CTMR Networking Event 2024LR Leaders 1

This year, inspired by the call to “go and do likewise”, CTMR Church Leaders brought together their wider teams, putting faces to names that have often appeared on emails and memos. 

Around 40 people gathered at the Margaret Clitheroe Centre, for a programme centred around a shared lunch - deliberately planned to simply provide space for conversations to start, working relationships to deepen and new ideas to spark and share brief moments of prayer together.

Very much appreciated were the contribution of various speakers who offered “snapshot presentations” of practical on the ground initiatives made possible through ecumenical co-operation. This included stories from Together Liverpool, seeking to enable local church community action partnerships; the CTMR social action team, working ecumenically to support refugee and asylum seekers; the Skelmersdale Ecumenical Centre developing an thriving community centre and beacon of hope through a new approach to ecumenical partnership; Hope Wirral, a growing mission partnership that emerged from the Hope 08 initiative; Diaspora LEP’s, recounting how churches from across cultures are forming effective partnerships, and Gather UK – exploring how churches can have a voice in the recently established mayoral Liverpool City Region.

Responses from those who were present indicated that numerous conversations were started and contacts made that have potential to bear significant fruit in the months and years ahead.

A very different gathering perhaps to what we have become used to in our Week of Prayer for Unity, but one we sense that was worthwhile, fruitful and fully in the spirit of this longstanding event.

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity 2024


‘You shall love the Lord your God… and your neighbour as yourself' (Lk 10:27)

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity has a history of over 100 years, in which Christians around the world have taken part in an octave of prayer for visible Christian unity. ItWPCU-2024-cover-image-850x460- is an international Christian ecumenical observance kept annually around Pentecost in the Southern Hemisphere and between 18-25 January in the Northern Hemisphere. Each year ecumenical partners in a different region are asked to prepare the materials, including chiefly an ecumenical opening prayer service and biblical reflections and prayers for the eight-days of the octave, employed by churches around the world.

Go and do likewise

Resources are available for the 2024 Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. For 2024, materials were prepared by an ecumenical team from Burkina Faso facilitated by the local Chemin Neuf Community (CCN).

The chosen theme is ‘You shall love the Lord your God… and your neighbour as yourself' (Lk 10:27). Brothers and sisters from the Catholic Archdiocese of Ouagadougou, Protestant Churches, ecumenical bodies and the CCN in Burkina Faso collaborated generously in drafting the prayers and reflections. They experienced their work together as a real path of ecumenical conversion – see the introduction below.

Resources

For 2024, resources are available both as downloads and printed versions that can be ordered. The pamphlet is available now in English, and will also be available in bilingual Welsh/English, Irish and Scots Gaelic. The poster will be produced as a mulitilingual version and an English only version.

Please post any photos and details of events you hold to the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity wall by posting to Twitter with the hashtag #wpcuwall.
 
Download or order resources

Photo: Mazur/cbcew.org.uk