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Adopted by the WCC 10th Assembly as part of the Report of the Public Issues Committee.

Professor Ram Puniyani, a former professor of biomedical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, is chairperson of the Centre for the Study of Society and Secularism, Mumbai, India.

WCC Assembly plenary on Christian identity and religious plurality

"Changing social and economic context" : Poverty threatens life and human dignity. It is not a destiny, but the very result of the methods and structures of wealth creation and distribution of wealth in individual societies and worldwide. Inequality increases not by accident, but by the way economic and political processes are structured and function. Poverty undermines the very basis of life of billions of children, women and men who are denied not only the benefits of growing wealth, but even of access to basic necessities of life.

"Religious plurality and Christian self-understanding" : The question of the theological approach to religious plurality had been on the agenda of the WCC many times, reaching a certain consensus in 1989 and 1990.1 In recent years, it was felt that this difficult and controversial issue needed to be revisited. The present document is the result of a study process in response to suggestions made in 2002 at the WCC central committee to the three staff teams on Faith and Order, Inter-religious Relations, and Mission and Evangelism, and their respective commissions or advisory bodies.

Intervention by Juan Somavia, director-general of the Internationa Labour Organization (ILO), during the Assembly Plenary on economic justice

Thanks to the great arc of the Carpathian Mountains, the Danube and the Black Sea, Romania is easy to find on any map. Culturally speaking it lies at the cross-roads between eastern and western Europe. Ninety-nine percent of its population of just over 22 million people call themselves Christian. As regards other communities of faith, there are 9,000 Jews and 56,000 Muslims. A few thousand people declare themselves to be atheists or of no faith.