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Church representatives at a recent Oikotree Global Forum in Johannesburg, South Africa stressed the need to support peoples'€™ movements promoting justice in the economy and ecology, a concern, they say, that lies at the heart of the faith.

“Quite often, it is not the relationship between the Muslim majority and the Christian minority that was, and is, at stake but justice, political participation, human rights and national dignity,” said Dr Tarek Mitri. He added that “community-specific anxiety could not overshadow the common worries of Christians and Muslims" in the Middle East.

The World Council of Churches (WCC) “ is defined by all the three key words in our name. We are global, in all continents, and therefore also in solidarity with one another, seeking peace in all its meaning for the whole earth,” said the WCC general secretary Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit.

By Marcelo Schneider (*)

A call for solidarity with the poor was delivered to a gathering of religious, political and civil society leaders from all over the world by one of the presidents of the World Council of Churches (WCC). The meeting on the topic “Bound to Live Together: Religions and Cultures in Dialogue” is taking place from 11-13 September in Munich, Germany.

Wealth and property shape a “false reading” of human value, World Council of Churches (WCC) general secretary Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit said recently at a Protestant convention in Germany.“Property and possessions have purpose in as much as they help us to live as the people God called us to be and no more,” Tveit said in a Bible study at the German Protestant Kirchentag which met in Dresden 1-5 June.

When Archbishop Valentine Mokiwa visited a gold mining operation in Tanzania, he came across something he never expected to see: a world-class runway and sprawling houses with private swimming pools.

The “dignity of work” or “decent work” in the context of a values-based response to globalization was at the core of a recent international inter-religious seminar hosted by the Geneva-based World Council of Churches (WCC).

Resettlement of people displaced by the consequences of climate change was highlighted as a major concern for churches at a gathering of ecumenical representatives from Asia and the Pacific region.

by Karen Burke (*)

Conflicts in Congo and Gaza, recognition of the International Year of Reconciliation, the impact of the global economic crisis on the WCC budget and an update on the election of a new general secretary were topics of discussion and action by the WCC Executive Committee which met in Bossey, Switzerland, 17 to 20 February 2009.

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.