An Anglican layperson, Abuom in 2013 became the first woman and the first African to serve as moderator of the World Council of Churches (WCC) central committee, when she was elected by acclamation at the WCC 10th Assembly in Busan, Republic of Korea. She served until the WCC 11th Assembly in September 2023, held in Karlsruhe, Germany. Abuom was the president for the WCC from 1999 to 2006. Abuom was succeeded as WCC moderator of the central committee in September 2022 by Bishop Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, who commented, “After getting this sad news, I just watched her last video on the WCC homepage, which is something like her legacy for us as the new leadership. It was very moving for me to hear her speak. She says: ‘It is not winter but summer with green and fruit, although threatened. On the journey someone was called home, but that is part of the pilgrimage. We lose people, others get named and continue…” Bedford-Strohm said: “I will always hold her in loving memory. It is sad to lose her so soon after the end of her service to WCC. I am glad she still experienced the honor of being named as an Anglican canon. We will miss her love, her wisdom, her kindness, her confidence, her inspiration. She is now leaning in the everlasting arms.” Said Rev. Prof. Dr Jerry Pillay, whose term as WCC general secretary began in January of this year, "The WCC mourns the loss of its immediate past moderator, Dr Agnes Abuom, who passed away on 31 May after a brief illness. She was a woman of humble spirit, great compassion and steadfast faith. Though small in frame yet she possessed the energy, strength and vision for leadership far beyond the reach of many people her age." Pillay added "Her wisdom, patience, ability to listen, sensitivity and firmness all gave her the qualities of a dynamic and wise leader. The WCC was blessed to have her serve for many years in the ecumenical movement and then in the past 8 years as moderator of the central committee. Her passion for Christian unity, justice and peace are what prompted her to give sacrificial and untiring service to the WCC. We will always remember her with joy and thanksgiving. “Blessed are those who die in the Lord, they shall live forever.” Pillay concluded "May the presence and power of the Holy Spirit bring comfort, counsel, peace, love, strength and hope to Agnes’ family, friends, church and all those who knew and loved her in the WCC and beyond. May God’s grace be sufficient for you all." Bishop Mary Ann Swenson, former vice moderator of the WCC central committee, said Abuom was a blessing. “I remember our first time together in Geneva in December 2013,” said Swenson. “She took me to the service for Saint Lucia at the Anglican Church near our hotel, and I learned about Agnes’ years in Sweden. Today we honor Saint Agnes. I will miss her every day for the rest of my life. She was a remarkable leader. For us to walk side-by-side for nine years in our Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace was the crowning journey of my lifetime. Thanks be to God for the life and witness of this amazing woman.” The Most Revd. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, presiding bishop of the Church of Norway, and former WCC general secretary from 2010-2020, said Abuom was one of the great personalities and leaders in the global Christian family of our time. “The years we worked together, leading the work of the World Council of Churches, will remain precious memories and moments of blessings that I will treasure forever,” said Tveit. “Dr Agnes was a daughter of Africa, extremely gifted and empowered by God to raise the great issues of unity among people and among the churches in the whole world.” Tveit reflected on Abuom’s wisdom, passion, and spirituality, built on her faith and costly experiences. “Dr Agnes was a champion for true Christian unity, a unity in faith, hope, and love, with justice and peace for all,” he said. “She led our joint struggle in the ecumenical movement for unity, peace, and justice around the world with compassion and professional competence, embedded in a deep and profound spirituality: ‘Let us pray! Please, lead us in prayer!’