ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

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The WCC General Assembly Karlsruhe 2022 was the 11th General Assembly of the World Council of Churches and took place in Karlsruhe from 31 August to 8 September 2022. The motto was “Christ’s love moves the world to reconciliation and unity.” After Amsterdam in 1948 and Uppsala in 1968, it was the third General Assembly in Europe. Some 4,000 guests from the approximately 350 WCC member churches attended. The event planned for 2021 was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Preparations
At the last WCC General Assembly in Busan in 2013, it became clear that the WCC could no longer hold such a major event from its own resources, but needed a host church willing to pay a large part of the costs. Konrad Raiser explains: Also due to the sharp decline in financial resources, the WCC is now focused on accompanying and promoting processes between churches. The emphasis of the work of the WCC has now shifted to the role of convener of the permanent ‘great palaver’ of churches. The Evangelical Church in Germany offered the WCC in June 2016 to host the eight-year Assembly due in 2021. This was also supported by all EKD member churches as well as other German WCC member churches and the Working Group of Christian Churches in Germany. In June 2018, the WCC Central Committee decided that the 11th General Assembly should be held in Karlsruhe in 2021, as the Evangelical State Church in Baden became a unified church by petition in 1821, thus celebrating the 200th anniversary of this event in 2021. The WCC Executive Committee decided in July 2020 to postpone the Assembly for one year because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the WCC General Assembly “returned” to Europe after about 50 years, it was faced with the task of addressing Europe’s handling of current crises from a postcolonial perspective and questioning the normativity of Eurocentric methods and forms of theology. In Busan in 2013, a “Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace” was started, which was implemented in the time between the two General Assemblies, among other things, through meetings (Pilgrim Team Visits) in various places worldwide under annually changing focus topics. This resulted in four recurring problem areas: “(1) truth and trauma, (2) land and displacement, (3) gender justice and (4) racism.”

A preparatory meeting of the 20 Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox member churches took place from 9 to 16. May 2022 in Paralimni on Cyprus. It was overshadowed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022. The delegation of the Russian Orthodox Church was founded by Me