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As nearly 500 people gathered in-person and online for the 11th Annual Symposium on the Role of Religion and Faith-Based Organizations in International Affairs, they spoke of “finding the sun”—a symbol of a future that is both possible and profoundly just—together. 

In 2025, Mutual Aid Agency (MAA) proudly marks its 140th anniversary, celebrating more than a century of faith-driven service, insurance protection, and a commitment to mutual aid.

In this issue: Remembering Pierre Ferrari and George Etzweiler, New and Renew, Beyond the Signature: Living Out the Ash Wednesday Ecumenical Declaration, how Ugandans do church, job openings, and more

The World Council of Churches has published a Faith and Order paper, “Towards a Common Date for Easter” as an encouragement to churches and Christians to work with one another in their own contexts for a common celebration of Easter.

Thursday, April 17, 2 PM to 3 PM US ET Join Live via Zoom or Facebook Zoom registration is required but complimentary. Please click here to register.

An ongoing WACC-supported project is using inclusive strategies to deepen digital access and connectivity in “last-mile”—or geographically isolated—communities in Rivers State, Nigeria. The Community Centred Digital Access Project is working to increase digital access for marginalized groups across Nigeria by incorporating community networks that link...

Editor’s Note: The United States Institute of Peace (USIP), an independent institute founded by Congress in 1984, was recently taken over by the Department of Government Efficiency, who fired most board members and staff, replaced the president, and transferred USIP…

The post Opinion: UCC pastor and former Institute of Peace Staffer calls for action in defense of peace  appeared first on United Church of Christ.

[Religion News Service] Outside, on the banks of a chilly river flowing into the blue-black waters of Hudson Bay, it was only 10 degrees. Inside St. Thomas Anglican Church, in the northern Canadian hamlet of Inukjuak, about 70 people were gathered – one of them an imposing, 6-foot-1 man with a thatch of white hair, a full beard and the long, sweeping red, black and white robes of an Anglican bishop. Bishop David Parsons, holding up a red paper heart to signify the blood of Jesus, a black one to signify sin, a Bible and a flashlight, said: “This Bible is a light to show us where to go. For 12 years, I’ve worn the robes of a bishop. The robes remind me that I am a sinner.” Parsons had recently turned 70, the mandatory retirement age in the Anglican Church of Canada, and was taking a farewell tour after a dozen years heading the Diocese of the Arctic. Covering Canada’s northern third, it is the largest Anglican diocese by area in the world. Inukjuak, population 1,821, is in Nunavik, a region at the diocese’s far eastern end in the remote northern reaches of Quebec. Interpreting for Parsons was his predecessor and mentor, Andrew Atagotaaluk. Wiry and compact, with bushy eyebrows and silvery-black hair, and standing almost a foot shorter than Parsons, Atagotaaluk was the diocese’s first Inuit bishop and one of four translators of the first Inuktituk-language Bible. Together, the two bishops had created an evangelical outpost with 34,171 members and still growing amid the more liberal ACC that is dropping numbers so fast, the entire denomination may not last beyond 2040. The diocese’s bishops have consistently voted throughout the years against same-sex unions, gender transition liturgies and other liberalizing trends in the ACC. “The South doesn’t want to support us because we’re too biblical,” the bishop mused. “We believe Jesus is Lord, we’re not interfaith and we don’t have the intelligence to run things on our own without the Holy Spirit.” If its congregations are growing, however, Parsons’ successor, who will be elected May 9 in Edmonton, will grapple with the never-ending problem of how to attract priests to the Arctic. Only 16 full-time clergy serve the diocese’s 49 parishes, recruited from around the world to serve in 13 hamlets ranging from Kugluktuk to Kuujjuaq. Parsons has used a patchwork of retired clergy, deacons and laity to lead another two dozen churches, leaving 10 parishes with no clergy or lay leader. Meanwhile, climate change, geopolitics and tourism bring the world farther north every year. The Anglicans, who have been in the region since the late 17th century, and the Catholics, who’ve been there a century, are seeing a bit of competition. Jehovah’s Witnesses and Muslims have established footholds in the Arctic, and independent Baptists and Seventh-day Adventists have also moved in. To meet that challenge means a constant search for new blood, which is tremendously draining. The onetime corps of missionary Anglican clergy from the U.K. eager to minister in the Arctic no longer exists. Many non-Inuit clergy leave after a few years due to the isolation of the Arctic and easier career opportunities elsewhere. Add to this the simple wear and tear on the body from constant travel in subzero cold. Born in Labrador, Parsons is used to living up north, but his first post as a lay minister in 1989 in Aklavik was truly remote. Only reachable by plane or ice road, the village, near the Alaskan border, was a trading post for the Hudson Bay Co. and the site of the diocese’s first cathedral. Parsons adored his four years there, he said, as there were several clergy within a day’s journey to mentor him. “It was like a party for me,” he said. “I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. These were high-caliber people who treated me if I were one of them.” One of them, Atagotaaluk, ordained him and sent Parsons to head a parish in Inuvik, a town on the Mackenzie River Delta near the Arctic Ocean. Parsons served happily there until Atagotaaluk announced his retirement in 2012, and Parsons was nominated to replace him. Parsons dithered on whether to keep his name on the ballot. “Dad,” said Davey Parsons, the bishop’s youngest son, then 30, “how long are you going to run away from everything?” Parsons’ name stayed. He was elected after several ballots. “The next morning,” he remembered, “a member of the Nunavut government asked me what I was going to do about all the suicides.” In 2012, after he prayed about how to answer the government official’s question, he realized the key was hiring a youth coordinator for the at-risk teenagers dying by suicide. He hired one and got a $45,000 grant to help train parish leaders in suicide prevention. Then COVID-19 hit. Meanwhile, the youth coordinator married, got pregnant and quit. The question of suicide came up at the bishop’s next stop, in Puvirnituq, the largest town on Hudson Bay’s eastern coast and home of the new $4 million (Canadian) St. Matthew’s Anglican Church. Its priest, Esau Tatatoapik, and his wife, Mary, a deacon, met him at the airport and took him to their home beneath skies green with the northern lights. Just before Parsons’ plane pulled in, the couple had presided at a funeral for a woman who’d been killed by her drunken grandson. Esau averages three funerals a month, but this past week he’d had four. Parsons asked what was killing everyone, and the couple — along with their youth group leaders — responded that the causes were alcohol-related, drug overdoses or cancer. “Mary and I are so tired,” the priest said. “There have been so many funerals. So many of the clergy have had suicides.” Parsons had been going all day, but somehow, he had to encourage this dispirited group. “I am soon going to be gone,” he said. “It will be you guys who will need to […]

