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While meeting in Amman, Jordan from 17-23 November, the World Council of Churches (WCC) executive committee issued a statement on recent developments in Iraq affecting the prospects for sustaining religious and social diversity, and the future of the nation and its peoples.

Ecumenical diakonia means complementing each other in what we do best: serving our communities, thus bringing visible church unity to the world, agreed participants at an Ecumenical Strategic Forum on Diakonia and Sustainable Development convened by the World Council of Churches (WCC) last week.

Borders – physical, political, attitudinal – which deny people their human rights, dignity and life are counter to the gospel which calls us to protect and welcome migrants and refugees. This was the recurring theme of an international conference on migration and reception, “Living and Witnessing the Border”, held 30 September – 2 October in Palermo.

On 5 July, the first Syrian and Iraqi refugees arrived legally in France from Lebanon in what marks an expansion of the Humanitarian Corridors project founded by by the Federation of Protestant Churches in Italy (FCEI), the Sant’Egidio religious community and the Italian government.

In the wake of official announcement of Mosul’s liberation from the so-called ‘Islamic State’ (IS) group, World Council of Churches (WCC) general secretary Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit called for a commitment to restoring the social and religious diversity of the city and region.

Members of the World Council of Churches Ecumenical Disability Advocates Network (WCC-EDAN) Reference Group and the regional coordinators met in Geneva from 12-14 June to reflect on the work of the network in the last four years and plan for the next four years.

The World Council of Churches strongly condemns the car bomb attack on evacuees in Aleppo on 15th April, in which at about 100 people are believed killed, many of them children.

Responding to overnight missile attacks on a Syrian air force base by U.S. forces, WCC general secretary Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit on 7 April urged all parties in the conflict to cease hostilities and commit to peaceful negotiations toward a transitional governance within the framework of international law.

The fifteenth of March 2017, marks the sixth year since the start of the Syrian war.
Lebanon, being a small Middle Eastern country facing constant political and national unity challenges with a population of approximately 450,000 Palestinian and Iraqi refugees, has been the shelter for more than 2 million registered Syrian refugees since 2011.

WCC general secretary Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit joined other speakers at a side event of the 34th session of the UN Human Rights Council on 7 March. The speakers, which also included Metropolitan Hilarion, chairman of the Department of External Church Relations for the Russian Orthodox Church, addressed the topic of “Mutual Respect and Peaceful Coexistence as a Condition of Interreligious Peace and Stability: Supporting Christians and Other Communities.”

During the visit to Iraq on 20-24 January, a delegation of church leaders shared the findings and recommendations of a recent study exploring the specific needs of displaced people in Iraq and Syria. The delegation also learned a lot about the current situation and challenges from representatives of local faith communities in Iraq, heads of the country’s Christian churches and Christian young people.

A global delegation of church leaders concluded a visit to Iraq on 24 January, focusing on the future of vulnerable components of Iraq’s society following the expected military defeat of the so-called “Islamic State”. The delegation called for an emergency response from international donors to support efforts to secure, stabilize and rebuild affected communities and societies.

Upon her first visit to Iraq, Antje Jackelén, archbishop of the Church of Sweden, had the same questions as many others across the world: “What’s really happening? What can we do to help our Christian brothers and sisters? What can we do to also assist other communities under huge pressure?”

He earned the title “Green Patriarch” as a religious leader addressing alarming environmental issues over at least two decades. In 2008, Time Magazine named His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew as one of 100 Most Influential People in the World, for “defining environmentalism as spiritual responsibility”.

Baden-Württemberg minister-president, Winfried Kretschmann, has expressed gratitude to the churches for putting Christian service and neighbourly love into practice, and not only at Sunday sermons. The German state’s governor Kretschmann gave his message in a meeting with the general secretary of the World Council of Churches, Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, in Stuttgart last Thursday.

Father Emanuel Youkhana rues that, for the third Christmas in a row, the church bells will not ring in Mosul. He recounts that, around June 2014, the numerical religious minorities such as Yazidis and Christians around Iraq’s second biggest city began to face a horrific onslaught by the group calling itself IS (Islamic State), or Daesh in Arabic.

Analyzing efforts to protect religious communities and groups and build peace in Syria and Iraq, the WCC and Norwegian Church Aid presented a joint study on protection needs of religious and ethnic minorities in Syria and Iraq. The findings were announced on 12 December to the media and public at the Palais des Nations in Geneva.

The story shared by Fr Yakoub Babawe of the Oum-El-Nour Relief Committee of the Syrian Orthodox Church in Iraq’s city of Erbil moved and challenged participants at a recent meeting in Beirut.

On 17-23 November, the Executive Committee of the WCC met for the first time ever in China. The visit was hosted by the China Christian Council and the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. The Three-Self Patriotic Movement is a Protestant church in the People's Republic of China, as well as one of the largest Protestant bodies in the world.

The removal of the group calling itself Islamic State will not alone secure the return of displaced minority communities or their longer-term wellbeing in Iraq or Syria, a new report by The World Council of Churches (WCC) and Norwegian Church Aid (NCA) released today in Oslo has found.