World Council of Churches

From Brietbart:

The World Council of Churches on Thursday called on churches around the world to ring their bells 350 times during the Copenhagen climate change summit on December 13 as a call to action on global warming.

The leading council of Christian and Orthodox churches also invited places of worship for other faiths to join a symbolic “chain of chimes and prayers” stretching around the world from the international date line in the South Pacific.

“On that Sunday, midway through the UN summit, the WCC invites churches around the world to use their bells, drums, gongs or whatever their tradition offers to call people to prayer and action in the face of climate change,” the council said in a statement.

“By sounding their bells or other instruments 350 times, participating churches will symbolise the 350 parts per million that mark the safe upper limit for CO2 (carbon dioxide) in the atmosphere according to many scientists,” it added.

Read the entire article.

From the WCC website:

“Where I live, in the United States, before we had radio when somebody’s house caught on fire we rang the church bells so that everybody would know and come out to do something about it. Well, something’s on fire now”, adds McKibben, whose book The End of Nature was one of the first to explain global warming to a mainstream audience when it came out in 1989.

The only thing on fire is McKibben’s over-heated imagination. The jury is out on global warming (also see the Petition Project). Orthodox leaders ought to be more circumspect about what is increasingly becoming the promiscuous use of Orthodox moral authority.

From “Unity as Calling, Conversion and Mission,” the opening address of His All Holiness the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew to the Plenary of the World Council of Churches’ Commission on Faith and Order event, “Called to be One Church” (Crete, Greece, October 7, 2009):

We should not be frustrated by our human limitations, which unfortunately determine our disagreements and divisions. Our ongoing and persistent pursuit of unity is a testimony to the fact that what we seek will occur in God’s time and not our own; it is, by the same token, the fruit of heavenly grace and divine kairos.

[ … ]

… genuine humility demands from all of us a sense of openness to the past and the future; in other words, much like the ancient god Janus, we are called to manifest respect for the time-tested ways of the past and regard for the heavenly city that we seek (cf. Heb. 13.14). This “turning” toward the past and the future is surely part and parcel of conversion.

[ … ]

… it is the preservation of creation as the proper way of worshipping the Creator and the promotion of tolerance and understanding among religions and peoples in our world. Working closely together on issues of ecological awareness and ecumenical dialogue is a crucial reflection of the “everlasting covenant” (verses 25-26), whereby Ezekiel’s God proclaims: “I will be their God and they shall be my people … forevermore” (verses 27-28). Continue reading →

The Associated Press has a story out of the World Council of Churches about deliberations toward a common date for Pascha/Easter. The story was based, in part, on this release from the WCC. From the AP:

Under the plan the unified Easter usually falls as it would under the Gregorian calendar used by Catholics and Protestants, said Dagmar Heller, an ecumenical professor in Switzerland heading the council’s faith and order commission.

In the next 15 years, the only time Western churches would have to change Easter is in 2019 from April 21 to March 24. The bigger adjustment would be for the Orthodox Church, which has experienced several schisms in its history over the question of dates.

“There are of course some fundamentalist Orthodox who say ‘The Julian calendar is our tradition and it was used in Jesus’ lifetime so we cannot change,'” Heller said, adding that some Eastern theologians might fear more breaks in their church as a result of a date change.

“And, of course, it’s an issue because the astronomical data is closer to the Gregorian calendar, which was introduced by a pope,” she said, referring to Pope Gregory XIII’s reform of the calendar in 1582. It only slowly replaced the calendar named for Julius Caesar, who introduced it in 46 B.C.

Some Orthodox representatives at the meeting appeared to back the plan. French Orthodox theologian Antoine Arjakovsky acknowledged that the astronomy was closer to the Gregorian calendar, but noted that Catholic and Protestant churches were also compromising by “accepting that the date of Easter should be established on the basis of a cosmic calendar rather than by a fixed date.”

More detailed information on these talks, free of WCC spin, is available from the Religious Information Service of Ukraine, which reported on “A Common Date of Easter – Possible: The 1997 Aleppo Consensus,” a conference held earlier this month at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. Snip:

Expressing joy that such an important theme had been raised in the seminar, Metropolitan Andriy Horak mentioned that such a detailed answer from the Orthodox representation concerning the Aleppo proposals could be received only after a Pan-Orthodox consultation and, eventually, a council. It is worth mentioning that Fr. Milan Zust, S.J., representative for the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, said that the Roman Catholic Church is waiting for a response from the Orthodox churches and he thinks that if the Orthodox would accept the Aleppo recommendations, then there would be no problems with establishing one, common date of Easter. If some remarks would come from the Orthodox representation or if they were to propose another variant, then the question would definitely need to be reviewed.

Dr. Konstantine Sigov, chief director of the publishing firm Spirit and Letter, who spoke in the name of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), mentioned that it is of huge importance to spread information about the possibility of establishing a common date for Easter – especially within an academic environment as well as among the broader public.

See the Orthodox Wiki entry on Old Calendarists.

The World Council of Churches, which claims to speak for most Orthodox Churches around the globe, has formulated a number of proposals to reform the global financial system because of its inherent “injustice.” General Secretary Samuel Kobia sees the need for new transnational financial watchdog organizations that will “qualitatively regulate the growth in massive movements in capital.”

The problem here is that Kobia fails to understand that a global economy requires an international flow of capital — along with an international flow of goods and services and, very often, labor (indeed immigrant labor). In cataloging a long list of ills flowing from the current economic crisis, and the “neoliberal economic myth” of efficient markets, Kobia neglects to mention — or fails to see — how markets work to create wealth, economic growth and jobs. These are not things created by, as he would have it, “democratizing all global finance and trade institutions” across international boundaries. Nor is economic growth created by watchdog groups or ecumenical bodies. And Kobia also fails to see that in some of the most desperate regions of the developing world, including his own native Africa, more and more people are asking only for a chance to operate in a real market economy.

Here are some of Kobia’s more extreme proposals and my parenthetical responses:

Continue reading →