The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity takes place from 18-25 January 2019 on the theme ‘Justice and justice only you shall pursue’. Locally there is a Service of Prayer at St. John’s (Church of Ireland, Church Street, Longford) on Monday, January 21st.
Bishop Brendan Leahy, Bishop of Limerick and co-chair of the Irish Inter-Church Meeting, offers a brief introduction to this year’s Christian Unity Week in this short video.
A number of events to mark the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity are taking place this week in parishes and dioceses across Ireland. Check out local parish and diocesan websites for more information.
Theme and Resources for 2019
Resources for this year’s Week of Prayer for Christian Unity were produced by Christians from Indonesia, the largest country in South East Asia, made up of more than 17,000 islands, 1,340 different ethnic groups and over 740 local languages, united by one national language Bahasa Indonesia. With some 86% of its 260 million people estimated to be Muslim, it has the largest Islamic population of any country. About 10% of Indonesians are Christian. Indonesians have lived by the principle of gotong royong which is to live in ‘solidarity and by collaboration’, regarding all Indonesians as brothers and sisters.
The Christians of Indonesia found that the words of Deuteronomy, ‘Justice, and only justice, you shall pursue…'(see Deut. 16:18-20) spoke powerfully to their situation.
All the resources for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity 2019 can be found here.
The resources for An tSeachtain Ghuí le hAontacht Chríostaí 2019 are also available in the Irish language here.
Social media
You are invited to show your support for Christian Unity by posting messages and details of your events to the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity Twitter wall – simply add the #wpcuwall hashtag to your Twitter post (note they take 15 minutes to appear).
You can also find updates about the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity on Twitter by following the #wpcu2019 official hashtag.