Theological bridges: Nicaea, decolonial theology, and contemporary movements

Building on the 2025 Sixth World Conference on Faith and Order in Egypt, which commemorated 1,700 years since the Council of Nicaea under the theme “Where Now for Visible Unity?” the Nairobi conference sought to bring the ancient faith into dialogue with decolonial thought and contemporary struggles for justice in an African context. The gathering aimed to explore how the Nicene legacy can serve as a living theological resource for churches engaging questions of unity, power, and transformation today.

The conference combined keynote and short paper presentations, as well as panel conversations from well-established scholars, upcoming scholars, and some students from St Paul’s University. 

Rev. Prof. Dr Stephanie Dietrich, moderator of the WCC Faith and Order Commission, delivered a keynote address entitled “From Pax Romana to Just Peace: Nicaea and the Theological Foundations of Social Transformation.” She explored the theological potential of the Nicene faith — particularly its Christological confession — as a vision of unity without domination. She proposed that the doctrine of Christ can offer a critical resource for imagining just peace beyond colonial and neocolonial forms of order.

“The search for just peace calls for humility, listening, and the courage to allow theology itself to be transformed,” she stated. 

Concluding her address, she reflected: “Perhaps the most faithful way to honour Nicaea today is not to repeat its words triumphantly, but to let them question how we live, lead, and speak in a wounded world. To confess homoousios is therefore not only to repeat an ancient formula, but to witness to a unity that refuses domination — a communion that resists every ideology seeking to divide, exclude, or sanctify violence, and that invites the church into the unfinished work of just peace.”

Dr Masiiwa Gunda, WCC programme executive and Ecumenical Institute at Bossey adjunct professor, offered a keynote entitled “Decoloniality at Nicaea? Can an African Decolonial Theology be underpinned on Nicaea’s empire-church convention?” The presentation explored the meaning of coloniality and decoloniality – the former as an amalgamation of various instruments of power, mostly unjust and ranging from political, economic, religious, to epistemological systems while the latter was portrayed as an intentional, persistent, and radical resistance to coloniality for a more just church and society. 

In summing up his presentation, Masiiwa reiterated “the reality of cultural imperialism in which global majority cultures were “genocided” not because they were bad, anti-life, or anti-dignity but because they were different. An African decolonial theology cannot ignore the wreckage of the cultural genocide but seek to retrieve not only from pre-colonial cultures, theologies, and epistemologies but also from our Christian ancestral theologies – Latin American liberation theologies, African theologies, African Women theologies, spiritualities, and identities.”