Justice,Peace and the Integrity of Creation

Abstract

At the Vancouver Assembly of the World Council of Churches in 1983, the WCC undertook a process of making issues of Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation more central to the belief and practice of the member churches.

A major step in that process was taken at a Convocation held in Seoul, Korea from March 5–12, 1990. Delegates from all the member churches, with advisers, and also observers from the Roman Catholic Church met to prepare a covenant to present to the churches on these topics. The covenant will be discussed among member churches and finally come to the next WCC assembly in Vancouver in February 1991 for its final acceptance.

Three of the editorial team of Transformation were present at Seoul: Tokunboh Adeyemo and Ronald Sider as participants representing the World Evangelical Fellowship and Chris Sugden as a journalist for BBC World Service, the Sunday Correspondent and the Church of England Newspaper. The three of us met regularly together and with other evangelicals (we could identify about 20 out of an attendance of about 500) at the convocation to reflect on the issues together.

In this feature we share the message from the Seoul Convocation. (The three major documents of preamble, affirmations and covenant will be published and available through the WCC networks.) We reproduce a covenant that evangelicals prepared in a process where people were invited to make their own covenants and commitments together. And in two articles we share reflections that we had at the close of the convocation.