The dream has become a reality… With God’s grace, the Ecumenical Institute for the Middle East has been founded and launched to enrich the Ecumenical Movement in the Middle East, building cadres for the church youth who posses knowledge about the churches of the East, their past and their present, about Islam and the Muslims, and the contemporary challenges. The Institute also seeks to broaden the knowledge of students on the bodies and institutions of the present ecumenism and working in the Middle East and the world.
The Institute’s administration has held several meeting about the Bossey Institute, subordinate of the World Council of churches in Geneva and has established cooperative basics that would support our institute in its first footsteps.
The Institute also seeks to create an effective ecumenical dynamism between its colleagues during their residence in Saint Augustine center in Lebanon where they can interact together through the life of love, knowledge, and common prayer.
In its first year, and by the grace of God, the Ecumenical Institute for the Middle East has made its first steps amid sorrows of the Middle Eastern Church.
This Institute was created to respond to the needs of the youth to ecumenical formation as they have expressed in various meetings of the World Student Christian Federation and through the Institute their strong desire for the ecumenical movement as a necessity, hope and a dream of a church that puts everyone in her ribs so it becomes more beautiful and glamorous despite violence and war. The students have said that they have felt that some of the ecumenism is about knowledge and love. Here we felt that we can overcome fear and anxiety because we realize that we are witnesses for Christ. Our cause is one and when our solidarity becomes a prayer to the work of the Holy Spirit. Whenever we surpass ignorance we surpass history and geography borders. The Institute’s students said in their rating for what they have learned and lived is that our realization to the importance of the other in our ecclesial life has made us liberated from the stereotype picture built in our minds about Islam and Muslims throughout all the confrontations we lived. We now know that we as Christians and Muslims are suffering from extremism in the Middle East. We seek a cultural revival between us that would approach us from God’s face so that we will be all founders of justice and peace in our East which God wanted us from and to him.
The Institute’s students from all Eastern churches have realized that they have an essential role in building the culture of dialogue and loving gathering rather than the culture of division and its consequences.
If the Ecumenical Institute for the Middle East was a pure youth initiative, it is thus from the church and to it. It expresses the new generations ‘refusal to the division as a certain and continuous state.
For the church unity, the Institute was founded.
- For the refusal of the rule of ignorance over history… the Institute was founded.
- For the church to surpass the experiences of violence and war… the Institute was founded.
- For our youths not to immigrate… the Institute was founded.
- For a new company with the Muslims… the Institute was founded.
- For the evolution of women along with men in the church and society… the Institute was founded.
- For the building of justice and peace… the Institute was founded.
- For the meeting of the other, every other… the Institute was founded.
- For the renewed theological creativity… the Institute was founded.
- For love to shine as a unity… the Institute was founded.
- For the building of youth ecumenical cadres for the church… the Institute was founded.
- For the partnership between the East and the world… the Institute was founded.
- For the icon of the Messiah to be drawn on our countries and the world… the Institute was founded.