World Council team visits India to promote peace

(Sept.23,2009):- Aiming to promote peace, a team from the World Council of Churches - WCC, began on Monday (Sept. 21), a week-long meeting with violence-affected Christians in India.
The team comprising of Church representatives from Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia will visit churches, ecumenical organizations and civil society movements, especially in Orissa and Andhra Pradesh on the eastern Indian coast until Sunday, Sept. 27, said a WCC news release .
The ecumenical team, known as “Living Letters,” visits a country to listen, learn, and share approaches and to help confront challenges, in order to overcome violence and promote and pray for peace. The visits are organized in the context of the WCC’s Decade to Overcome Violence as a preparation for the International Ecumenical Peace Convocation in 2011. The focus of the seven-day India visit is on the Indian Churches’ witness to peace with justice in a context of mass poverty, social exclusion and violence against women, dalits and Christians.
The team is scheduled to meet with leaders of various Churches, peace activists, and representatives of interfaith peace initiatives and dalit movements. The WCC news release said the team started the visit from New Delhi, where they met inter-religious groups. On Tuesday (Sept. 22) the team visited Orissa and Andhra Pradesh, two states that witnessed several cases of anti-Christian violence in recent times.