Episcopal Press and News
Heavy Agenda of World Council of Churches Assembly Now Includes War and Peace
Episcopal News Service. January 25, 1991 [91023]
Jean Caffey Lyles, News Editor of The Lutheran
As 3,500 Christians from around the globe prepare to travel to Canberra, Australia, for the Seventh Assembly of the World Council of Churches (VCC), war in the Persian Gulf overshadows other major issues on the assembly agenda.
The Rev. William Norgren, ecumenical relations officer of the Episcopal Church, said "the assembly will certainly have fresh reason to attend to the churches' responsibility for peacemaking and justice for all the people of the Middle East, as well as the care of our resources."
Ten voting delegates, led by Presiding Bishop Edmond L. Browning, will represent the Episcopal Church at the February 7-20 world gathering; dozens of other Episcopalians will attend as visitors, advisers, observers, or stewards.
The assembly, which convenes once every seven years, will for the first time have as its major focus the third person of the Trinity. The theme, "Come, Holy Spirit -- Renew the Whole Creation," will help shape daily worship services as well as assembly deliberations on such issues as land rights for aboriginal peoples, steps to save the environment, economic justice, and the ethical use of new technologies.
Participants will discuss how the ecumenical movement can be enriched by the gifts of Pentecostal and charismatic churches. And they will consider how the churches' task of proclaiming the Gospel relates to dialogues with people of other faiths and ideologies.
Andrea Cano, a spokesperson at the WCC's New York office, said council officials believe that with the mounting crisis in the Persian Gulf, some representatives of churches in the Mideast will elect to stay in the region rather than travel to Canberra. "It is not clear whether delegates from Cyprus, Syria, and Lebanon will have freedom to travel," she said.
Norgren said that he believed Anglicans and others from the region would "try to come" to the assembly "in order to speak to the council out of their position as churches under great duress."
The use of force by the Soviet army in the face of Lithuanian demonstrations for independence could be a point of tension in Canberra. The council, which has six member churches in the Soviet Union, has in past years refrained from publicly criticizing of the Soviet Union.
Yet in mid-January, WCC General Secretary Emilio Castro made public from the WCC's Geneva, Switzerland, headquarters a telegram to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev saying the WCC views "with profound disquiet" measures taken by the Soviet government in Lithuania. "We must protest strongly at the deployment of troops and military action" there, Castro said.
The assembly will open with worship under a large tent on the campus of the Australian National University in Canberra. Planners said that worship will be central to the event, with three services daily.
An ecumenical eucharistic liturgy, the Eastern Orthodox liturgy, and early morning Eucharists according to different church traditions will be celebrated.
During the two-week meeting, the 950 delegates -- representing 311 churches in some 100 countries -- will review what the WCC has done since its Sixth Assembly, which met in 1983 in Vancouver, British Columbia. They will also set guidelines for programs for the years ahead and consider statements on pressing issues.
Delegates will be roughly half clergy and half laity and include about 40 percent women and 15 percent youth.