The quarterly of the World Council of Churches

Editorial

This issue of The Ecumenical Review focuses on matters of peace and violence, and on the churches' efforts to foster a culture of peace. This is not an innocent undertaking: it reflects efforts among the member churches of the World Council of Churches to foster a culture of peace in opposition to the culture of violence prevailing in the world today.

Vital issues are at stake. They are not issues which touch only a specialized few; nor are they abstract or abstruse. They touch all of us as church members, whether lay or ordained; as Christians seeking to live out our faith in our daily lives as well as on Sunday; and, not least, as Christians asking simply how life on this planet can be lived more fully, completely, honourably, and to the greater benefit of all. They are issues which drive us to ask: What does the Christian faith say to questions of power and the exercise of power? How may life "in all its fullness" (cf. John 10:10) be fostered in a world which so often curtails and denies the full exercise of the gifts and powers of all? How does the legitimate exercise of power find its place within a faith community which follows Christ, the One to whom "all authority in heaven and on earth has been given" (Matt. 28:17) -- but who was equally the powerless one who was despised and rejected, and who found "nowhere to lay his head" (Matt. 8:20)?

The immediate inspiration for this issue of The Ecumenical Review is the Decade to Overcome Violence: Churches Seeking Reconciliation and Peace, a programme launched, by the WCC's member churches at the WCC central committee meeting in Potsdam, Germany, early in 2001. Some of the essays presented here deal with this programme specifically, giving an overview of its history, rationale, goals and prospects. One article engages the issues actively from a sociological point of view. Others trace how the churches, and the ecumenical movement, have long struggled with issues of peace and violence. Others develop the issues in light of the experience of Christians and the churches in specific situations around the world (South Africa, Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland). Still others stand at the interface of these issues with new and perhaps unexpected areas of ecumenical concern: with worship as an experience and expression of the churches' search for common praise, confession and witness, and with the world wide web as a vehicle for Christian witness and action.

In the end, of course, it is not only issues which are at stake. Lives are at stake, lives claimed through the exercise of violence in its many forms -- violence enabled partly through the churches' inability to realize the "reconciliation and peace" which they seek for themselves and for the societies in which they live. And so we may well pray with St Basil the Great, as did the member churches of the WCC in launching the Decade to Overcome Violence (see Message, p. 227):

   Direct our steps to the way of peace ...
   So that we may send up ... hymns
   To you the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

THOMAS F. BEST Managing Editor

DEENABANDHU MANCHALA Guest Editor

COPYRIGHT 2001 World Council of Churches
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group