Nicaea 2025

The World Council of Churches (WCC) is planning a year of activities in 2025 to mark the 1700th anniversary of the first Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325, a key moment in the history of Christian faith and for the ecumenical journey today.

At the centre of the WCC’s activities in 2025 will be the holding of the Sixth World Conference on Faith and Order. 

Bringing together church leaders and theologians of different traditions as well as involving a new generation of ecumenists, the Sixth World Conference will approach the theme “Where now for visible unity?” from the interconnected vantage points of faith, mission, and unity.

Alongside the Sixth World Conference on Faith and Order, the World Council of Churches is planning activities to mark the anniversary of Nicaea with member and other churches, Christian World Communions, national and regional organizations, and theological and ecumenical institutions.

The first Ecumenical Council in 325 was a gathering of Christian bishops in Nicaea, now İznik in present-day Türkiye, as the first attempt to reach consensus in the church through an assembly representing all of Christendom, and to affirm the Christian faith in the triune God.

In Nicaea, Christians who only recently had been persecuted in the Roman Empire were able to gather under the patronage of the emperor to affirm their faith and witness to the society around them. Then, as now, the call to unity was heard within the context of a troubled, unequal, and divided world.

The anniversary offers an opportunity to celebrate and reflect on on the affirmation of faith in the Nicene Creed, the mission of God’s triune love and the implications this has for the common witness and service of the churches, it gives us the opportunity to ask afresh with others what Nicaea means for churches and Christians today.

For further details and information about how you can support the conference, please contact: [email protected]. More information: www.oikoumene.org/Nicaea2025

The fifth and most recent conference took place at Santiago de Compostela, Spain, in 1993.

World Conferences have been events that have gathered up the work on Faith and Order in the preceding period and set the agenda for the future, not only for the work on Faith and Order but also for the wider ecumenical fellowship and the WCC.

A steering group of the WCC’s Commission on Faith and Order chaired by the Rev. Prof. Dr Sandra Beardsall is developing plans for the sixth conference and associated events.

The See of Alexandria is historically significant for early Christianity, with an important role in the debates that led to the Council of Nicaea.

A Global Ecumenical Theological Institute (GETI), with up to 100 participants, will be held in conjunction with the World Conference. This will be another opportunity to nurture a new generation of emerging ecumenical theologians.

The heartbeat of the conference will be its spiritual life, shaping the daily rhythm of the gathering. The spiritual impulses will draw on the spiritual resources and the desert mysticism of its host, the Coptic Orthodox Church, while inhabiting the spirituality of global Christianity.

Three decades after the conference at Santiago de Compostela in 1993, we are now experiencing a significant moment in the life of the world and of the ecumenical movement. There are compelling reasons to bring the churches together for a world conference in our times.

A world of climate catastrophe, pandemic, war, and economic concern requires a fresh engagement of the churches with one another on the core issues of faith, unity, and mission that both unite and continue to divide them.

The World Conference on Faith and Order in 2025 will be the sixth such gathering since the first was held in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1927. This gave birth to the Faith and Order movement, and since then, World Conferences on Faith and Order have been held at key moments in the history of the ecumenical movement. In 1948, the Faith and Order movement was one of the initiatives that led to the creation of the World Council of Churches.

Over the decades there have been five Faith and Order World Conferences. The fifth and most recent conference took place at Santiago de Compostela, Spain, in 1993.

Each conference gathered church representatives from around the world who wrestled with the issues of faith and church order in the contexts of their day. Together, they searched for the manifestation of the one Church of Christ in eucharistic fellowship through agreement on apostolic faith, sacramental life, and ministry.

Meeting in Egypt, on the continent of Africa, this will be the first world conference to take place in the global South, at a time when the “centre of gravity” in the Christian world has shifted to the southern hemisphere, to Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

It will broaden the “table of conversation” to include perspectives from as broad a spectrum as possible of church traditions and forms of being church, including Evangelical, Pentecostal, Neo-Pentecostal, Charismatic, and African Instituted or Independent churches.

The links direct to the online conference reports in English found in the Faith and Order Papers Digital Edition:

• 1927 – Lausanne, Switzerland 
• 1937 – Edinburgh, Scotland 
• 1952 – Lund, Sweden 
• 1963 – Montreal, Canada 
• 1993 – Santiago de Compostela, Spain 

Alongside the Sixth World Conference on Faith and Order, there will be many ways for Christians and churches to engage in the sharing in the Nicaea anniversary. These include:

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity 2025 offers an invitation to draw on the shared heritage of Nicaea and to enter more deeply into the faith that unites all Christians.

The prayers and reflections for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity 2025 were prepared by the brothers and sisters of the monastic community of Bose in northern Italy. The resources are jointly published by the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity and the World Council of Churches. Learn more

Common Easter and Pentecost

In 2025 all Christians will celebrate on the same date both Easter (20 April 2025) and Pentecost (8 June 2025), the Easter calendars of Eastern and Western Christianity will coincide. This will be a reminder that attempts to establish a common date for Easter began with the Council of Nicaea in the year 325.

Further, there will be:

•    Webinars on key aspects of the commemoration of Nicaea and the work of Faith and Order
•    Contributions to conferences and gatherings around the world
•    Online and local interactive presentations and conversations
•    Links to Nicaea commemorations being organized mong the churches

Leading up to the Nicaea commemoration in 2025, the World Council of Churches will be producing spiritual life resources, Bible studies related to the Sixth World Conference, webinars on key aspects of the work of Faith and Order, and publications and articles on relevant topics.

Resources that are currently available include:

Commemorating the Council of Nicaea
A special thematic issue of the WCC journal, The Ecumenical Review

Videos on different aspects of the anniversary and the Sixth World Conference

Faith and Order Papers Digital Edition
An online collection of the studies, research, and convergence texts produced by Faith and Order in its history, including the past studies below related to the commemoration of the Council of Nicaea: 

Councils, Conciliarity and a Genuinely Universal Council (1974) 
Formulated by Faith and Order in 1973, this text reflects the ecumenical interest in the discussion of conciliarity and ecclesiology prompted by the Orthodox and Roman Catholic participation in the ecumenical movement following the Second Vatican Council.

Confessing the One Faith. An Ecumenical Explication of the Apostolic Faith as it is Confessed in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (381)  (1991)
Confessing the One Faith is a 100-page commentary on the Nicene Creed, undertaken as part of Faith and Order’s larger project of expressing the apostolic faith within a contemporary, ecumenical context.

One God, One Lord, One Spirit. On the Explication of the Apostolic Faith Today (1998)
Emerging from the Faith and Order study project “Towards the Common Expression of the Apostolic Faith Today,” the book includes reflections on the three articles of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed.

Apostolic Faith Today: A Handbook for a Study (1985) 
A collection of historical documents related to the Faith and Order study on apostolic faith, including the creeds of the ancient church, confessions of faith from the 16th and 17th centuries, and statements emerging from the ecumenical movement of the 20th century.