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During a noon prayer on 19 April, the World Council of Churches (WCC) called for global solidarity with the people of Sudan as an escalating conflict has plunged many innocent people into a situation in which they are barely able to survive. 

World Council of Churches (WCC) acting general secretary Rev. Prof. Dr Ioan Sauca expressed deep shock at a recent attack on a church community during a Sunday morning mass at St Francis Catholic Church, Owo, Ondo State, Nigeria.

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.

 

Church leaders in Sudan are welcoming a peace agreement signed between the transitional government and rebel groups on 3 October, after a year of talks in Juba City, the South Sudanese capital.

South Sudanese church leaders have welcomed a new cabinet, which the country’s president Salva Kiir Mayardit announced on 12 March.

The unveiling of the cabinet ended months of anxious waiting for a new unity government which was mandated by a 2018 peace pact, known as the Revitalised Agreement for the Resolution of Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan. The government has 34 ministers and 10 deputies.

Religious communities’ significant role in creating safer, sustainable and inclusive cities has been underlined at the United Nations Habitat Assembly in the Kenyan capital Nairobi.

When more than 100 religious leaders and other actors from around the world gathered at the UN in Vienna in mid-February, it was a manifestation of unity between religious and non-religious organizations, and a genuine commitment to cooperate in dealing with hate speech and incitement to violence that could lead to atrocity crimes.

In a pilgrimage of justice and peace in Burundi on 8-10 November, African women of faith met some of the world’s most pressing problems - poverty, violence and climate change - with faith, hope and action.

A consultation in Arusha, Tanzania, has issued a communique entitled “Sustainable Peace in Burundi.” The meeting, organized by the World Council of Churches and the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, drew together Burundian religious leaders on 18-19 October.

With the aim of monitoring how the Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace is unfolding and to develop suggestions for its various initiatives and activities, with a special focus on the Africa region in 2017, the World Council of Churches (WCC) convened a meeting of the reference group of the pilgrimage in Nigeria from 20-27 February.

The latest edition of the quarterly WCC journal features a discussion of the roots of religion and violence in the Middle East. Five presentations drawn from three WCC-sponsored conferences of recent years explore aspects of the religious concepts of “promised land,” the “theology of land” and how to go about “reading the Hebrew Bible in solidarity with the Palestinian people.”

Hope in a Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace formed the integral thread for proceedings at the meeting of the Central Committee of the WCC in Trondheim, Norway this week. The 2016 meeting took place 22-28 June, the second gathering since the Central Committee was elected at the WCC 10th Assembly in Busan, Republic of Korea in 2013.