roadmap for other health facilities to follow, emphasizing the importance of collaboration with organizations of persons with disabilities, government stakeholders, and faith-based organizations.
While the progress is commendable, there are still gaps that need to be addressed to fully realize inclusive healthcare services for women and girls with disabilities. These include improving infrastructure, enhancing communication between healthcare providers and patients with disabilities, and creating specific policies and procedures that ensure the dignity and autonomy of all individuals. The compendium underscores the necessity of continuous training, accessible information systems, and advocacy at all levels to ensure that no one is left behind.
Moving forward, it is essential for health facilities, policymakers, and development partners to prioritize the inclusion of persons with disabilities in all healthcare-related initiatives. By addressing the existing gaps and building on the good practices outlined in this compendium, Tanzania can continue to lead in the promotion of disability-inclusive SRHR and GBV services in the region and globally, ensuring that every woman and girl has the right to safe, accessible, and respectful healthcare.

This first issue of the Living Planet Monitor aims to monitor our commitment to sustainable food systems, conservation of land, ecological biodiversity, and water justice in Africa The Living Planet Monitor will give you an overview of the situation in a particular continent by monitoring indicators on food security, water resources, land use, and climate resilience. It is a key instrument for faith communities to stay informed on the current situation, share good practices and projects led by church-based organizations, and give hope and courage to transform the situation.

Desertification of the Mediterranean region is fuelled by the ongoing increase of CO₂ emissions, of which over 75% are caused by fossil fuels. This fact sheet highlights how our financial choices can help combat desertification and create a sustainable future for our children.  It is one of several resources the World Council of Churches (WCC) has developed to support churches from the region in their response to this challenge.

Copublication of WACC and WCC.

The Toolkit equips trainers and advocates to plan and facilitate training sessions on monitoring misogyny on social media.

Taking Action Against Tech-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence outlines key concepts, with practical exercises, to raise participants’ awareness of gender cyberviolence. It presents the tools needed to conduct social media monitoring, report on the results, and plan further monitoring.

The toolkit is divided into five sections that facilitators can use to structure training sessions:

• Today’s media landscape
• Impact of tech-facilitated gender-based violence
• Methodology of social media monitoring
• Social media monitoring in practice
• Action plan for participants

This multi-author publication reflects the rhythm of Caribbean orature and storytelling of the many peoples that inhabited the region who brought with them their own expressions of faith.
In the foreword, WCC general secretary Rev. Prof. Dr Jerry Pillay writes, “It is only natural that when the Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace was envisaged by the 2013 WCC assembly in Busan, Republic of Korea, it would be unpacked in the Caribbean region through a decolonial lens. While this project was initiated under the Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace, its publication at this time serves as a bridge between the Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace and the ongoing Pilgrimage of Justice, Reconciliation, and Unity. . .  Caribbean Rising embodies the hope of a new day in the ecumenical movement which affirms that all o’ we is one family. This volume is an overture from the people of the Caribbean to the fellowship of churches in the WCC today. . .. Both globally and locally, Caribbean theologians and church leaders have influenced the ecumenical movement profoundly. This includes the World Council of Churches’ (WCC) involvement in decolonisation and combatting racism.”

A Discussion Document 

HIV treatment is very effective and tolerable nowadays. However, some faith leaders, out of misinformation, continue spreading messages of exclusive healing by faith, asking people living with HIV to abandon their medications as proof of their faith in God.

In Good News about HIV Treatment, Cure, and Healing, the initiators of the conversations and the discussants analyzed the concepts of treatment, cure, and healing in HIV, using principles of Christian and Muslim theologies, and concluded that faith communities have the mandate to heal. They discussed the six recent six cases of people with HIV who have been declared cured, which sparks hope for a definitive cure for all. Meanwhile, faith communities must support people living with HIV in adhering to their treatment. Medications and treatments are part of the healing touch of God, who is the ultimate source of healing.

This simple factsheet provides background about the Mpox zoonotic disease,: what it is, how it is transmitted, signs and symptoms, vaccines and treatment, and, most importantly, the role of faith communities in responding to the disease.

