The Ukrainian War as an X-Ray of Ecumenical Fatigue: Reflections on Luke 12:32
CYRIL HOVORUN
The Very Rev. Archimandrite Cyril Hovorun is Director of the Huffington Ecumenical Institute at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He is a renowned Ukrainian Orthodox theologian and scholar. He holds a PhD in Theology and has taught at prestigious institutions such as Stockholm School of Theology and Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. Fr. Cyril has authored numerous influential works, including Eastern Christianity in Its Texts (T&T Clark, 2022), Scaffolds of the Church: Towards Poststructural Ecclesiology (Cascade, 2017) and Political Orthodoxies: The Unorthodoxies of the Church Coerced (Fortress, 2018). His research focuses on ecclesiology, church history, and the intersection of theology, politics, and social issues, highlighting his commitment to engaging with contemporary challenges in the modern world.
The Kingdom mentioned by Christ in Luke 12:32 can readily be interpreted as the Church. As the Kingdom of the Father can only be one – because the Father is one – so too is the Church essentially one. Christ’s encouragement to the “little flock” that the Kingdom will be God’s gift to them is therefore also an admonition to preserve its oneness. In other words, this passage is as powerful in commanding Christian unity as John 17:20-23, with Jesus’s prayer that “all of them may be one, Father.” At the same time, Luke’s passage is clearer in affirming the role of human agency in sustaining the Church’s unity. According to Luke, the Father’s Kingdom is entrusted to the people, who are implied to take care of it from that point. Of course, the passage does not imply that the Father withdraws from caring about the Kingdom – it is still His Kingdom. What the passage implies, however, is a synergy between the Father and the “little flock” in caring for Christ’s Church.
When there is synergy with active human agency, however, there are always failures. The inevitable fallibility of human agency in sustaining the Church, convincingly demonstrated by Church history, led me, in my ecclesiological studies, to distinguish between the Church’s nature and its structures. The Church’s nature is the core of the Kingdom. It comprises everything in the Church that cannot be changed and without which the Church cannot be the Church: the Scripture, Baptism, the Body and Blood of Christ, the Ministry, and so forth.
The forms of ministry in the Church may vary, but its essence remains the same: to help Christ cultivate the “little flock.” Ministry is an unalienable part of the Church’s nature, whereas particular forms of ministry belong to the Church’s structures. These include primacy, hierarchy, and the like. Structures are always the product of divine-human synergy. They are designed to uphold the Church’s nature and should correspond to it. However, they do not do so automatically, and they often fail.
Church structures can, and do, even turn against the Church’s nature. In such cases, they make the Church appear wrong in what it does and says. Among other erratic appearances, they make the Church look and act divided. The Christian community becomes fragmented as a result of ecclesial structures’ malfunctioning. Their original rationale was to serve the Church’s unity, but as time passes, they may depart from this original rationale and lose focus on it. In their mistaken modus operandi, caused by imperfect human input into the divine-human synergy, ecclesial structures can and do cause divisions in the Christian community.
The Church’s nature, however, requires the Church to be one and inspires what we call the ecumenical movement. This movement emerged as an emergency response, in a time of catastrophic human violence, to the failure of ecclesial structures to sustain the Church’s unity. The ecumenical movement is therefore also an unfolding of divine-human synergy, and so here too we must distinguish between its nature and its structures.
The nature of ecumenism is to serve the Church’s unity, an unalienable feature of the Church’s nature. In other words, the two natures correspond directly to each other. Like the Church, the global ecumenical movement has developed its own structures. Similarly to the ecclesial structures, ecumenical structures are supposed to serve their nature but often do not.
Both ecclesial and ecumenical structures fail when, instead of serving their corresponding nature, they demand to be served: I would call this phenomenon structural autarcheia. It happens when auxiliary structures become self-sufficient. Their authority stems from the nature they are supposed to serve, but they spend this authority for their own well-being. As a result, their bureaucracy grows enormous and inflexible, their focus shifts or gets blurred, and the original rationale for their existence receives mostly lip service.
The departure of structures from their original rationale, which is to serve the nature and purpose of the Church, causes disappointment with both the structures and nature. I believe this is one reason for what has been called “ecumenical fatigue.” The “little flocks” seem disappointed with the ecumenical movement, which has become institutionalized through platforms such as the World Council of Churches (WCC). This council is a superstructure of the global ecumenical movement. It was designed to encompass and serve the ideals of the Christian desire for unity, yet I believe it has departed from the original rationale by shifting its focus to agendas not quite relevant to this rationale. These agendas are more political and ideological than theological, which are necessary to maintain alignment between ecumenical structures and the nature of the Church that they serve.