—so she always started and concluded any session of work.” Tveit added that Abuom encouraged people to use their gifts and time to serve God in the callings given to them by the churches. “She conveyed this in a personal way to me and others, encouraging and challenging us to be courageous and faithful in our calling,” said Tveit. “As she was leading the World Council of Churches, but also in many other tasks that she accepted, she has given us a unique model of leadership and discipleship.” Abuom was a particularly profound inspiration for women and lay leadership in the church, concluded Tveit. “As God has now called her to eternal rest, I offer my thanks to the Triune God for granting me the gift to know and work together with this great woman, our beloved sister, Dr Agnes Abuom.” Abuom’s final years as moderator were marked by the changes wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic and by her work with the acting general secretary, Rev. Prof. Dr Ioan Sauca. “I am so proud of our work together,” he said. “Despite the suffering and death caused by the virus, Agnes clearly saw the pandemic as a defining pastoral challenge for the churches to accompany those in pain, to console those in grief, to demand healthcare for the afflicted, and to innovate in sharing the gifts of a truly global ecumenical spirituality.” Sauca added: “I am devastated; she was for me not only a moderator but a holy woman; she lived her faith in everything she did. We have to be grateful to God for the great gift He gave to us in the person of Agnes. She will be greatly missed.” Rudelmar Bueno de Faria, general secretary of the ACT Alliance, expressed his sadness. “Agnes’ commitment to the ecumenical world was truly without peer, and her loss will be felt around the world,” he said. “Agnes’ support of ecumenism was well appreciated by the ACT Alliance, and her support of the ecumenical diakonia of churches was an important part of her ministry." A child of the movement Abuom’s ecumenical journey began long before her election as moderator. Born in northwest Kenya in 1949 to a family with four brothers, Abuom’s ecumenical roots ran deep, with Protestant, Catholic, Anglican, and Pentecostal family members and early childhood education in missionary schools. Her political engagement also emerged early and unerring, going back to her student days at the University of Nairobi, when her Christian activism led her to exile and, later, imprisonment. “My faith journey is rather interesting,” she told an interviewer in 2009. “I was coming of age in the time of leftist thinking, and to combine leftist thinking and faith was not easy. The churches were often uneasy with socialism and many in the leftist political movements rejected religion. But I was able nonetheless to combine my leftist sense of justice and my faith. Later on, I found that they strengthened each other. My ideas about social justice were very much informed and strengthened by my faith. In this I was inspired by and drew strength from the example of my grandmother, the faith leader, who broke through ethnic and cultural barriers, refusing female genital mutilation and moving in new directions.” Abuom became involved with the World Council of Churches when the WCC’s assembly was held in Nairobi in 1975. She also was involved in student organizations and politics – the latter causing controversies that led her to leave Kenya for Sweden in 1976. There she learned Swedish and earned a degree in education. After two years as a youth worker for the WCC in Geneva, she returned to Sweden and earned a doctorate in missiology with a thesis on "The Role of Non-Governmental Organizations in Development." She worked in the WCC Youth Sub-Unit in the 1980s and later worked with refugee issues for the WCC in Sudan, and worked for two years in Zimbabwe as a tutor. Returning to Kenya in 1989, Abuom was imprisoned for her opposition to President Daniel Arap Moi. She then went on to work for the Anglican Church of Kenya, mostly with national development issues, and from 1991 with a civic education program. Abuom husband, Wilfred, passed away in 2014, and she has two daughters. By 2013, Abuom had already served on the WCC executive committee, representing the Anglican Church of Kenya. She was the president for the WCC from 1999 to 2006. She had also been a development consultant serving both Kenyan and international organizations and coordinating social action programmes for religious and civil society, especially in the Horn of Africa, establishing her own agency, TAABCO Research and Development Consultants, in 1997. Agnes Abuom served three consecutive terms on the central committee, first as a WCC president (1998-2006), then as a member (2006-2013) moderating the policy reference committee, then as moderator of the central committee (2013-2022). Her first WCC assembly was Nairobi (1975). She was a delegate of the Anglican Church of Kenya at the Harare (1998), Porto Alegre (2006), Busan (2013) and Karlsruhe (2022) assemblies. She served as moderator of the public issues committee in Porto Alegre, moderator of the policy reference committee in Busan and moderator of the assembly in Karlsruhe. She was also a member of the Special Commission on Orthodox Participation in the WCC and the Permanent Committee on Consensus and Collaboration. Abuom was also closely associated with the All Africa Conference of Churches, the National Council of Churches of Kenya, and WCC member churches in Africa, as well as Religions for