Ecumenical Prayer Service for
Christian Unity

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity
January 18th-25th, 2025

“Do you believe this?”
(John 11:26)

For this year, 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. This year 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.

The Council of Nicaea

Convoked by the Emperor Constantine, the Council of Nicaea was attended, according to tradition, by 318 Fathers, mostly from the East. The Church, having just emerged from hiding and persecution, was beginning to experience how difficult it was to share the same faith in the different cultural and political contexts of the time. Agreement on the text of the Creed was a matter of defining the essential common foundations on which to build local communities that recognised each other as sister churches, each respecting the diversity of the other.

Disagreements had arisen among Christians in the previous decades, which sometimes degenerated into serious conflicts. These disputes were on matters as diverse as: the nature of Christ in relation to the Father; the question of a single date to celebrate Easter and its relationship with the Jewish Passover; opposition to theological opinions considered heretical; and how to re-integrate believers who had abandoned the faith during the persecutions in earlier years.

The approved text of the Creed used the first-person plural, “We believe...”. This form emphasised the expression of a common belonging. The Creed was divided into three parts dedicated to the three persons of the Trinity, followed by a conclusion condemning affirmations that were considered heretical. The text of this Creed was revised and expanded at the Council of Constantinople in 381 AD, where the condemnations were removed. This is the form of the profession of faith that Christian churches today recognise as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, often referred to simply as the Nicene Creed.

From 325 to 2025

Although the Council of Nicaea decreed how the date of Easter should be calculated, subsequent divergences of interpretation led to the feast frequently being marked on different dates in East and West. Though we are still awaiting the day when we will again have a common celebration of Easter yearly, by happy coincidence, in this anniversary year of 2025, this great feast will be celebrated on the same date by the Eastern and Western churches.

The meaning of the saving events which all Christians will celebrate on Easter Sunday, 20 April 2025, has not changed with the passage of seventeen centuries. The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity is an opportunity for Christians to explore afresh this living heritage and re-appropriate it in ways that are in keeping with contemporary cultures, which are even more diverse today than those of the Christian world at the time of the Council of Nicaea. Living the apostolic faith together today does not imply re-opening the theological controversies of that time, which have continued down the centuries, but rather a prayerful rereading of the scriptural foundations and ecclesial experiences that led to that Council and its decisions.

World Council of Churches Resources

Download the sequential hymnal for the upcoming service from the Daily Sequential Hymnal webpage.

• Tuesday, January 21, 2025 — Maximus the Confessor; Martyr Neophytos

  Christian Unity Prayer Service 6:00pm

  Saint Theresa Church, Main Sanctuary
  25 West Lipoa Street, Kihei

Aloha hour is held after the service. Feel free to bring a dish to share with everyone!