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When you choose to join the ecumenical movement, it means you'll never stop moving. You need to always find a new perspective of life, to share your faith to all people that you'll met in your journey. It also means you'll never stop learning, from all things that you encounter, good or bad. And it means you should never stop sharing about your ecumenical movement so the people you meet can start their own ecumenical journey.

Passion for football is not unanimous in Brazil. Although the world seems to be convinced of the contrary, Brazilians have a wide range of feelings towards the sport. For some people, football is a true passion. But there are people among us who are indifferent towards football. And there are others who criticize the game severely. They are especially critical of fans' alleged refusal to acknowledge all the corruption that is involved in several institutional levels of organizations linked to this sport.

"Isn’t it kind of contradictory to fly in thousands of people to talk about CO2 emission reductions? Wouldn’t CO2 emissions substantially decrease, if the amount of people participating in these conferences would be minimized to - let’s say, just some ministers and their advisors?"

For many of us “toilet” is a taboo subject to talk about. To do so in the prayers is all the more not acceptable to many of us! We can talk of water in our prayers due to its strong spiritual significance with all religions, including Christianity. But it seems the issue of “sanitation” is rather a profane one! But it is high time we talk about it as lack of adequate sanitation affects 2.4 billion people – that is 1 in every 3 in our planet.

Flying through the labyrinthine alleys of the Medina on a motorbike as the COP22 came to a close in Marrakesh, I thought it an apt comparison to the complex and intricate UN process responding to climate change. At every twist and turn or blind alley we encountered a huge variety of people, dwellings, riads, vehicles and forms of transport – from donkey carts to bicycles, small wagons, three-wheelers, skateboards, motos and electric cars, in all directions at once, all struggling with their different capacities to get through the narrow passageways to their destinations.

All over the world polarization is on the increase. And it seems like the further distance between the standpoints, the better. To be clear about something has become a synonym of being irreconcilable. We should be concerned about this.

They stopped counting at 524, but many more showed up. The 524 were clergy, registered from over 50 different groups, but many others were along to show support for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline. They also called for an end to the militarized governmental response to the peaceful protest.

On 31 October 2016, Lutherans and Catholics co-hosted for the first time in history a joint commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. The events took place in Lund, Sweden, under the slogan “From Conflict to Communion”. Many Orthodox representatives attended the event. What did it mean for them? I cannot respond to this question on behalf of all the Orthodox present, but I will try to explain how I perceived it through my eyes.

In May and June, leading up to the World Council of Churches’ Central Committee meeting in Trondheim, I was on a pilgrimage from Oslo to Trondheim, promoting peace and peaceful co-existence between religious groups in my home country, Norway. On 18-20 October, I was again at a pilgrimage of justice and peace, this time together with about 50 people, representing councils of churches, specialized agencies and other ecumenical actors, who were gathered in Nairobi, Kenya, for the annual meetings of the South Sudan Ecumenical Network and the Sudan Ecumenical Network.

When I was invited to attend the consultation on spirituality, worship and mission, I was asked to prepare some personal reflections on my own spiritual journey as a young person. I was asked to share what advice I had for the WCC with respect to how to engage youth in the Church as they aimed to define what they could say "about the spiritualities of the Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace and how to manifest it in worship, spiritual formation, and mission activities of the church as well as in daily life."

In Landskron, where I am a pastor of the Lutheran Church in Austria, we have a dynamic, growing and socially engaged congregation. Our town hosts hundreds of refugees and asylum seekers from various countries. While their papers are being processed, they are not allowed to work. In our interactions with the refugees and asylum seekers, they have expressed their frustration at not being able to use their time fruitfully. Most of them miss working, and the contact with the land.

Teenagers pose lots of challenges for any parent. Emotional, rebellious, and subject to inevitable pressures, it is undoubtedly difficult to raise children who are transitioning from becoming children to adults. I am in this situation—I have three. As I reflect on their growing into individualized people, I can only hope that, once they embark on their respective paths, they live in a society that is peaceful and accepting.

We have been breathing joy, optimism and excitement to promote a new way of being a country. 26 September was a very busy day for all of us who were invited to attend the official ceremony of the signing of the Colombia peace agreement, in Cartagena. As I met other participants, a strong common feeling of hope was present in every shake of hands, every hug and every look.

For the past 26 years, the global water community is gathering in Stockholm for a week in August or September, at the World Water Week, organized by the Stockholm International Water Institute, to discuss the importance of water for human development and a sustainable planet. Call it a coincidence: just one year before the first World Water Week, September 1st was proclaimed as a day of prayer for the environment by the late Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I in 1989. For some reason, in the past, faith communities, even though engaged in the water sector, were barely present at the World Water Week.

When we began planning for this year’s Peace Day, I started to think about the many different visions of peace in the Bible and from the Church of the Brethren tradition. Peace Day has been a ministry of On Earth Peace since 2007 and an international event since the UN resolution in 1981. But this year we really wanted to connect our visions and dreams of peace with what we hoped for the church and the world.

The economy is what the bankers do. Or all these business people. It’s about profit, efficiency, rationality, and all these things they invent at the stock market that no normal person would understand. That’s what one could easily think when reading the economy section in newspapers or listening to economists.

There is a financial wealth that goes beyond what we imagine, believe or are even able to understand, there is an economic system that devours lives and uses them as raw material for its insatiable appetite for growth and excessive development.

It is Monday 27th June, the sixth day of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches in Trondheim, when a regional council of Churches in the Netherlands, the Council of Churches in Friesland, is gathering.