An International Ecumenical Peace Convocation convenes 9–13 September in Seoul, Republic of Korea, under the theme “World Peace and the Korean Peninsula: The Church as a Community of Healing, Reconciliation, and Peacebuilding” Co-organised by the World Council of Churches, the Christian Conference of Asia, and the National Council of Churches in Korea, the gathering brings together churches from across the world to reckon with their calling to just peace in a time of intensifying war — linking the unfinished story of the Korean Peninsula to conflict zones around the globe.
The World Communion of Reformed Churches (WCRC) joins this convocation carrying a peninsula’s questions into a global one. What does it mean to call a divided land at peace, when division itself has simply learned to wear a quieter face? We recognise this question as a global communion.
Muna Nassar, WCRC’s Executive Secretary for Mission and Advocacy, took the stage alongside Rev. Dr Mitri Raheb on the convocation’s first day, reflecting on the word ”Salam” — how peace saturates Palestinian language and naming, even as generations have lived and died without ever experiencing the reality it names. Drawing on her own experience in Bethlehem, she described peace as a prayer inherited across generations, now being passed to children facing even greater escalation than she did. She emphasised the need to understand the different usage of the word peace, she said, “The word peace can be used honestly, or it can be used as a demand dressed in gentler language, asking the oppressed to compromise and live without justice. And people who have lived without justice, but with the word peace looming in the air, learn, early and painfully, to tell the difference.”
Raheb, drawing from his own 1990 experience at a WCC convocation in Seoul, confessed to having once participated in in-depth conversations and covenant writing on peace without touching the wound. He urged the church to “find the moral courage to break the theological siege: to expose global Israel, to join global Palestine, and to name this struggle for what it is — the ethical and theological test of our generation.”
Rehab went on to name the reality of what is at stake when the church works toward peace without touching the wound. “What is at stake is not Palestine; what is at stake is the majority world; what is at stake is humanity itself.”
The convocation continues through 13 September, with workshops on peacebuilding in conflict zones, youth roles, and ecumenical mediation. It will conclude with a “2026 Peace Declaration” and a DMZ Peace Pilgrimage on 12 September.
As Nassar closed, she asked the ecumenical community gathered, “Let peace be a demand. Let it require something of the powerful, not just patience and resilience from the oppressed.”
