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Joint release with the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and the Council for World Mission

The legacies of the slave trade, and how churches can respond to past and present forms of slavery, are going to be discussed at an ecumenical conference to be held 10-14 December in Runaway Bay, Jamaica. About sixty theologians, church leaders, social scientists and activists, mainly from Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean will gather in the country where nearly one million Africans and later indentured servants from Asia were exploited as human commodities and many more transited on their often deadly passage into slavery.

A severe reminder "of the wealth that was built and sustained on the continued extraction and plunder of Africa's resources as well as on the exploitation of Africa's people" was addressed to Christians in the global North by the participants in the African ecumenical consultation "Linking poverty, wealth and ecology" last week.

"We still believe strongly in the work to achieve unity, because it is God's commandment to us and because our globalized world is in great need of unity," said Prof. Andrea Riccardi speaking at the World Council of Churches (WCC).

Concrete plans to mobilize churches around the world for peace were approved by the World Council of Churches (WCC) executive committee in early March. What is expected to become a major worldwide mobilization of churches for peace will culminate with an International Ecumenical Peace Convocation to be held in early May 2011 and an Ecumenical Declaration on Just Peace.

The war on terror will "never" be won "as long as there are conditions in the world that make people desperate," like dehumanizing poverty, disease and ignorance, Nobel laureate and former Archbishop Desmond Tutu told ecumenical participants at the start of the 2007 World Social Forum (WSF) in Nairobi.

"The cross calls us not to glorify, but to attend to the suffering in the world and to struggle for its elimination," said the participants of a theological consultation on cruelty organized by the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in partnership with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). The conference took place 5-8 December in Puidoux, Switzerland.