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[Anglican Taonga] The Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia has empowered its Climate Commission to develop a churchwide climate resilience strategy over the next two years. Elisiva Sunia moved the motion on climate resilience, speaking from her experience reducing disaster risks for communities. Sunia said that while climate change affects every part of the church, its impacts are experienced differently in each community. “A churchwide strategy will give us a shared direction, while still allowing dioceses and Hui Amorangi to respond to their own local realities,” she said. Read the full article here.

[Anglican Communion News Service] Throughout the Anglican Communion, churches, communities and individuals are advocating to restore and protect the “lungs of the Earth.” Creation care is a core pillar of the Anglican tradition, reflected in the Fifth Mark of Mission, which urges Anglican to “safeguard the integrity of creation, and sustain and renew the life of the Earth.” The Episcopal Church of South Sudan is implementing this vital charge in the form of intentional tree planting, water source care and waste management in churches and beyond. Kenyi Emmanuel Dube, a team leader for the Episcopal Church of South Sudan Environmental Network (ECSSEN), shared with Anglican News the changes that are being implemented in parishes and regionally. “Through ECSSEN, we mobilize Christians to become better stewards of God’s creation and actively promote the Green Anglican Movement in South Sudan,” Dube said. “This year, in collaboration with the Catholic Church, we jointly launched the Season of Creation, during which we engaged in prayer and practical actions such as cleaning water sources, as part of our commitment to caring for creation.” Read the full article here.

[Anglican Journal] Every year for the last decade, the Rev. Catherine Askew has attended the Ottawa ceremony commemorating Canada’s National Indigenous Veterans Day, which recognizes the contributions of Indigenous military veterans – particularly in the two world wars and the Korean War. It takes place annually on Nov. 8, three days before Remembrance Day, known as Veterans Day in the United States. Askew, a military chaplain, co-chair of the Anglican Council of Indigenous Peoples and member of Moose Factory Cree Nation, supports Aboriginal Veterans Autochtones, the Canada-wide association that organizes the ceremony at the National Aboriginal Veterans Monument. She says the Anglican Church of Canada should observe National Indigenous Veterans Day as part of its commitment to reconciliation with Indigenous people. “It’s so incredibly important to remember that when Indigenous people weren’t even considered persons under the law, when their children were being taken away to residential schools, when they were still restricted by a pass control system on the reserves and could only leave with an Indian agent’s permission, they were still volunteering to fight in World War I and World War II at a higher rate than any other people in Canada,” Askew said. Read the full article here.

World Council of Churches (WCC) general secretary Rev. Prof. Dr Jerry Pillay met with the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dr Denis Mukwege on 13 October to discuss calls for stronger international action to end violence and advance lasting peace in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

A Tent of Our own Making is a series of gatherings in the United Church of Christ where leaders across the UCC have been convened by the General Minister and President to talk about the diversity of the church, the…

The post We Are Not Alone appeared first on United Church of Christ.

UCC News recorded a special, live edition of the Reporter’s Roundtable featuring some of the top stories we’ve produced in 2026 thus far, on Monday, October 12. We took a look at Citizens Bank’s decision to stop funding ICE detention…

The post Reporter’s Roundtable: Citizens Bank, Antoinette Brown, Church and buildings, and Club West appeared first on United Church of Christ.

