Pilgrims of Peace, Trust and Hope

Uniting Church President-elect Rev Dr Paul Goh has reflected on the Church’s vocation to peace and reconciliation after attending the International Ecumenical Peace Convocation in Seoul last week.

The gathering – organised by the World Council of Churches, Christian Conference of Asia and National Council of Churches in Korea – brought together Christians from around the world to consider the Church’s role in peacebuilding amid war, division and growing geopolitical conflict, with particular focus on the Korean Peninsula.

The convocation marked 40 years since the historic Glion Consultation, where Christians from North and South Korea met and affirmed that their identity in Christ could transcend political division.

For Rev Dr Goh, who represented the Uniting Church President’s Office, the gathering was also a deeply personal return.

In 1988, as a university student, he attended a service adopting the Korean Church’s “88 Declaration” on national reunification and peace.

“Returning 38 years later, I realised I had not simply come back to where I began; I had been travelling,” he writes in his reflection on the convocation.

That journey, he adds, resonates with the Uniting Church’s Basis of Union as a “pilgrim people, always on the way towards a promised goal”.

“The pilgrimage of the Uniting Church and the pilgrimage of the worldwide ecumenical movement meet whenever Christians cross boundaries to listen to the wounds of the world and seek together the things that make for peace,” he added.

The gathering confronted participants with some of those wounds.

Rev Dr Goh visited the National Museum of Korean Democracy, a former Anti-Communist Interrogation Office where democracy activists were detained, interrogated and tortured. There he encountered the photograph of a university student, almost exactly his own age, who died after being tortured there 39 years ago.

The experience reinforced a challenge from keynote speaker Rev Dr Mitri Raheb, who urged Christians to “touch the wound” rather than speak about peace only through declarations and conferences.

Rev Dr Goh says peacebuilding must be grounded in justice, truth and proximity to those who suffer.

“Reconciliation without justice can become another way of asking wounded people to remain silent,” he writes.

A highlight of the gathering was a peace pilgrimage along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Rev Dr Goh was one of four participants who walked the Peace Trail, while others walked an Eco Trail alongside them, separated by a barbed-wire fence. Yet the fence could not divide the sky, wind, fields or the table where the pilgrims would later share lunch.

“Perhaps there was a glimpse of God’s peace in that moment,” he reflected.

The convocation concluded with an Ecumenical Joint Worship for Peace and Reconciliation, building on the 2026 Seoul Peace Declaration adopted during the gathering.