The Very Reverend The Honorable Dr. Lois Wilson has sent a warm welcome to Canada to the delegates of the WSCF 34th General Assembly. Her greetings to the Assembly encourage delegates to be overturners of the world order, challenging them with Arundhati Roy’s strategy of not only confronting, but “laying siege”, to the death-dealing of the global Empire we live within.

Dr Wilson’s message to the Assembly follows below.

To all delegates to the WSCF General Assembly in Montreal:

A very warm welcome to Canada!

We are excited to have you boundary breaking and limb connecting people in our midst, and feel that the words with which the folk of the Biblical Thessalonica welcomed Paul and Silas are particularly appropriate here,

"Those people who have turned the world upside down have come here also." (Acts 17:6)

Many of us are humbly and deeply grateful to have been part of the life changing work of the Federation over the years, and joyously join with you to sustain the Federation's current efforts to choose and give priority to life giving measures with people, not death dealing.

At a recent World Social Forum, Indian activist Arundhati Roy put it in a nutshell when she said,

"Our strategy should be not only to confront Empire, but to lay seige to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it...with our ability to tell our own stories that are different from the one's we've been brainwashed to believe."

The prayer and hope of those of you present at this Assembly, as well as those of us who cannot be there physically, must be that we live fully and thankfully in this world, but not of it.

"That we no longer adapt ourselves to the patterns of this present world, but let our minds and our whole nature be transformed so that we might discern what is good, acceptable and perfect in God's sight." (Romans 12:2)

So hang in there, upside down!

And may the blessing of the God of Sarah and Hagar, as of Abraham,
the blessing of the Son, born of the woman Mary,
And the blessing of the Spirit, who broods over us as a woman to her children,
Be with us all.
Amen.

The Very Reverend The Honorable Dr. Lois Wilson

SCM President, Manitoba, Canada 1943-47;
Moderator of the United Church of Canada 1980-1982;
President of the World Council of Churches, 1983-1990;
Independent Senator, Canada 1998-2002
Chair of WSCF Canada, 2006 -