Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity has a history of over 100 years, in which Christians around the world have taken part in an octave of prayer for visible Christian unity. It is an international Christian ecumenical observance kept annually around Pentecost in the Southern Hemisphere and between 18-25 January in the Northern Hemisphere. Each year ecumenical partners in a different region are asked to prepare the materials, including chiefly an ecumenical opening prayer service and biblical reflections and prayers for the eight-days of the octave, employed by churches around the world.
 

Theme for 2025

 

“Do you believe this?” (John 11:26) 

                                                                            Photo: Leo Lintang/Alamy Stock Photo

For 2025, the prayers and reflections for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity were prepared by the brothers and sisters of the monastic community of Bose in northern Italy. 2025 marks the 1,700th anniversary of the first Christian Ecumenical Council, held in Nicaea, near Constantinople in 325 AD. This commemoration provides a unique opportunity to reflect on and celebrate the common faith of Christians, as expressed in the Creed formulated during this Council; a faith that remains alive and fruitful in our days. The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity 2025 offers an invitation to draw on this shared heritage and to enter more deeply into the faith that unites all Christians.

Resources for 2025

The resources are jointly published by the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity and the World Council of Churches and are available on the World Council of Churches website by following this link.

Churches Together in Britain and Ireland have produced resources which can be accessed by following this link.

CTMR Networking Event 2024

This year, inspired by the call to “go and do likewise”, CTMR Church Leaders brought together their wider teams, putting faces to names that have often appeared on emails and memos. 

Around 40 people gathered at the Margaret Clitheroe Centre, for a programme centred around a shared lunch - deliberately planned to simply provide space for conversations to start, working relationships to deepen and new ideas to spark and share brief moments of prayer together.

Very much appreciated were the contribution of various speakers who offered “snapshot presentations” of practical on the ground initiatives made possible through ecumenical co-operation. This included stories from Together Liverpool, seeking to enable local church community action partnerships; the CTMR social action team, working ecumenically to support refugee and asylum seekers; the Skelmersdale Ecumenical Centre developing an thriving community centre and beacon of hope through a new approach to ecumenical partnership; Hope Wirral, a growing mission partnership that emerged from the Hope 08 initiative; Diaspora LEP’s, recounting how churches from across cultures are forming effective partnerships, and Gather UK – exploring how churches can have a voice in the recently established mayoral Liverpool City Region.

Responses from those who were present indicated that numerous conversations were started and contacts made that have potential to bear significant fruit in the months and years ahead.

A very different gathering perhaps to what we have become used to in our Week of Prayer for Unity, but one we sense that was worthwhile, fruitful and fully in the spirit of this longstanding event.