As South Sudan readied to welcome visiting world Christian leaders, church officials in the country articulated a range of expectations, including a strong call for peace and reconciliation.
After postponing their unique ecumenical pilgrimage of peace to South Sudan, world Christian leaders will travel to the world’s youngest nation in February.
A Zoom panel on 30 January 2022 recalled the witness of Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1931-2021) and to celebrate the publication of a new book, Ecumenical Encounters with Desmond Mpilo Tutu, honouring his life and work and presented to him on his 90th birthday.
The National Council of Churches USA (NCCUSA) will confer its President’s Award for Excellence in Faithful Leadership to Dr Agnes Abuom, moderator of the World Council of Churches’ (WCC) central committee.
Peace education to promote mutual understanding and cooperation between people involving the religious and secular sectors is needed to counter uncertainty fed by radicalization and xenophobia, says a leading human rights advocate.
Each year students from all over the world arrive at Bossey near Geneva for a three-month language training course to pave their way for ecumenical studies that follow on straight after. “The title captures the goal of the course,” says Father Lawrence Iwuamadi, the Nigerian priest who studied at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and is academic dean of the Ecumenical Institute.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is the largest of the Oriental Orthodox Christian Churches, one of Christianity’s oldest and has been in Africa since 330 AD, so there was joy and celebrations when on 27 July it declared an end to a 27-year-old schism that had torn it apart.
For the World Council of Churches Comission on Faith and Order, meeting in South Africa this year holds special significance. In 1960 a WCC meeting with member churches in the country was followed by a parting of ways with one of those churches for more than half a century, over the question of apartheid.
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.
At the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Lesotho Evangelical Church, a WCC member church, WCC’s associate general secretary Dr Isabel Apawo Phiri expressed her deep admiration for its missionary legacy and its “clear witness for God”.
“Uganda is a country of strong Christian witness. It is a country of Christian martyrs like Archbishop Janani Luwum, who lost his life at the hands of Idi Amin. It is therefore natural that we get together in Uganda to see what peace, justice and dignity mean to the African churches.”