As a result, we are facing a crisis in the global ecumenical movement. Fatigue is a symptom of this crisis, not its cause or disease per se. It has an etiology, which, I believe, can be found at the level where structures touch nature. Frictions between them cause the surface to shake and the ecumenical organism to feel pain.
When a body exhibits symptoms such as high temperature, headache, a runny nose, or a cough, a more thorough examination is needed. Conflicts reveal the etiology of structural diseases in the most effective way. However, they are invasive and painful. Wars are like huge X-ray machines that, in the most striking way, reveal the malfunctioning entrails of organizations such as the WCC.
This organization was established in 1948, in the aftermath of World War II. In the spirit of the United Nations’ rationale, which was to prevent further wars, the delegates of the First Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam in August 1948 formally declared: “War is contrary to the will of God.” The official report further expanded on this foundational stance, including the exact text: “War as a method of settling disputes is incompatible with the teaching and example of our Lord Jesus Christ. The part which war plays in our present international life is a sin against God and a degradation of man.”
When the war in Ukraine began, the largest in terms of violence, destruction, and casualties in Europe since 1945, the WCC almost completely failed to acknowledge and address it in a meaningful way. It acknowledged the war rhetorically while refusing every step that would have made that acknowledgment consequential. In a previous publication in Ecumenical Trends,[1] I demonstrated this through an examination of the decisions and discussions at the WCC General Assembly in Karlsruhe in 2022. While the Assembly provided space for discussion and ultimately adopted a statement condemning the war and identifying Russia as the aggressor, it nevertheless continued a pattern of moral equivalence between Russia and Ukraine. Ukrainian participation in the General Assembly remained constrained, while representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church retained full standing and advanced Kremlin-aligned narratives.
Soon after the General Assembly in October 2022, a high-ranking WCC delegation, led by its Acting General Secretary Ioan Sauca, visited Moscow and met with Patriarch Kirill. The delegation returned to Geneva, happy to announce that the Patriarch had denounced the idea of holy wars. They regarded this denunciation as sufficient to continue business with the Moscow Patriarchate as usual. This business continued until March 2024, when a congress of the World Russian People’s Council, held in Moscow, stated: “From the spiritual and moral point of view, the Special Military Operation is a Holy War, in which Russia and its people are defending the single spiritual space of Holy Russia.” This statement, approved by the same Patriarch Kirill who had promised the WCC delegation that he is against such wars, meant that the Russian Orthodox Church does not really appreciate the WCC’s efforts to preserve their collaboration. The WCC makes significant concessions for the sake of this collaboration, while the ROC does not seem to make any.
The WCC leadership has swallowed the insult. On the one hand, the WCC’s new General Secretary, Jerry Pillay, issued a formal statement declaring that the WCC “cannot reconcile” the decree’s declaration of a “holy war” with what Patriarch Kirill had explicitly told WCC leadership.[2] On the other hand, collaboration between the WCC and the ROC grew even closer, as became clear at the WCC’s Central Committee meeting in Johannesburg in June 2025. The Russian Orthodox Church had a strong presence there and was given a red-carpet reception, a kind Donald Trump would show Vladimir Putin in Anchorage two months later. Russian delegates actively participated in many committees – reportedly more so than at previous similar meetings.
This made even clearer the growing discrepancy between the WCC’s words and deeds regarding the war that the Moscow Patriarchate openly supports, dismissing any objection to it from its ecumenical partners. The Statement on the Way of Just Peace, adopted by the WCC 10th General Assembly in Busan in 2013, and the 2011 foundational Ecumenical Call to Just Peace, adopted by the WCC Central Committee meetings in Geneva in February 2011, state things as they should be. But the same Central Committee does not seem willing to implement its own statements, such as the following:
Without peace, can there be justice? Without justice, can there be peace? Too often, we pursue justice at the expense of peace, and peace at the expense of justice. To conceive peace apart from justice is to compromise the hope that ‘justice and peace shall embrace’ (Ps. 85:10).[3]
This is exactly the aspiration of Ukrainian Christians regarding how the war waged against them by Russia should end. We want peace, but we want it to be just. Just peace is impossible without bringing the perpetrators to account. The same statement confirms this by calling for “perpetrators accountable – even perpetrators from within church communities” (An Ecumenical Call to Just Peace, 21). This is a nice theory. In practice, the “perpetrators from within church communities,” in this case the Russian Orthodox Church, are not only brought to account but are treated as a valuable partner.
