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Dear sisters and brothers in Christ,
Dear ecumenical colleagues and fellow disciples in the Lutheran World Federation,
It is my special privilege, on behalf of the global fellowship of the World Council of Churches, to greet your President, Bishop Henrik Stubkjaer, your General Secretary, Rev. Dr Anne Burghardt, and you, the assembled representatives of the LWF’s member churches, as you gather this week in Addis Ababa,Ethiopia, for your annual LWF Council meeting.
Your meeting in Ethiopia, ancient home of the earliest Christian churches, ties your extensive and effective laborstoday directly to our forbears in faith. It recalls our heritage of faith and our mandate as Christians to bear witness tothe Risen Lord in all we do. We pray always that your work, like theirs, may be a boon to your fellowship and alight to the world.
Your gathering also reinforces LWF’s deep ties to the African continent and your decades of empoweringchurches and serving human needs in so many venues.
"Be my witnesses" (Acts 1:8) is a call to action for believers to share the message of Jesus Christ. It's a core element of the Christian faith, instructing believers to be actively involved in spreading the word anddemonstrating their faith in the world.
In our current global context, we strive for viable Christian unity and strength among churches. We mustremain faithful to our Christian witness together in a world in which upheaval, instability, and uncertainty areimpacting us all.
As our deeply valued ecumenical partners across the whole range of ecumenical and diaconal programs, we treasure our many programmatic ties and our shared work for justice, peace, and reconciliation. Weappreciate your intense focus on inter-church dialogue, your support of theological education, humanitarian reliefand development, international advocacy, gender justice and peace-making.
We now have a momentum in the one ecumenical movement, where we have strong and wide participationin efforts of mission and diakonia. It is important that the churches own these agendas and that we continue todiscuss what that means in practice, for example, in our
cooperation with the ACT Alliance. The principles and the practices should be shared and developed. The worlddesperately needs our joint efforts. Urgent needs for unity, justice and peace have driven us forward. We can accept, even embrace and celebrate, what are imperfect but real and diverse expressions of unity and shared service for justice and peace, and the whole of creation.
During a year in which we are commemorating the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, we reflecton the foundational confessions of our faith and we renew our commitment to visible unity. During this special Ecumenical Year of 2025, whatever the challenges we may face in preserving the unity of fellowship as Christians, we face them together, with Christ calling us to have unity in our witness to the world.
May your gathering this week further nurture your fellowship, strengthen your resolve, and enhance your service in realizing God's reign on earth and the dawn of God’s New Creation. I join you in spirit and inprayer.
We pray that you will have a Spirit-filled and fruitful meeting as you discern together what God is calling you to doin your continued work within and beyond the Lutheran family, always abounding in the hope we have in JesusChrist, our Lord and Saviour.
Let us continue, dear sisters and brothers to “Be my witnesses". This moment and this momentum aregiven to us now.
Yours in Christ,
Rev. Prof. Dr Jerry Pillay
General Secretary
World Council of Churches
