This was the overall theme of today and the plenary started with a few important questions:
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| Theme Plenary on Justice |
- What kind of world are we living in?
- What kind of world will they (children) be living in in 20-30 years from now?
And went on to remind all of us that were gathered in the auditorium that we can't achieve justice or peace without Christ, that Christ is the hope with us and justice is incarnate. If we believe that Christ is with us then we must believe that we are the hands of Christ and justice in the world. How do we take our authority and speak for all of those who have no voice? The work towards justice cannot be an option one... as we believe in a God of justice we (as individuals and churches) must go into the world and hold our governments, community and local organizes accountable.
The plenary session ended with being challenged/reflecting on what we can do when we leave Busan... how we can go home and do both prayer and action. How we can go home and advocate for justice in our community and in our world... that we go and find all of those who fight for justice and who question the injustice of the systems in our world today and stand side-by-side with them.
- What will you do?
- What stories will you listen to when you go home?
I had my first lunch break without any meetings in longer then I can remember. Unfortunately due to the fact that we did not complete the Nominations work the other night we had a special closed Business Plenary session at 1pm (we normally don't meet until 2pm) to finish that work. And have much conversation and voting we finally elected a new Central Committee. Yahoo!! (Seriously, this was a lot of work!)
Much of the rest of the day was filled with Business Plenary sessions where we heard many reports, read many recommendations and did much voting. We've put a small dent (read 2/11) in the Public Issues statements and there are already some recommended changes in the documents so we meet again at 9am tomorrow to get some work done on those!
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| Evening Prayer |
Evening Prayer tonight was led by the local Korean Churches and followed the traditional structure of a Korean Wednesday service. Sounds pretty cool, eh? The problem was that the Canadian delegates planned to gather for dinner this evening after Evening Prayer and this evening prayer was scheduled for an extra 30 minutes in order to follow the traditional structure of the service. A group of us were still wanting to attend and decided that 9pm dinner wasn't the end of the world. We walked into the worship hall which was packed and discovered on our chairs a 74 page worship book for the evening for each of us... now, I'm sure that part of the reason for the size was due to the fact that the service was translated into five languages but even after a quick scan of the service we realized that there was much choral singing, scripture reading, two sermons, page after page of prayers with time for silent and loud prayer after each section, and more singing. By the time that we had gotten through the sermons and the first section of prayer it was 8:40pm and there was at least an hour to go. So some of us snuck out while other stayed.
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| Canadians gather for dinner. Photo: Bruce Myers |
It's a service I probably would have loved staying until the end for, but at this point in the Assembly and at that hour the day I was not ready to be in worship until 10pm and then gather with folks afterwards. I will take the resource home though and read through the prayers more carefully... and dinner... it was simply just wonderful to gather with friends old and new!
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