Problems with Reuters

My colleague Juan, the WCC's media relations officer, had a busy few
days down here, busy and sometimes difficult because of a Reuters story on our meeting in Toulouse which has made itself into the Washington Post.

Depending how you read it might look as if the WCC thinks that Pentecostal
or evangelical churches are sects, though the piece doesn't put these
words in Juan's mouth, and the WCC does not use such language.

However for the individuals from the Pentecostal and evangelical
churches who have come to this meeting it means they may have problems with some people from their own communities who are unsure about working together with other
churches on such issues - it actually means they are already getting long
emails on the subject.

And looking up "sect" in the dictionary shows just what a range of
meanings the word has - http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sect.

For me this shows how difficult it is for us to communicate about what
churches are doing alot of the time. Of course communication is always a risk, but may
be an even greater risk is to not dare to communicate at all.

The good news is that there has been a really high level of interest. Yesterday at lunch time a mobile phone was being handed between about five participants as a journalist from the French Catholic daily La Croix interviewed them.

One of the things I'm interested in is reflecting on language and communication. If information is not in English it is almost as if it never happened in the international community, yet for local consumption the local language is also essential and in order toget information, news communicaiton out there beyond a few internationally minded folk it has to go out in many languages - if that weren't important we wouldn't have translated the Bible into so many lanaguges.