Tuesday’s launch was headed by Rev Bob Fyffe, the recently appointed general secretary of CTBI. He said at the launch that the weekly prayer of Christians should be that “the church should be one just as Jesus prayed that the church should be one” and that the resources come at an “incredibly important time for the Christian church”.
“And at a time when in some respects the whole ecumenical movement is reconfiguring itself, is looking for fresh ecumenical vision, it seems appropriate to me that we should pray harder and harder that we might be one,” said Rev Fyffe.
The general secretary of CTBI was joined by members of the writing group involved in adapting the materials for the UK, including Rev Mary Hunter, representative of the Irish Inter-church Meeting for the last four years; Bede Gerrard, County Ecumenical Officer for Oxfordshire and a Reader in the Orthodox Church in Oxford; Rev Andrew Scobie, Parish Minister at Cardross in Dunbartonshire (Church of Scotland).
The material for the Week of Prayer 2007 is drawn from the experience of Christian communities in the South African region of Umlazi, near Durban, and has been internationalised by a team of Christians from around the world to make the issues accessible to all participating churches regardless of which country they are in.
The community of Umlazi, like so many others, has been ravaged by HIV and AIDS, with an estimated 50 percent of the residents infected with the virus. And the suffering from the widespread prevalence of the virus has only been aggravated by the stigma attached to issues of sexuality within the communities which keeps sufferers from speaking out on their condition.
The Week of Prayer for Unity takes its spiritual theme, ‘He even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak’, from Mark 7.31 – 37. It reflects the search for full visible unity among Christian churches in light of the experience of Christians in Umlazi and their desire to ‘break the silence’ on HIV and AIDS which so often oppresses and isolates sufferers.Together we could do so much more.
Rev Mary Hunter, Irish Inter-church Meeting
Rev Hunter said: “The temptation is always to sanitise the reality so that the shocking truth about the way some people have to live is moderated. In the material we’ve drawn together for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity 2007 we sought to resist the temptation and I hope the shocking reality has not been sanitised or concealed.”
She added: “The voice of Umlazi and other places like it needs to be heard loud and clear.”
Rev Hunter also threw out a challenge to the church to tackle the “shocking truth” of disunity in the church.
