wfn.org | WCC 8th Assembly includes 2 Lutherans among keynote speakers

[FRANK_IMHOFF.parti@ecunet.org (FRANK IMHOFF)]

Wanda Deifelt, Brazil and M. Deenabandhu, India

GENEVA, 14 May 1998 (lwi) - Two Lutherans will be among the keynote
speakers at the World Council of Churches (WCC) Eighth Assembly in Harare,
Zimbabwe, Dec. 3-14. Brazilian pastor and theology professor, Wanda
Deifelt, will be one of the main speakers on the assembly theme "Turn to
God - Rejoice in Hope" at the assembly's first deliberative plenary
session, Dec. 4. Deifelt is a member of the Evangelical Church of the
Lutheran Confession in Brazil. The professor of systematic theology at the
church's seminary in Sao Leopoldo is a member of the board of the WCC's
Ecumenical Institute in Bossey, Switzerland.

Lutheran pastor and Dalit theologian from India, M. Deenabandhu, will
participate in the plenary session which will review the Ecumenical Decade
of Churches in Solidarity with Women, Dec. 7. The decade was launched by
the WCC Central Committee meeting in Moscow in 1989.

A public celebration will mark the WCC's 50th anniversary Dec. 13 with the
former president of Tanzania, Julius K. Nyerere, and the third WCC general
secretary (1972-1984), Philip Potter, from Dominica in the West Indies, as
keynote speakers. The event will be moderated by Pauline Webb who was the
first woman officer of the WCC. Webb, a Methodist from Great Britain, was
appointed vice-moderator of the WCC Central Committee elected by the WCC's
Fourth Assembly in Uppsala in 1968.

The public celebration will be a multi-media event produced by John
Peterson, who will cooperate with WCC staff, on special assignment from the
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America where he is Director for Public
Media Ministry, a WCC press release reports.

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