WCC NEWS: Ecumenical Patriarch and Baptist leader share peace messages at IEPC

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World Council of Churches - News

ECUMENICAL PATRIARCH AND BAPTIST LEADER SHARE MESSAGES OF PEACE AT IEPC

For immediate release: 23 May 2011

“As faithful disciples of the Lord of peace, we must constantly pursue
and persistently proclaim alternative ways that reject violence and war.
Human conflict may well be inevitable in our world; but war and violence
are not.”

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew shared this message of peace at a Sunday
ecumenical prayer service and celebration in Kingston, Jamaica, for the
participants of the International Ecumenical Peace Convocation (IEPC).

Over the past four days, some 1,000 convocation participants have been
exploring peace in the community, peace with the earth, peace in the
marketplace, and will continue with peace among the peoples on Monday. On
Tuesday they will release a convocation message.

The IEPC is co-sponsored by the World Council of Churches (WCC), the
Caribbean Conference of Churches (CCC) and the Jamaica Council of Churches
(JCC). The convocation is being held on the grounds of the University of
the West Indies (Link: 
http://www.oikoumene.org/index.php?RDCT=a62ebd8506419dfbf399 ).

The IEPC participants, who come from more than 100 churches around the
world, are completing their work against a global backdrop of
unprecedented challenges to peace, Bartholomew said in his video recorded
message.

“First, never before has it been possible for one group of human beings
to eradicate as many people simultaneously; second, never before has
humanity been in a position to destroy so much of the planet
environmentally,” Bartholomew said, acknowledging the precipice
humankind stands on.

As the convocation participants have been pondering the tension and ties
between the concepts of peace and justice, the patriarch stated that most
peacemaking efforts fail because we are unwilling to forgo established
ways of wasting and wanting.

“In peacemaking, then, it is critical that we perceive the impact of our
practices on other people (especially the poor) as well as on the
environment,” he said. “This is precisely why there cannot be peace
without justice.”


“Move Your Foot”

Despite the growing knowledge at the IEPC of the monumental obstacles
blocking the path to peace, songs performed by local Jamaican musicians
ushered in a mood of celebration during the service.

The ecumenical service offered the opportunity for the participants to join
as one voice both in their praise to God and their hope for the church to
be united in peacemaking.

The Rev. Dr Ralph Hoyte, of the United Church in Jamaica, who was
officiating the praise service with Dr Oluwakemi Linda Banks who is
president of the Caribbean Conference of Churches, surveyed the
congregants after the entrance song, and urged them to sing the refrain
once again. He politely invited them to lighten up.

“This time,” he said, “move your foot.”

Just one foot. And they did, some tapping a toe, others hesitantly breaking
into a slight sway, many finally dancing to the beat of steel drums played
by the Bethel Steel Orchestra.

“When you are in Jamaica, you don't celebrate with just your voice,” he
said. “Move your foot. Move your body.”

Later the University Singers presented more classical choral music composed
by famed Jamaica composer Noel Dexter.

After celebrating peace for children, women, men and youth, the congregants
heard a message from the Rev. Dr Burchell K. Taylor, vice president of the
Baptist World Alliance.

Burchell preached on the gospel of Mark 4:35 in which Jesus and his
disciples leave a crowd and cross over the wind-swept waters. He portrayed
the water in the passage as a troubled border that the disciples must
cross in order to spread their message.

“Life is sharply and simply filled with borders, with boundaries and with
frontiers that divide people, making them strangers and aliens,” he
said. “Associated with this are nurtured and cultivated discriminations,
mistrust and hostilities.”

Restoring peace in the world, he said, will depend upon peacemakers who are
willing to “cross over” borders, or transform their relations based on
a restored humanity signaled by a new order of God's rule in Jesus
Christ.

“These borders – legal, racial, national, ethnic, social, economic,
cultural, gender, political and religious – are assigned values to
define and identify those who are superior and those who are inferior,
those who are entitled to be dominant and those who are predetermined to
be dependent, those who are chosen to be at the center, and those who
naturally belong to the margins.”

As IEPC congregants joined hands and sang, “We Shall Live in Peace” to
the tune of the United States civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome,”
they vowed to become living witnesses – within their families,
communities and the world – to a new order of peace.

Burchell urged them to meet the challenges waiting for them in their home
countries:

“Cross over, agents of peace,” he said.


IEPC website (Link: 
http://www.oikoumene.org/index.php?RDCT=5a5b11aa09d7edadde48 )

IEPC photo galleries (Link:
http://www.oikoumene.org/index.php?RDCT=edb3930106793ba93664 )

IEPC videos (Link: http://www.oikoumene.org/index.php?RDCT=72c329b73c10ecd747db
)

High resolution photos of the event may be requested free of charge via
photos.oikoumene.org (Link:
http://www.oikoumene.org/index.php?RDCT=89da41247a6fff50d98d )


The World Council of Churches promotes Christian unity in faith, witness 
and service for a just and peaceful world. An ecumenical fellowship of 
churches founded in 1948, today the WCC brings together 349 Protestant, 
Orthodox, Anglican and other churches representing more than 560 million 
Christians in over 110 countries, and works cooperatively with the Roman 
Catholic Church. The WCC general secretary is Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, 
from the [Lutheran] Church of Norway. Headquarters: Geneva, Switzerland.



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