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“We must avoid stereotypes,” said Rev. Dr Nikolaus Schneider, chair of the council that coordinates relations and activities within the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD). As diverse groups encounter one another in the contemporary dynamics of world Christianity, he added, the key questions are whether the calling of the church is being fulfilled by a given community, and whether Jesus Christ is to be found there.

“Without any doubt, ecclesiology remains in our times the crucial issue for Christian theology in ecumenical perspective.” This was one of the conclusions drawn by a week-long consultation in Cyprus at which forty Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox representatives provided a common response to The Nature and Mission of the Church, a 2005 ecumenical text published by the WCC Commission on Faith and Order.

A week-long inter-Orthodox consultation with the aim of studying the Faith and Order document “The Nature and Mission of the Church” began its work on Thursday 3 March in Ayia Napa, Cyprus. The aim of the consultation is to offer distinctly Orthodox insights as part of a world-wide discussion of the doctrine of the Church, or “ecclesiology”. The gathering is hosted by the Orthodox Church of Cyprus.

The Rev. Jennifer Leath is a member the World Council of Churches Joint Consultative Group with the Pentecostals and ECHOS, the WCC commission of youth. She is a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the USA and identifies herself as “a Black American who lives in solidarity with those in the African Diaspora and all those who experience oppression, these are they who capture my heart.” Leath was one of the speakers at the 2011 WCC Central Committee plenary on “Ecclesiological Landscape”, where she shared a strong testimony on the issue of youth and ecumenical movement.  She was interviewed by Marcelo Schneider.

The general secretary of the World Council of Churches, the Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, made his first formal visit to the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams on Friday 14 January 2011. Tveit led a delegation from the WCC to a meeting with the archbishop and other senior leaders of the Church of England at Church House, Westminster, London, the administrative headquarters of the Church of England.

Pope Benedict XVI will welcome the Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, general secretary of the World Council of Churches since January of this year, to a private audience at the Vatican on Saturday 4 December.

With migrants tallying some 250 million of the world’s population, churches need to help defuse public hostility towards them. That is what participants agreed at an international consultation on the mission and ecclesiology of migrant churches, jointly organized by the World Council of Churches (WCC) Commission on Faith and Order, the WCC programme on Just and Inclusive Communities, and the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism together with the Ecumenical Network on Multicultural Ministry and Mission.

A joint response by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria (ELKB) and the Roman Catholic dioceses of this southern German state to the document "Called to be the One Church" was given to the general secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC) Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit on 15 March in Geneva, Switzerland.

Interview by Martin Hoegger (*)

by Theodore Gill (*)

The Faith and Order Plenary Commission meeting, which took place in Kolympari, Crete, 7-13 October 2009, has come to an end. Participants noted an emerging coherence between the three current studies on Nature and Mission of the Church, Sources of Authority and Moral Discernment in the Churches. A tendency to give more space to an "ecclesiology from below" based on the concrete experience of "being church in a particular context", rather than describing the church theoretically "from above", was encouraged.