Here is one example. On September 15, 2026, General Secretary Jerry Pillay met with a delegation from the Moscow Patriarchate, led by Metropolitan Antoniy Sevriuk, Chairman of its Department for External Church Relations. The moderator of the WCC central committee, Bishop Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, also participated in the meeting online. The statement following the meeting, published on the WCC website, highlights the General Secretary’s words: “The church must speak together against violence and injustice, and the path to that common witness is dialogue.”[4] The statement contains no condemnation of the Moscow Patriarchate’s active involvement in the aggression against Ukraine or of the aggression itself. The meeting took place several weeks after Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, Antoniy Sevriuk’s boss, published a book, War Beyond the Visible Reasons and Consequences (Publishing House of the Moscow Patriarchate, 2026), which is essentially a theological apology for the war. The WCC’s communiques made no reference to this apology.
From meetings like this, the WCC appears to be a systemic enabler of a systemic abuser and a perpetrator of the war and violence: the sort of violence that Jerry Pillay, Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, and other WCC officials witnessed during their visit to Kyiv in July 2026. It reminds me of how Donald Trump’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, also enablers of the abuser and perpetrator, speak, or rather do not speak, about violence and war when they meet their Russian counterparts. At least the smiles on their faces look the same – even as Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities are hit by Russian missiles and drones.
This war has become a litmus test of whether the WCC’s structures are coherent not only with its own statements but also with the very nature of the ecumenical movement. I believe that the WCC has failed the test. The test has shown that this organization is in crisis. The diagnosis is the detachment of the ecumenical structures from the nature of the ecumenical quest. This includes the betrayal of values such as justice that underpin this quest.
Many in the WCC believe that challenging the Russian Orthodox Church’s participation in this organization will trigger an irreversible crisis within it. If the ROC leaves, this will set off a chain reaction, prompting other Orthodox Churches to leave as well. These churches already have doubts about their participation in the ecumenical movement. In such a case, as the ROC threatens the WCC, the council would become a council of Protestant churches, given that the Catholic Church is not part of it anyway. However, by fearing the crisis with which the ROC blackmails the WCC, the council allows a bigger crisis to take root within its body. This is a crisis of values, of the WCC’s original rationale, and of the very idea of Church unity.
The ROC hierarchy has demonstrated that it is not sincerely committed to the cause of unity. The only reason this church remains in the WCC is to use its facilities to promote the Russian agenda, which is almost entirely the Kremlin’s agenda. The ROC is not interested in Christian unity. It is not even interested in preserving the ecumenical structures. If this church sees that its political ends are no longer served by these structures, it will not hesitate to undermine them. After using the WCC and no longer needing it, the ROC will easily leave it, dragging other Orthodox churches with it.
The only way for the WCC to prevent such a scenario is to return to its original rationale and the values laid at its foundations. This means addressing the war in Ukraine honestly, together with the issue of the ROC. Otherwise, this ecumenical platform will have to reckon with its choice between war and dishonor. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, it has chosen dishonor, but it will still have war. Let me conclude with the WCC’s own assertion: “When justice and peace are lacking, or set in opposition, we need to reform our ways.”[5] Indeed, the WCC needs to reform its ways; otherwise, it will continue discrediting itself.
As we approach the 2027 Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, with its thematic exhortation to set our fear aside and take responsibility for the gift of the Kingdom entrusted to us, let me cite another Christian passage, probably written before the Gospel of Luke, from the Didache, or the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles: “There are two ways, one of life and one of death.” In light of this teaching, we see all the more clearly the sharp contrast in Luke 12:32 between the way of fear and the way of the Kingdom. In our ecumenical journey, we should be driven not by fear of conflict but by hope that our all-too-human failures can be overcome by God’s presence in our midst. If we are afraid of upsetting ecumenical companions who want to exploit our fear, we will never reach our goal, the restoration of Christian unity for the sake of God’s Kingdom. Our hope should embolden us to follow another of Christ’s commands: “Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil” (Matthew 5:37). It is tempting to camouflage our fear with euphemisms that avoid yeses and nos. But we should not yield to this temptation, for this is the way of death.
[1] Cyril Hovorun, “Can ‘Ecumenism as Usual’ be Possible in the Wake of the War in Ukraine?” Ecumenical Trends 52, no. 5 (2023), 25-31.
[2] WCC statement on Decree of XXV World Russian People’s Council, signed on April 12, 2024, by Rev. Prof. Dr. Jerry Pillay, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches: https://www.oikoumene.org/resources/documents/wcc-statement-on-decree-of-xxv-world-russian-peoples-council.
[3] World Council of Churches, An Ecumenical Call to Just Peace (Feburary 20, 2011), 1: https://www.oikoumene.org/resources/documents/ecumenical-call-to-just-peace.
[4] World Council of Churches News, “WCC receives delegation from Russian Orthodox Church,” September 15, 2026: https://www.oikoumene.org/news/wcc-receives-delegation-from-russian-orthodox-church.
[5] An Ecumenical Call to Just Peace, 1.