Life and Work

The Universal Christian Conference on Life and Work, held in Stockholm in 1925, was the first large-scale gathering of leaders of Anglican, Protestant, and Orthodox churches after the First World War. Together they spoke out for justice, peace, and reconciliation. The conference gave birth to the Life and Work movement, in which churches sought to respond to social, political, and international challenges, and which was one of the main streams that led to the creation of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in 1948.

More than 300 documents in relation with the Life and Work movement from the 1920’s are available online. They consist in two sets of material. The first set, published from 1917 until 1948, are the communications, pamphlets, study documents, proceedings and reports of the process leading up to and following the World Conferences on Life and Work in 1925 and 1937. They are foundational documents about how Christian churches gathered to witness together on issues such as economic justice following the First World War and the Great Depression, the struggles for decolonization, and the relation of churches and Christianity to the totalitarianism of the 1930s that led to the Second World War. The second set relates to the work of the WCC on ecumenical social ethics and action after its foundation at its 1st Assembly in Amsterdam 1948, including the churches’ role in the “rapid social change” that accompanied the end of the colonial era; the movement of liberation and racial, gender, and political justice; the quest for a just, participatory, and sustainable society against the background of the threats to the natural environment and creation; and Christian faith and the world economy today.