The Ecumenical Assembly for Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation

Abstract

The Vancouver assembly of the World Council of Churches in 1983, in part through the efforts of Heino Falcke and the delegates from the GDR, called on the WCC “to engage member churches in a conciliar process of mutual commitment to justice, peace and the integrity of creation”. In the GDR, the high point of this conciliar process was an Ecumenical Assembly of Churches and Christians which met in three sessions in 1988 and 1989, and which, not least because of the involvement of peace, environmental and human rights groups, made unprecedented demands for the reform of the GDR and influenced the citizens' movements and political parties formed at the time of the peaceful revolution of autumn 1989. As envisaged at the Vancouver assembly, the conciliar process was intended to link the issue of peace, a priority at that time for many WCC members in the northern hemisphere, with that of global justice, an overriding concern for churches in the South. In the course of preparations for the Ecumenical Assembly in the GDR, however, the discourse of justice was applied to GDR society itself, something that was reflected in the 10,000 proposals from parishes, groups and individuals for the assembly, and in the “testimonies of concern” with which the assembly opened its first session in February 1988. In this article,1 which comes from a conference in Dresden in April 1999 to mark the 10th anniversary of the final session of the Ecumenical Assembly, Falcke reflects on how the assembly changed from being a Christian, church gathering to becoming an emerging opposition within civil society.