Institutions are the guarantee of sustainability and the cornerstone of social progress

Dr. Michel E. Abs

Secretary General of the Middle East Council of Churches

This speech was given during the meeting of Reverend Dr. Paul Haidostian

President of the Middle East Council of Churches on the Evangelical Family

And the MECC delegation at Haigazian University

Dear Reverend Dr. Paul Haidostian,

President of the Union of the Armenian Evangelical Churches in the Near East

President of Haigazian University and President of the Middle East Council of Churches,

It is a pleasure for us to have the honor to hold this meeting with you, the MECC team and myself, as part of the program of visits we are making to the Presidents of the Council as well as to the church leaders.

We are pleased to meet you at Haigazian University, this historical scientific edifice that struggled with the scourge of war and endured and persisted despite the bitterness of that time. It preserved its educational role when institutions were retreating one after the other. We experienced that period together.  

One can simply comment: The Church is accustomed to this, and this applies to the Union of the Armenian Evangelical Churches in the Near East, as during the century and a half of its work in our region, it witnessed the massacres and calamities that befell the Armenians, Syriacs and Anatolian Romans.

As we congratulate your Union on the occasion of the 175th anniversary of the founding of the Armenian Evangelical Church, we wish for it to continue its creativity and achievement and to provide society with the skilled persons who help in its preservation and development at all levels. During this period of time, the Union established or contributed to the establishment of countless organizations in different fields, including the educational, the humanitarian, the developmental, the health field, the cultural filed, and the list may be long.

A large number of members of the Union participated, with great conviction and in depth, in the work of the MECC and provided relentless efforts to spread the message of Christ and Ecumenical Culture throughout the Middle East; they were exemplary in that. What we witnessed of the dynamism and achievements of your Union during our last visit to Aleppo with the World Council of Churches and Act Alliance is the conclusive evidence of that.

 We congratulate you and tell you that we are all partners in witnessing to Jesus Christ and in healing the wounds of the weak and heavy burdened, for whom He was incarnated and came to this world. The Lord of Salvation did not neglect other aspects of life, but rather healed the sick, fed the hungry, and restored honor and dignity to those whom their environment demonized them, judged them, and squandered their blood. We exist to work for a better life for humankind.

We in the council, in the image of the Incarnate who came as a Salvation for the world, and in complementarity with the churches and through the development of complementarity among them, all of which constitute the one and only Church of Christ - the pledge of allegiance to the Lord, we try to perform the role entrusted to us in the best possible way, as determined by the church.

The Council is a place of interaction between institutions that have historically diverged, rather they resented and were sometimes at odds with each other.

There is no doubt that the ecumenical culture has made great strides since the establishment of the MECC, but we still have a long way ahead. Today, we are on the threshold of the fiftieth anniversary as an organization, in addition to celebrating this anniversary as a golden jubilee, we need a pause with oneself, in cooperation with the church institutions, in order to evaluate what has been accomplished and what has not been accomplished, focusing on the failures as much as on the successes. The evaluation also includes the proposal that you handed-over to me in writing in the General Assembly about the decisions and recommendations of the previous General Assemblies, what were applied and what weren’t, and why.

The MECC went through a dangerous period during which its existence was threatened, and a large part of the team left it, its services declined, its effectiveness weakened, and its organizational culture withered, due to the dismantling of its community. When we say community, we symbolize this huge number of people that were working and interacting within it, from the MECC team, and most importantly, from the representatives of churches in the various committees of the institution.

Therefore, we look forward not only to recompose the organizational structures of the MECC, but also its organizational culture, the set of values, ideals, ways of thinking, patterns of behavior and vision. This target was mentioned as a priority in the MECC Quadrennial Strategic Framework that we developed last year and which was accepted by the Executive Committee at the time before being presented to our international partners.

Here, I must inform you that we will present this plan before the elected Executive Committee for advice, comment and possibly development.

We must also make it clear that our approach was in the logic of the strategic framework and not in the logic of the strategic plan, in order to secure a wide margin of action for the various programs of the Council and its working groups. The framework provides a margin of movement and development that the plan does not secure, since it may obligate the working teams to some goals that need to be modified according to the environmental variables. Working in a region such as the Middle East requires a high percentage of ability to accommodate and adapt due to the rapid changes taking place in it.

In addition, interaction with this volatile environment constitutes an essential means for the relentless search for an update of the role that the MECC must fulfill. The MECC is neither a supra-church nor a super-church, but rather an inter-church setting, and here lies the main challenge for its role: to make the arid no man’s land “areas” between the churches fertile fields for interaction and joint endeavors. I can say that the Council has succeeded somewhat in some areas, but there is still a lot to be done, and this is what we will be gradually submitting to the Executive Committee as of its next face to face meeting.

As for the other matter that we need to crystallize gradually, so that it becomes part of the MECC Organizational Culture, it is the decision-making process. We must find a balance between the necessity of follow-up and monitoring, which is one of the first duties of the decision-making bodies in institutions, such as the Executive Committee, and the necessity of expeditious action that the MECC team needs in its daily action. The balance between these two necessities is easy to establish, and in this context we have developed some proposals that we will put forward during the next meeting as well.

Dear Reverend Paul Haidostian,

We welcome you to our common home, as President of the MECC on behalf of the Evangelical Family and President of the Union of the Armenian Evangelical Churches in the Near East, where, for nearly half a century ago, Reverend Dr. Hovhannes Aharonian, President of the Union and the first President of the MECC on behalf of the Evangelical Family, served since its establishment in 1974 and until 1985. He was one of the "Founding Fathers" and was distinguished, besides his knowledge, by his judgment, far-sightedness and calmness, and this is some of what you have.

On God’s blessing, we proceed, full of the love that the Lord gave us, and strengthened by an eternal and unrelenting faith, aiming at the establishment and development of institutions, the only guarantee for a better future for humankind.

Beirut, Haigazian University, July 27, 2022