Peace. Given such commitments, for Abuom, creative, practical engagement with migrants, abuse survivors, or victims of violence also means reframing the practice of ecumenism. “The witness of many in the forefront of struggles demands that we move away from the culture of conferences and statements and begin to get engaged in actions that nurture hope and alternatives,” she told the central committee in 2016. “There is room in the gospel for disagreement but there is no room for disengagement.” Looking back on her journey As WCC moderator, Abuom has said, “I saw the divine move of God in the time when the whole venture of discernment and consensus decision-making became a reality” in the council, modeling and promising a less hierarchical, more open structure in the churches and world communions as well. “As I left the council, I left with this very important experience of consensus-building, consensus decision-making, discerning the will of God. That resonates so much with me, and of course when you are in the business of mediation, reconciliation, and peace-building, what else would you anchor your work on?” Reflecting at the end of 2022 on the council’s last ten years, Abuom lifted up the Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace as a truly engaging and successful banner motif and strategy for the council’s work and as an agent for deepening the ecumenical fellowship, even during COVID, through emphasis on the spiritual life of prayer and sharing. She cited many genuine achievements, among them the renewed understanding Christian service as reflected in the document on ecumenical diakonia, the advance of consensus on the perennially divisive issues of human sexuality (in Conversations on the Pilgrim Way), and the enhanced, indeed “pivotal role” of communications in the global work of the fellowship. Abuom’s decades of dedicated work have earned her many plaudits and honours. In 2017, she was awarded the Lambeth Cross for Ecumenism by the Archbishop of Canterbury "for her exceptional contribution to the Ecumenical Movement, for her work with the World Council of Churches and currently its Moderator." In 2018, one of Norway’s largest private universities, VID Specialized University, awarded her an honorary doctorate, specifically affirming that she “has shown how academic knowledge can be translated into practical action with a clear theological and diaconal approach.” And in 2019 in the USA, Abuom received the National Council of Churches’ President’s Award for Excellence in Faithful Leadership, being recognized for her "exceptional, risk-taking leadership.” “I’m still waiting on the Lord” The perennial quest for Christian unity, she maintained, can open new ecumenical vistas through solidarity for social justice, seeing churches as communities of reconciliation. “Pilgrimage is about hope breaking into our present, motivating us to move forward, overcoming hurdles. . . We need to move from the nostalgia of the past, set aside our burdensome preoccupations and instruments that have outlived their purpose and venture into new and relevant areas of engagement.” A champion of gender justice, Abuom embraced the vision of WCC’s campaign against sexual and gender-based violence, Thursdays in Black, as it works toward a day when “we will have no more sexual and gender-based violence because the church will have stood firm with the vulnerable, with the survivors, and it will have said, ‘Enough is enough!’ ” Even welcoming her new role as a lay canon of the Anglican Church in Kenya, she remained impatient with the church. “It has pained [me] when my own communion could not resolve in an amicable manner, matters of human sexuality,” she said recently. “I’m still waiting on the Lord.” In thinking of the future of the ecumenical movement and the council, Abuom stressed the vital role of the WCC and “the biggest challenge” of cementing unity among the churches, to tackle the issues of youth, deepen engagement with other religions and, above all, to work through problems of injustice, violence and worsening climate for the survival of people and the planet. “We have to act,” she said. “We can no longer just say prayers and plant trees.” Abuom’s wholehearted commitment to justice was infectious. “When Dr Agnes Abuom is done talking to you,” wrote an interviewer in 2021, “you want to do either of two things; punch the air and scream, ‘we shall rise!’ Or sit in a quiet corner and ask yourself; ‘what’s my contribution to humanity?’ ”
All those who wish to share a message in memory of Dr Agnes Abuom are invited to send their thoughts by email to media@wcc-coe.org. Tributes have been issued to Dr Agnes Abuom and a memorial service will be held in the Ecumenical Centre in June 2023. WCC special photo gallery "Dr Agnes Abuom: peace pilgrim" | 
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