[Religion News Service] Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe, the head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and other faith leaders are condemning plans by the Pentagon to livestream the execution of the man who shot and killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009. The outcry follows the announcement that the Pentagon will livestream the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army officer who also wounded 32 people during the 2009 shooting. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had previously stated that the execution, which will be conducted by a firing squad, will be “public.” “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it,” Hegseth said Oct. 8. Archbishop Paul S. Coakley of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops railed against the news in a statement Oct. 9, calling the military’s proposal a “barbaric promotion of a culture of death.” “Our God is the God of life,” Coakley’s statement read. “In no way can Hasan’s actions be condoned, but this decision is a barbaric promotion of a culture of death and must be reconsidered. The word of God exhorts us: ‘Do not repay anyone evil for evil’ (Romans 12:17). The public execution even of one who has done grave harm will only further undermine the moral fabric of our nation and be a blight on the conscience of its people.” Coakley added: “I pray for the intercession of Our Lady of Good Counsel that we as a nation may always choose life even in the most trying times and circumstances.” If the Pentagon goes through with plans to livestream the killing of Hasan, the U.S. will join Iran and Saudi Arabia as one of very few countries that still conduct public executions. The last government-sanctioned execution in the U.S. took place in 1936 in Kentucky, when a Black man was hanged in front of a crowd of 20,000 people. The practice was banned in the state less than two years later. According to The New York Times, Hasan is also slated to be the first soldier put to death by firing squad since World War II and the first killed by the military justice system since 1961. A White House spokesperson directed questions about the execution to the Department of Defense. A DOD official declined to respond directly to the USCCB’s statement, only confirming the execution will be livestreamed and that details are forthcoming. Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy, executive director of the Catholic Mobilizing Network — a group that advocates against the death penalty — also spoke out against the public execution plans. “We undermine our own humanity when we treat another person’s death as something to watch, celebrate or use for entertainment,” Murphy said in a statement. Rowe voiced similar disapproval. “The Episcopal Church has long formally opposed the death penalty, and more recently we have called for an immediate moratorium on its use,” Rowe said in a statement. “The idea of live-streaming a firing squad execution is reprehensible in the extreme and will cause moral injury to everyone involved. We need to ask ourselves who we have become as a nation when senior officials decide to make a spectacle of state-sponsored violence.” While Catholics have long been generally opposed to the death penalty, Pope Francis changed the Catechism of the Catholic Church in 2018 to clarify that the church views the death penalty as “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,” adding that Catholics will work “with determination for its abolition worldwide.” Similarly, Pope Leo XIV celebrated efforts to abolish the death penalty in parts of the U.S. before becoming pope, and he told reporters last year that “someone who says I’m against abortion but is in favor of the death penalty is not really pro-life.” Other faith leaders have also been outspoken critics of the death penalty, such as Shane Claiborne, one of the founders of the group Red Letter Christians. In an interview with Religion News Service, Claiborne compared the public execution plans to “lynchings and hangings and all the other ways that we’ve made a spectacle of death in our own history.” He also lamented that the plans are are being implemented by figures such as Hegseth, who has spoken often of his Christian faith and attends a church led by Pastor Doug Wilson, a self-described Christian nationalist. “I don’t think there’s any way that you can follow Christ — the Prince of Peace, the one who blessed the merciful and interrupted an execution by saying ‘let the one who is without sin cast the first stone’ — and then champion executions,” said Claiborne, an evangelical Christian. Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, senior vice president of the Union for Reform Judaism and head of the denomination’s Religious Action Center, said in a statement that he prays for “comfort for the loved ones of all 13 service members horrifically murdered at Fort Hood in 2009” but condemned the decision to hold a public execution. “Jewish tradition, led by sages such as Rabbis Tarfon and Akiba, has found the death penalty repugnant and the Reform Jewish Movement has called it a ‘stain on society,’” Pesner’s statement read. “The Defense Department’s reprehensible decision to livestream his execution only compounds this tragedy.” Walter Kim, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, told RNS that while he affirms the “need for justice” regarding Hasan’s crime, “at the same time, a live-streamed execution by firing squad risks turning one of the state’s most solemn responsibilities into a public spectacle, promoting a culture of death, rather than a culture that upholds the dignity of every human being.” Vice President JD Vance, himself an adult convert to Catholicism, also appeared to suggest discomfort with the move. “Whatever the controversy is about the method of the execution, I hope that people don’t forget that this is a guy who brutally murdered a lot of innocent people,” Vance said, according to News Nation. “Now that said, I mean, look, […]

World Council of Churches central committee moderator Bishop Prof. Dr Heinrich Bedford-Strohm spoke on 13 October during the annual Christian Unity Gathering of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA, underway from 12-16 October. 

In 2015, the United Nations adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, a global commitment to end poverty, protect the planet and promote peace and prosperity for all people by 2030.  As World Food Day approaches on October 16, the United Nation’s 2026 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report offers a snapshot of progress and ongoing challenges in the fight against ...

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The post World Food Day 2026: Global Hunger Has Declined, but Gains Are Fragile appeared first on CWS.

Dr David Barstow is a ruling elder at First Presbyterian Church in Corvallis, Oregon, (US) and a member of the Faith and Science Working Group of the World Council of Churches (WCC) Commission of the Churches on Health and Healing. Barstow earned a PhD in artificial intelligence at Stanford 50 years ago, so he has seen the field grow from an obscure academic discipline to a rapidly changing technology that will have dramatic effects on society and the planet.