[Religion News Service] Although All Saints Anglican Cathedral in Khartoum, Sudan, suffered huge damage in the two-year battle for the Sudanese capital, the country’s archbishop is relieved the structure was never bombed. Speaking on April 1, days after the Sudanese Armed Forces, the national army, had recaptured the city from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, Ezekiel Kondo, archbishop of the Province of the Episcopal Anglican Church of Sudan, told Religion News Service he had received information about the state of the cathedral and the damage it had sustained. “The damage is huge. Archbishop’s residence, dean’s house, and offices are all destroyed and looted. Praise God the building is not bombed,” Kondo, 68, told RNS from Port Sudan, in eastern Sudan, where he had been forced to flee two years earlier. “It will cost millions of dollars to repair the church.” According to the archbishop, Christians are yet to return to the cathedral because the army has not declared the area safe. “There may be land mines left behind by the paramilitary. Basic services such as water and electricity have not been restored,” said Kondo. On March 26, Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, the leader of the Sudanese Armed Forces, announced that his forces had taken the city back from Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo and the Rapid Support Forces, raising hopes that the bloody civil war between the two factions of the military government might move on from the area. However, a month earlier, in Nairobi, Kenya, the Rapid Support Forces and allies had announced plans to form a parallel government. The Sudanese Armed Forces now controls the north and the east, while the Rapid Support Forces controls the south and the expansive Darfur region in the West, creating an impression of a split in Africa’s third largest country. Dagalo is a former leader of the Janjaweed, a group of Arab militias widely accused of committing mass atrocities in the Darfur region, recognized by the United Nations as genocide in 2004. Like other churches and some mosques, All Saints has been caught in the fight for control of Khartoum and northeastern Sudan. On April 15, 2023, Kondo, along with other church leaders and their families, had been in the cathedral preparing for the Sunday service when the paramilitary seized the church building and turned it into a military base. This past September, the archbishop told RNS the paramilitary had turned the cathedral compound into a graveyard, chopping pews for use as firewood. In Sudan, an estimated 5% of the 50 million population are Christians. The rest, 95%, are Sunni Muslims. While the war has forced the shutting of an estimated 165 churches, some mosques have also been targets. On March 24, the paramilitary allegedly shelled a mosque in Khartoum, killing at least five people and injuring dozens of others. According to reports, the militaries have also arrested numerous Muslim clerics who have advocated for peace. At least 12 mosques in Khartoum, El Fasher and El Geneina have been affected. “The religious sites and the clerics are being caught in the crossfire in a war between two generals who are Muslims. It is not a religious war,” said Sheikh Abdullah Kheir, an imam and a senior university lecturer in various Kenyan universities. “When you look at what is happening, it is not only Christians who are suffering, but Muslims too. I have seen Muslim women being bombed as they try to flee.” Church sources indicate that St. Matthew’s Catholic Church in Khartoum has also been badly damaged, with the interior and exterior affected. However, the structure is still standing. The 1908 cathedral, near the El Mek Nimir Bridge, is the seat of Archbishop Michael Didi Adgum Mangoria of Khartoum. Mangoria is also living in Port Sudan after having been forced out by the war. “The building is intact, but there are no benches in the sitting area. Instead, there is rubbish,” said the Rev. John Gbemboyo Joseph Mbikoyezu, the coordinator of the South Sudan Catholic Bishops’ Conference. Despite persistent calls by church leaders for peace, there is no ceasefire agreement in sight, and the two generals are promising to fight on. The exact death toll in the Sudan conflict is still unknown, but organizations have put the figure between 61,000 and 150,000 people. The conflict has displaced an estimated 12 million people and created one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, according to the U.N.

Despite multiple court orders, the Trump administration’s refugee ban and funding freeze remain largely in place. Thousands of refugees have been left stranded abroad, often in dangerous conditions without basic support. Refugees who were recently resettled across the United States – those who finally found a safe place to call home after years of lengthy screening and vetting – are ... Read More