Member Church News: Countering, Praying, Launching

The World Association for Christian Communication and the Christian Broadcasting Service of the Presbyterian Church in Cameroon have partnered to help promote a more positive attitude and counter hate narratives toward migrants in Douala, Cameroon’s economic capital.

“Our responsibility is to ensure the permanence of what God has given,” says the Waldensian Evangelical Church of the Río de la Plata in the wake of forest fires in Uruguay that have consumed more than 20,000 hectares.

Union Presbyterian Seminary will use a nearly $1 million grant to help churches respond theologically and not reactively to racism, the pandemic, climate change, and other issues of public concern affecting congregations and their communities.

On the eve of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, the Protestant Church in the Netherlands will hold a national prayer service, focused on the ongoing pandemic and the tensions in society this has exposed.

On 8 January His Holiness Patriarch Mor Ignatius Aphrem II held a reception in honor of His Grace Bishop Zoltán Balog, Head of the Reformed Church in Hungary who is accompanied by a delegation from Hungary which is visiting Syria for a pilgrimage to the ancient Christian sites.

Following a successful pilot project in the spring of 2021, the Ecumenical Institute at Bossey is inviting applications for a renewed version of the 10-week online course entitled “Together Towards Unity. Being Church in a Fragmented World” in 2022.

Registrations are open for a World Council of Churches webinar on 19 January that will launch the first volume of a major new history of ecumenism produced by a team of academics and scholars coordinated by the Italian-based Foundation for Religious Studies.

What happens when you send a song out into the world and invite 25 million people to make something of their own out of it? On January 16, 2022, the Evangelical Mission in Solidarity (EMS) will celebrate a service together with the Evangelical Church of the Palatinate to mark the 50th anniversary of the EMS. As part of this service, a song will be broadcast from Landau to the worldwide EMS Fellowship (via the EMS website). All congregations, choirs, groups and districts of the 30 member churches and mission societies in the EMS are invited to send back their very own version of this song by Easter.

_{Image: Musician and pastor Fabian Vogt; courtesy of EMS.}