The MECC Secretary General Dr. Michel Abs Presents a Lecture at the ACT Alliance MENA Forum Annual Meeting:
The Church should be a precocious warning voice for harmful trends that take place in society and a catalyst for mutual maturation between different groups
The ACT Alliance MENA Forum held its annual meeting in Amman and online, on Monday 13 May 2024, in the presence of the concerned officers of the ACT Alliance, the Secretary General of the Middle East Council of Churches (MECC) Dr. Michel Abs, the Director of the MECC Diakonia and Social Service Department at Mr. Samer Laham, and members of the ACT Alliance MENA Forum representatives of local and international organizations.
During the meeting, the Secretary General Dr. Michel Abs delivered a lecture entitled “Church’s Role in Peace Building, A Middle Eastern Experience”, in which he spoke about many topics centered around embeddedness of peace in Christian Faith, essence and ingredients of peacebuilding, the modalities of Church’s action in peacebuilding, the Logos: "word, discourse, & reason", the Praxis: Joint Actions in Society & Culture, and working towards a paradigm of Church peacebuilding.
In his conclusive thoughts, Dr. Abs said that the Church should be, by virtue of its structure and culture, a precocious warning voice for harmful trends that take place in society, among which is the advent of conflicts. He also mentioned that the Church is to be a catalyst for mutual maturation (tanadoj تناضج) between different groups that form a society.
Dr. Abs added that this leads to rapprochement between people and groups leading to a sort of osmosis/ symbiosis, which harmonizes relationships between people. He stressed that in this sense the Christians remain the salt of the earth, and no other social settings could perform this role like the church. Thus, the Christian values are the guarantee to this role.
