Search results

The World Council of Churches (WCC) executive committee will convene in Uppsala, Sweden 1 – 8 November to approve 2019 programme plans and budget, follow up and decide on a variety of assembly matters, review the WCC strategic plan, discuss world affairs and issue statements in response to current situations.

Last week the 2,000-day mark since the abduction of two Syrian archbishops was passed. Syriac Orthodox Archbishop Yohanna Ibrahim and Greek Orthodox Archbishop Paul Yazigi haven’t been heard from since gunmen kidnapped them outside Aleppo in April 2013, almost five and a half years ago.

The date: 20 February 1991. The last day of the WCC 7th Assembly. The hours were packed with remaining agenda items, the assembly had acquired a second unofficial theme. As moderator, how was Bishop Heinz Joachim Held supposed to bring this incomplete, basically unfinished assembly to a close?

Faith leaders and health service providers from across the globe gathered on 27 September for an interfaith prayer breakfast, to join their voices and commit their action to combat the spread of HIV and TB in children.

At WCC’s ecumenical workcamps in the late 1950s, a young Govaert Chr.Kok of the Netherlands would learn lessons for life – and encounter a very special person.

The leadership of the World Council of Churches (WCC) Central Committee met in Geneva on 16-17 September to prepare for the Executive Committee meeting and the joint day on Ecumenical Diakonia with ACT Alliance in Uppsala, Sweden, in November.

At a time of increased divisions within churches and within rapidly changing societies, Christians are called, more urgently than ever before, to model the values of reconciliation, justice and peace. That’s why a group of theologians and church leaders from different denominations have been meeting near the German city of Augsburg to work together on two documents calling for much closer collaboration in the tasks of peace-building and the care of migrants and refugees.

A conversation on the way home to Chile from the WCC 4th Assembly planted an ecumenical seed that grew into a wonderful experience of Christian unity – the partnership agreement between the Pentecostal Church of Chile and the United Church of Christ.

Last week, the chairperson of the WCC Ecumenical Water Network, bishop Arnold Temple from The Methodist Church Sierra Leone, came to Stockholm to participate in the World Water Week, which is the world’s leading annual water event where experts and decision-makers from all over the world gather to strengthen the systems and processes that govern access to – and protection of – fresh water.

A trip to Cuba in 2005 with a WCC delegation was undoubtedly a high point of German retired Bishop Rolf Koppe’s ecumenical career.

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.

Hundreds of people gathered from across the world for an ecumenical prayer service at the Nieuwe Kerk, a 15th-century church in Amsterdam, to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the World Council of Churches (WCC) at the very spot in which the organization was founded.