WCC now hopes for broader 2013 assembly: Need to better express ecumenical movement

World Council of Churches officials have welcomed word that after 2010, the Lutheran World Federation and the World Alliance of Reformed Churches will no longer hold global assemblies of their own under current plans.

That assurance from officers of WARC and LWF, who met in mid-November, came in a communiqué that said “a new type of assemblies” is needed this century in order to express the ecumenical movement “more substantially.” The announcement raised hopes at the Geneva-based WCC that its own General Assembly in 2013 could be exceptionally broad.