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War in Ukraine, church dialogue, and humanitarian response were in sharp focus on third day of the World Council of Churches 11th Assembly. Church leaders from Ukraine together with heads of ecumenical organisations emphasised the need for reconciliation, unity, and peacebuilding.

The World Council of Churches (WCC) executive committee closed its meeting after convening from 12-17 November, leaving with a sense of hope, even while publicly expressing grave concern over many global injustices facing the world today.

As a symposium on digital justice drew to a close on 15 September, participants  were weighing their vision for the future in a landscape fraught with injustice. Those taking part in the symposium—be they theologians, church leaders, politicians, students, journalists or professional communicators—are all in fact, “digital communicators,” and this broad array of people who care worked to hone their collective thoughts into recommendations they believe can help the world.

Participants at a symposium exploring challenges and opportunities for a more just digital future held a lively discussion on and offline on how the digital era has changed the notion of public space.

If digital social justice begins with connectivity, perhaps it ends when that connectivity is usurped by oppressive regimes, extremists, fake news and hate speech. A “press club”-style conversation on 13 September found theologians, politicians, church communicators, activists and journalists from around the world weighing in on the short but exceedingly complex question, “Digital instruments – Blessing or Curse?”

Besides the dangerous monopoly structures in the digital economy, there is a danger for liberty and justice as they are crucial for pluralistic democracies in the digital world, says Dr Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria. Bedford-Strohm is also chairperson of the council of the Evangelical Church in Germany and was a keynote speaker at the opening of the symposium exploring challenges and opportunities for a more just digital future, in Berlin on 13-15 September, and co-organized by the EKD.

As a teenager growing up in East Germany in the 1980s, Dr Ellen Ueberschär learned of freedom of speech in her church parish and believes that fundamental digital rights will not prevail on their own or through voluntary commitments by corporations.

Media and communicators are invited to an online “press club” event during which they can speak candidly on the theme “Digital instruments – Blessing or Curse?”

The latest issue of The Ecumenical Review, the quarterly journal of the World Council of Churches (WCC), focuses on the Pan-African Women’s Ecumenical Empowerment Network (PAWEEN), a project of the WCC’s programme on Ecumenical Theological Education (ETE).

Formally established as a network in 2015, PAWEEN aims to celebrate, commemorate, and build upon the legacy of Pan‐African women in the ecumenical movement.

After 52 participants from 22 countries from different confessional and faith traditions gathered 16-19 June in Wuppertal, Germany, they have released "Kairos for Creation – Confessing Hope for the Earth”.

The World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) was featured in the DW Global Media Forum held 27-28 May in Bonn, Germany. More than 2,000 media professionals, policymakers, and movers from politics and civil society, culture and education, business and science – representing 140 countries – attended the conference.

The World Council of Churches (WCC), the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), ACT Alliance and the German Protestant development service Bread for the World are appealing to world leaders to take swift and coordinated action to limit global warming to 1.5°C degrees as a humanitarian and ethical obligation.

By his own admission, John D. Lewis was a very “young” eighteen-year-old when he arrived at the WCC Central Committee meeting in Geneva 45 years ago this week to be a steward. What he discovered there, and serving again in Berlin the following year, he carries with him to this day.

Amsterdam Concert Hall, 23 August 1948, 10:00. Sunday worship leads to Monday work. So, as you enter the Concert Hall, don’t let your aesthetic imagination be captured by the bust of the sublime Johann Sebastian Bach.