Topic: 5.Geneva

Palestinian Bishop Elected President of the Lutheran World Federation

Bishop Munib A. Younan is a Passionate Campaigner for Peace and Inter-Faith Dialogue in the Middle East

STUTTGART, Germany, 24 July 2010 – Bishop Munib A. Younan of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Jordan and the Holy Land (ELCJHL) has been elected President of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) by the Eleventh Assembly here, a gathering of 418 delegates and others from the LWF member churches.


Three hundred and sixty registered delegates voted, representing 140 member churches from 79 countries. Rt Rev. Dr Younan received 300 votes affirming his election, 23 against; there were 37 abstentions. There were no other nominees.

Younan, 59, succeeds Presiding Bishop Mark S. Hanson of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, who has been President of the LWF since the organization’s last Assembly in Winnipeg, Canada, in 2003.

Ordained in 1976 after study in Palestine and gaining a degree from Helsinki [Finland] University, Younan was a youth pastor and teacher in his homeland. From 1976 to 1979 he was pastor of the Church of the Redeemer in Jerusalem and he has also served parishes in Beit Jala and Ramallah. He studied at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago and he holds an honorary doctorate, granted by Wartburg Theological Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa.

The president-elect has headed his church body since 1998 and was the third Palestinian bishop of the church founded by Germans in the nineteenth century and previously led by clergy from Germany. A member of the LWF since 1974, the ELCJHL has about 3,000 members.

The bishop was the first to translate the Augsburg Confession, a key document of the Lutheran Church, into Arabic.

Younan is a former vice-president of the LWF, is president of the Fellowship of Middle East Evangelical Churches and serves with three Jerusalem patriarchs and nine other bishops on the International Christian Committee of Jerusalem. He is also a co-founder of the Council of Religious Institutions in the Holy Land, made up of the two chief rabbis of Israel, heads of the local churches, the Chief Judge of the Islamic Court in Palestine and other Muslim leaders.

He is the author of Witnessing for Peace, a book about the search for peace in his homeland and numerous articles on churches and the search for peace in the Holy Land.

His wife, Suad, is Director of the Helen Keller School in the Jerusalem suburb of Beit Hanina, which educates visually-impaired children. She is also the chair of the women’s committee of the ELCJHL.

The couple has three children and one grandchild.


CHOCOLATE MILK - Bishop Younan's first contact with the Lutheran World Federation (LWF)

STUTTGART, Germany, 24 July 2010 – Prior to his election today as the next LWF President, Rt Rev. Dr Younan told the Eleventh Assembly that, in the 1950s, chocolate milk was offered daily to students in the Martin Luther School in Jerusalem. It was a gift of the LWF.

He explained, “The chocolate milk physically nourished us refugees and was the answer to our prayer, ‘Give Us Today Our Daily Bread.’ It also nurtured in us knowledge of the theology of the Lutheran communion; it taught us about God’s love.”

Reflecting on his personal history as a recipient of “daily bread” from the hands of others, Younan said that “we [the LWF] must be boldly prophetic.” He urged the communion to shape policies that will address the world’s pressing concerns, including climate change, illegitimate debt, gender discrimination in church and society and governmental corruption. In this way, he said, the communion “carries her pulpit out into the street and introduces to the world the God of love.” The LWF must continue to focus on shared values “in order to oppose extremism and xenophobia, especially anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.”

Younan, who is Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Jordan and the Holy Land (ELCJHL), said that living in the midst of conflict motivates him to work with all churches for justice, peace and reconciliation in their own contexts. “It has taught me how to keep hope alive in hopeless situations.”

Because he lives in a land of conflict and tension, his election as LWF President would be an encouragement to minority churches in countries with other religious majorities, he said. It would also give Arab Christians “new courage.” At the press conference following his election, he told journalists that “we should encourage Arab Christians to stay in Arab countries. For what is the Holy Land without Christians?”

Whether or not the state of Israel has “theological meaning”, Younan said in reply to a journalist’s question, is not a pressing concern for him. Today “our concern in the Middle East is fear of Israelis and fear of Palestinians.” It is essential, he said, that whatever theological view is adopted, “it does not impede the progress of justice. I want justice for Israel and justice for Palestine.”

He noted that both the general secretary-elect (Rev. Dr Martin Junge from Chile) and the president-elect come from two of the smallest Lutheran churches in the world. “In our communion,” he said, “there is no large or small, no majority or minority, no South or North, for we all servants, sharing the resources and gifts that God has given to us.”

As long as there is poverty, HIV/AIDS, oppression and injustice our Lutheran communion cannot rest, the President-elect said. “It will always be struggling communion in serving its God-given purpose.”