PILGRIMAGE is the plan for the World Council of Churches (WCC), after its strategy for the next seven years was approved by its Central Committee.

Meeting between 21 and 27 June in Geneva, the committee, which is the governing body of the WCC, consists of 150 elected members and eight presidents.

This was the first meeting of the committee since the most recent WCC Assembly in Karlsruhe, Germany, last September (News, 9 September 2022).

The committee approved the WCC’s strategic plan for 2023-2030, which is conceived as a “Pilgrimage of Justice, Reconciliation, and Unity”, and was set out at the Assembly in September.

It builds on the “Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace” proposed at the previous Assembly, in Busan, in 2013.

The committee’s most recent report, referred to in a statement published on Tuesday, says that the new strategic plan serves “as a guide for implementing and monitoring the work of the WCC” until the next Assembly.

The report also asks the general secretary “to further develop objectives and indicators for 2023-2026 from the overall framework, to be reviewed by the executive committee in November 2023”.

The report also charges the general secretary — currently the Revd Professor Jerry Pillay — to prepare a note setting out a common understanding of the Pilgrimage of Justice, Reconciliation, and Unity, “in order to provide coherence to the programmes of the WCC, making use of the theology of companionship, to be presented to and adopted by the next executive committee meeting”.

”The common understanding of ecumenical diakonia provides more coherence to the programmatic work,” the report continues.