God’s created world is today groaning under the burdens that God’s creation has had to carry for centuries, caused by our appetite to consume. The spirit of uninhibited consumption led to the exploitation of creation, the enslavement of peoples, the colonization of lands and peoples and the wanton extraction and exploitation of natural resources from far and wide. Entire groups of people have been racially exploited. The World Council of Churches acknowledges that even faith communities, including some of its member churches and their members, have participated and contributed to the many cases of racially motivated exploitation, past and present. <p>

The World Council of Churches stands in solidarity with victims and survivors of racism, xenophobia, casteism, and all other forms of discrimination. Through this booklet, the WCC offers Christian communities a resource to develop biblically-based Christian responses to overcome these scourges.

Unlearning—Undoing—Relearning— Redoing

Unconscious biases and microaggressions are being experienced by many people in society, as well as in faith communities. Faith-based and related workplaces are not immune to these attitudes and practices. While significant investment has gone into mitigating conscious biases, racism, xenophobia, casteism and discrimination, the impact of unconscious biases and microaggressions are equally destructive. This toolkit invites and challenges Christians to intentionally invest in mitigating unconscious biases and microaggressions by employing a diversity, equity and inclusion lens in policies, practices and programming. Inclusive cultures in community and workplaces are more desirable and Christ-like.

An Emerging Consensus to Enhance the “Feast Of Creation” and Honour the Creator - The story so far

In March 2024, over a hundred delegates from all continents gathered in Assisi – with many more connecting remotely – to consider the idea of elevating the “Feast of Creation” from its current “world day of prayer” status to become a liturgical feast.

This report tells the “story” of that remarkable gathering, describing the origin of the observance, the theological and liturgical dialogues carried out in Assisi, and the extraordinary consensus that emerged. It also provides some framing of the theological and liturgical questions that remain open, and proposes next steps and directions for ongoing discernment during 2024-2025. Our hope is that this story will be a useful resource as our conversation is taken forward in different denominational contexts.

This is the detailed financial report and appendix of the World Council of Churches for 2023.

The transversals of Overcoming Racism, Xenophobia, and Related Discrimination and the Just Community of Women and Men of the  WCC are committed to ‘leaving no one behind’ by ensuring that issues of dignity and equity are included in all conversations as faith communities. They seek to strengthen male-female and race relations within the WCC fellowship, while advocating for shifts in the power structures which undergird this.

Recognising the role of Western epistemological systems in the gender and racial binaries, they advocate for decolonisation and decoloniality in their work and beyond.

This brochure shares ore information about the work and invites the fellowship to this pilgrimage of discovery, truth-telling, and transformation from the churches to the world and back to the churches.

The ecumenical fellowship find inspiration in two major anniversaries that fall in 2025, the 1700th anniversary of the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325 and the 100th anniversary of the Universal Christian Conference on Life and Work in Stockholm in 1925.

This brochure highlights WCC activities and events that will commemorate these two events, but also a number of other significant anniversaries.

Young People and Their Voices from the Warzones continues the theme of last year’s Ecumenical Youth Day. Political insurrection and ideologies have permeated the fabric of society. This has caused division and hatred, resulting in the loss of innocent lives.

Addressing the realities young people face in the world today represents a moral imperative for, and a crucial aspect of, peace-building. Through this toolkit, the World Council of Churches, via its Commission on Young People in the Ecumenical Movement (YPEM), invites all member churches and ecumenical partners to participate in this year’s International Youth Day. By doing so, we affirm youth agency and draw attention to the situation of young people living in the realities of wars, conflicts, and injustice, whether in civil or cross-border wars. 

This document is adapted from the 2023 toolkit and contains adaptable resources and suggested ways to observe this day. 

The climate emergency represents the most dangerous threat to children’s lives and the survival of future generations. Fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas – are by far the most significant contributor to the global climate emergency, accounting for over 75 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions and nearly 90 per cent of all carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
Therefore, halting new investments in fossil fuel expansion is one of the most powerful ways to accelerate climate solutions and save children’s lives.
This document provides concise guidelines for using the investment potential of individuals, organisations and churches to stop investment in fossil fuels.