WCC Assembly - November 2, 2013

Where I spent all of sunny Saturday! 

This weekend is titled "Ecumenical Pilgrimage for Peace with Korean Churches" on our WCC Assembly agenda. The Korean Host Committee has invited delegates and participants of the Assembly to take part in a weekend pilgrimage for justice and peace "to deepen their ecumenical fellowship with the Korean churches and to immerse themselves in the life and struggle of Korean people and society." (Assembly Handbook) A large group of people got up early this morning and boarded high-speed trains to head to Seoul for their pilgrimage and another group of people stayed in Busan to participate in pilgrimages here in town. On Sunday morning we join local parishes for worship.

I spent my short lunch break in the sun!!

Sounds exciting, doesn't it?! I can't wait to hear all about the different pilgrimages people experience... my weekend pilgrimage is with the Public Issues committee. That's right, committees use this weekend to get a whole lot of work done. The working group on "The Human Rights of Stateless People" statement pretty much finished their work the other day so today I worked with "The Human Rights of Stateless People" working group and together we attached the draft statement before us. I am learning tons, and I'm not even exaggerating that! I left my resource book on Stateless People in our meeting room so some pieces that really touched me while reading background information will be shared later on.

So, the process of this committee is that we review all the proposed statements, minutes and resolutions that are sent to us in the first 24 hours of the Assembly, figure out which ones meet the criteria and then present a list to the Assembly seeking their guidance and consensus so we can move forward with our work (this was done yesterday). Today we met from 9:15am until 5:15pm and for most of the day we worked in small groups on the different documents before us. As I mentioned, I worked on the "Statement on Abyei" document which is about a critical situation that has been ongoing in Abyei in South Sudan. (I *loved* our working group!! The world is filled with such lovely people.)

The "Statement on Abyei" working group. 

The process continued into the afternoon when we gathered back as a whole plenary group and started reviewing the documents that had been revised by working groups. How can I explain this process to you... Well, have you ever been part of the process of writing a vision statement with a group of people? Can you remember that moment after you've done the brainstorming and you're now trying to agree on the final set of words, language, order, etc...? That part of the process that just seems to never end? Well, in some ways that is what this is like. The document is projected on the screen and is read paragraph by paragraph, word by word in order to make sure that the Public Issues group is at a

"Official Dinner"

consensus with with is going forward to the Assembly. This process takes a long time, I'm sure that we'll be up all night tomorrow working through the rest of the documents. Today we got through two documents (and we'll have to review some changes in one of them tomorrow), one of those documents was eight pages long. We have somewhere around ten documents before us. To add a bit more pressure on the process we learned this afternoon that all of our documents need to be sent to the WCC office in Geneva by 10pm on Sunday night (tomorrow) so that they can be translated into the other four official languages used by the WCC.

Clam shells in my soup!

I'm interested and fascinated by this work and am so grateful to be part of it... but my goodness, it's a lot of work! Thankfully we have an amazing moderator and amazing staff support and overall great people to work and laugh with.

After a full day of work this evening we were all invited to the Official Dinner hosted by Busan Metropolitan City and the Mayor of Busan. It was a great dinner with good company and some amazing and fun cultural performances with Korean drummers and fan dancers! Thank you Busan for a great evening!

Korean Fan Dancers 

Are you wondering about the above photo? Well... those of you who know me well know that I'm not really a fan of fish and seafood. I've learned how to eat and even appreciate/enjoy some fish like salmon or cod but anything like scallops, clams, lobster, shrimp, etc... just doesn't work for me. Well, at tonight's dinner there was a soup filled with a few different types of seafood, soft tofu and mushrooms. I've been trying to be "adventurous" and was doing alright but then I caught site of the clam shells at the bottom of my bowl... never in my life did I expect that I'd be encountering clam shells in my soup! I enjoyed the broth, tofu and mushrooms and ignored the mysterious/"I don't know what to do with you" things. It was fun, nevertheless!