During a European consultation on just peace, organized by the Conference of European Churches in cooperation with the Polish Ecumenical Council in December, Peter Prove, director of the World Council of Churches (WCC) Commission of Churches on International Affairs, spoke about “A Pilgrimage of Justice, Reconciliation, and Unity” in the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine.
The World Council of Churches is an ecumenical partner supported by the Interdenominational Cooperation Fund apportionment, which enables United Methodists to share a presence and a voice in the activities of several national and worldwide ecumenical organizations.
“The Russian invasion of Ukraine came as a profound shock for all of us, in the ecumenical movement and in the wider international community,” Prove said. “Though, with the benefit of hindsight, we have to acknowledge that President Putin’s intentions were signaled quite clearly, perhaps we didn’t want to believe that he would follow through on his threats and perpetrate such a blatant violation of international law and of the post-World War II international order.”
"Now, after more than 1,000 brutal days of the still ongoing Russian invasion, we are infinitely sadder but perhaps a little wiser,” said Prove.
He noted that the WCC executive committee, during its meeting in Cyprus in November, recalled the passage of 1,000 days of the war in Ukraine.
“Each of those days,” the executive committee observed, “has been marked by the blood of so many civilians as well as combatants killed and maimed, the traumatic displacement of communities, and the destruction of homes, livelihoods, and civilian infrastructure.” The WCC governing body also reflected on the future direction of those efforts for peace in Ukraine.
Prove remarked that despite the acute difficulties of the current situation "we continue to insist on dialogue, offering an alternative space for encounter, in the space created by the breach of the relationship with one another and therefore with God". The WCC persists in not accepting separation and division as a pathway to peace, Prove said.
“Indeed, from my point of view, the pilgrimage methodology is a way of systematizing an ecumenical approach to the troubles of the world that is more-or-less consciously counter-cultural – a stance against the prevailing political, social, and cultural trajectory of division, confrontation, conflict, nationalism, and retreat from multilateral cooperation at a time in which such cooperation among the nations of the world has never been more urgently needed to confront the converging global crises that threaten us all,” he said.
The World Council of Churches exists “not because we agree, but precisely because we disagree, sometimes on very fundamental issues,” said Prove, “and that is why we need to be together, and to make this difficult journey together, as a witness to an increasingly divided and polarized world.”
The Consultation was part of the Pathways to Peace initiative, launched by the Conference of European Churches in the summer of 2022, to maintain links between Ukrainian and other European churches, to work theologically on the question of war and peace, and to provide concrete help to Ukrainian churches caught up in the conflict.
World Council of Churches website
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