As its 12th General Assembly in Kanaky (New Caledonia) concluded, the Pacific Conference of Churches, in an outcome statement, expressed a vision for leading change through transformation.
Direct contact in courses was the old way; going online is for some delving into the unknown, but students thrived in their recent Online Course in Ecumenical Studies at the Ecumenical Institute in Bossey and found a new way.
Who on earth decided in June 1920 in a conference held in Crans, near Geneva, that the following year at Lake Mohonk, New York, an International Missionary Council would be established and give an enormous institutional impulse to the emerging ecumenical movement?
Twenty-seven indigenous and ecumenical youths gathered together for a five-day World Council of Churches (WCC) event this week in Japan’s third-largest, western city of Osaka. Participants gathered under the theme, “WCC Continuing Formation on Youth and Racism Awareness in Asia & Indigenous Youth Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace.”
“We had heard that racism continues to be an issue in the United States,” said Dr Agnes Abuom, moderator of the WCC Central Committee. “But we did not expect to find it so deep, so wide and so pervasive.”
The Racial Justice Accompaniment Visit to the USA is a continuation of the WCC’s long history of racial justice work. As part of the Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace, the WCC wishes to listen to and express support for people and churches in the USA, and to encourage the efforts of member churches and ecumenical partners in the US, as well as other justice-seeking movements on these issues.
The nuclear attack on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945 revealed the brutality and dangerous logic of war, money and power, according to an Indigenous Anglican bishop from Canada.