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World Council of Churches general secretary Rev. Prof. Dr Jerry Pillay returned to Geneva from Indonesia with expressions of gratitude to the churches and communities who hosted him. 

Sharing hopes and challenges for the search for peace on the Korean peninsula, members of the Ecumenical Forum for Peace, Reunification & Development on the Korean Peninsula (EFK) gathered for an informal meeting this week.

After postponing their unique ecumenical pilgrimage of peace to South Sudan, world Christian leaders will travel to the world’s youngest nation in February.

Religious and traditional leaders in the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) participated in online consultations on the SADC Model Law on gender-based violence.

In Nigeria’s northwest state of Kaduna, Christians are bearing the brunt of insecurity and violence, as bandits attack homes, villages and churches, killing Christians and kidnapping others for ransom.

At the centre of the communal violence is religious persecution, territorial ambition and ethnic cleansing in the region where communities have settled along religious lines, according to Rev. John Joseph Hayab, the country director for the Global Peace Foundation, Nigeria.

 

More than 140 people met online in a spontaneous “Gathering in Grief” to mourn Rev. Phumzile Mabizela, who passed away the morning of on 5 July. Mabizela was the executive director of INERELA+ (the International Network of Religious Leaders Living with or Personally Affected by HIV), co-moderator of the World Council of Churches (WCC) Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance HIV Campaign Strategy Group and a member of the International Reference Group of WCC Ecumenical HIV and AIDS Initiatives and Advocacy.

Archbishop Rev. Dr Soritua Albert Ernest Nababan, a global ecumenical leader, passed away on 8 May in Jakarta, Indonesia, at the age of 88. He was the World Council of Churches (WCC) president from 2006-2013 and served as the former Ephorus (Archbishop) of the Huria Kristen Batak Protestan, the largest Protestant church in Indonesia and the largest Lutheran church in Asia with a membership of 4 million people.

Rev. Dr Santanu Kumar Patro, registrar of the Senate of Serampore College (University), passed away on 5 May in Calcutta. The news of his death was met with outpourings of grief and gratefulness from students, faculty and friends of seminaries and institutions responsible for theological education in South Asia and beyond.

In a pastoral letter to churches and communities in Myanmar, the World Council of Churches (WCC) and Christian Conference of Asia expressed both alarm and great sadness for recent developments in Myanmar.