A Theme That Named the Spirit, and an Address That Tested It

Every World Council of Churches assembly picks a theme, and most pass unremarked once the meeting ends. Canberra's did not. "Come, Holy Spirit, Renew the Whole Creation" was the first assembly theme to name the Holy Spirit outright rather than address Christ or the church in more familiar language, and the second half of the sentence was doing real theological work: the renewal being prayed for was not confined to the church but reached the whole of creation, the physical world along with the human one. That was a deliberate widening, meant to bring the assembly's attention to ecological crisis and to a Spirit understood as active in creation generally, not only in believers.

The theme got a plenary address to match its ambition, delivered by the Korean feminist theologian Chung Hyun Kyung. Rather than a conventional lecture, she staged something closer to ritual: invoking a series of "spirits" belonging to victims of historical and contemporary violence, leading dance with aboriginal and Korean immigrant participants, and burning paper as part of the performance. Delegates who had come expecting a theological address got something considerably stranger and more physical, and the assembly's theme, meant to open a conversation about the Spirit in creation, ended up defining itself against one address's attempt to answer that very question.