Today at the WCC central committee we were able to welcome our two new member churches - they were voted in as full member churches yesterday but their representatives only got to Geneva today, thanks to delays in their flights.
The two new member churches are the Independent Presbyterian Church in Brazil and the Lao Evangelical Church, the first WCC member church from Laos.
Following their official welcome cakes were cut and shared amongst delegates, visitors and staff at the coffee break.
Given that many Christian churches still have theological issues about sharing communion or the eucharist, the cakes were a good celebratory symbolic shared meal ressembling an agape.
The word fellowship is translated either as communauté or communion into French and as Gemeinschaft into German. This can lead to problems when translating theological documents - a fellowship is not the same as a communion but they can both be rendered by the same German word - which also can mean community! Trying to work out what the author may mean is often quite a challenge.
Fortunately fellowship with chocolate or raspberry cake is easy to translate into most languages and cutures.
Thursday 14 February 2008
From 347 to 349 member churches - a welcome with chocolate cake
Publié par Jane à l'adresse 12:52
Libellés : ecumenism, translation, WCC
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2 Comments:
The cake is a fantastic story! The article (as you wrote it) should be issued by WCC, as an official press release. What Christ cannot united at His table, a baker can do with chocolate cake!
I thought of this post yesterday when I incorrectly translated the Spanish word 'pasterlero' (which essentially means cake-maker as far as I can figure out) as pastor!
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