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4th Rally of Hope - Believers Unite for Peace
Written by Joshua Holmes, American Clergy Leadership Conference
Saturday, December 5, 2020
Las Vegas, United States—UPF International, together with the World Christian Leadership Conference (WCLC), co-sponsored the fourth online Rally of Hope with featured speakers who addressed an interfaith audience of hundreds of thousands around the world.
The rally was the concluding event in the two-day WCLC Convocation of December 4 and 5, with which WCLC celebrated the first anniversary of its founding.
The convocation was held in conjunction with the North American branch of Interreligious Association for Peace and Development (IAPD), one of UPF’s constitutent associations.
Some of the sessions were held concurrently in different regions of the world and hosted by local IAPD regional chapters with local speakers.
In addition to more than 2,000 Christian pastors from the United States and 3,000 clerics from throughout the world, more than a million believers from over 170 nations took part in the Rally of Hope via the Internet.
In her keynote message from the International Peace Education Center in Las Vegas, Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon said that, despite all obstacles, “God’s hope and humanity’s hope is to see a unified world … one big family under Heavenly Parent, a world of peace wherein all people live in unity as one family of humankind.”
The emcee of the Rally of Hope was Archbishop George A. Stallings, Jr., the chairman of IAPD-North America and the national co-chairman emeritus of ACLC (USA), who also moderated the final session of the convocation.
The theme of the two-day event was “Calling All Believers to Unite and Heal America: In a Time of Great Division, the People of God Must Take a Stand.” The rally’s speakers, well-known faith leaders from the United States and other nations, called for interfaith collaboration to resolve problems in the family, society, the environment and between nations—including the reunification of North and South Korea.
“We know that when we pray together, God’s Will comes in,” said Dr. Luonne Rouse, the national co-chairman of the American Clergy Leadership Conference, acknowledging that 2020 was a year of great difficulties, Dr. Rouse urged the audience to “pray without ceasing,” quoting the Bible’s 1 Thessalonians 5:17.
Referring to the theme of taking a stand, Pastor T.L. Barrett, senior pastor of Life Center Church of God in Christ, located in Chicago, recalled that in 1955, when Rosa Parks, a black woman, refused to give up her seat in a public bus to a white passenger, she paved the way for Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to champion the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
Pastor Paula White, spiritual advisor to President Donald Trump, encouraged the pastors to repent and extend God's love to all nations.
Bishop Noel Jones, senior pastor of the City of Refuge in Los Angeles, said Christian leaders should amplify Jesus’ truth “that we should love our enemies. … Our calling to true love and peace transcends democracy, monarchy, oligarchy, socialism, communism and autocracy.”
Bishop Don Meares, senior pastor at Evangel Cathedral in the U.S. state of Maryland, urged believers to focus on God, be clear about their faith and forgive others as they build a future of “divine peace.”
Cardinal Kelvin Felix, Roman Catholic Archbishop emeritus of Castries in the Caribbean, encouraged believers to “care for each other and to forgive each other at any offense.
Bishop Ki-hoon Kim, chairman of the WCLC Promotion Committee, said the WCLC was launched as a “great initiative for world Christianity to work together … to [realize] a heavenly unified world."
Archbishop Metropolitan Chrysostomos Celi, Orthodox Church in Ecuador, said the family must be strengthened, because the family is “the cornerstone to build a healthy society that cooperates well with church and nation.”
Prophet Uzwi leZwe Radebe from South Africa, founder of the Revelation Church of God, recently renamed the Revelation Spiritual Home, said, “May the WCLC become a force to reckon with, and may it be a platform by which spiritual leaders will forge closer cooperation and ties in addressing these critical issues of our times.”
Archpriest Vladimir Fedorov, Russian Orthodox Church, said there is renewed interest in a “spiritual culture” in both religious and civil society spheres. The mission of the church will be to “organize politics, culture and education in our society with the idea to help people develop their spiritual intelligence,” he said.
Music was provided by the Grammy Award-winning gospel artist and pastor Bishop Hezekiah Walker and the 5,000-voice Peace Starts With Me Choir, along with a joint youth choir singing “The Song of Unity.”
The WCLC was launched in December 2019 as part of an ecumenical conference and Rally for Peace held in the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey, with more than 1,000 Christian clergy and 20,000 laity in attendance.
Rally of Hope IV - 5 December 2020 from UPF Europe and Middle East on Vimeo.
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