Security and Sacrament: The World Council of Churches During Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

This guest article was written by Dr. Muhammad Faisal Khalil, Research Fellow at Pembroke College and Associate Faculty Member in the Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford.

The World Council of Churches (WCC) is confronting its deepest crisis since the end of the Cold War. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has exposed not just institutional weakness within the WCC but also a fundamental crisis that strikes at the organisation’s core mission and structure.

Founded in Amsterdam in 1948 and now headquartered at the Ecumenical Centre in Geneva, the World Council of Churches links 352 Protestant, Anglican, and Orthodox churches representing more than half a billion believers worldwide.¹ Often called a “Christian UN,”² the organisation understands itself as a fellowship (koinonia) of churches³ gathered around one confession: “Jesus Christ is God and Saviour.”⁴ It is not a super-church but a conciliar table where 352 communions seek visible unity, mutual accountability, and common witness.

Since February 2022, the Russian Orthodox Church, which is the WCC’s largest single member⁵, has openly blessed Moscow’s invasion, framing it as a “holy war” and a struggle that faithful Russians are bound to support. The fundamental question the WCC faces in this crisis is stark: How can an ecumenical body maintain dialogue when one member church sanctifies aggression against another? 

From the moment the invasion began, governments, journalists, and several member churches⁶ urged the World Council of Churches to expel the Russian Orthodox Church.⁷ Yet the Council chose the harder course: It condemned the invasion but kept Moscow at the table, insisting that genuine accountability could be achieved through continued dialogue.

The Council condemned the invasion as “illegal and unjustifiable” in June 2022,⁸ at Karlsruhe that September,⁹ and, with added force, as “illegal, immoral and unjustifiable” on the third anniversary in 2025.¹⁰ Still, Ukrainian churches continue to fall to Russian artillery, their destruction unaffected by mounting diplomatic protests.

From Security Grievance to Sacred Cause

George F. Kennan’s 1997 warning that NATO expansion would be “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era” proved prescient.¹¹ William J. Burns’s 2008 cable declared Ukrainian membership would cross “the brightest of all red lines” for Russia.¹² These warnings created a grievance Moscow could exploit—but the ROC stood ready to transform strategic calculation into divine mandate.

Putin’s core justifications for invading Ukraine remain strategic, but Patriarch Kirill does not merely echo security concerns about NATO “within 130 kilometres of St Petersburg.”¹³ He transforms them into an existential threat requiring a spiritual response. Kirill’s Russkiy mir (“Russian World”) doctrine, introduced in 2009 as a “common civilisational space uniting Church, people, and state”,¹⁴ sacralises Moscow’s sphere of influence. Orthodox scholars immediately denounced this as pseudo-gospel in their March 2022 “Declaration on the ‘Russian World’ Teaching.”¹⁵

When Moscow needed theological justification for invasion, the doctrine fit like a glove. Drawing directly from Russkiy mir’s civilisational frame, Kirill’s March 2022 Forgiveness Sunday sermon recast the invasion as a “metaphysical” struggle against Western “tests” like mandatory Gay-Pride parades—not cultural disagreement but cosmic battle.¹⁶ By March 2024, the World Russian People’s Council, chaired by Kirill, declared a “Holy War” demanding “the entire territory of modern Ukraine should enter Russia’s exclusive zone of influence.”¹⁷

With this doctrinal turn, the ROC explicitly embraces ethnophyletism, fusing ethnic and ecclesial identity, condemned as heresy at Constantinople in 1872.¹⁸ But the Church wraps this condemned doctrine in rhetoric that appeals to those who see Western values as a satanic threat. Since the ROC carries far more institutional weight than Ukrainian churches, these arguments influence the World Council of Churches’s statements, constraining how forcefully the organisation can condemn aggression despite its escalating language.¹⁹

The WCC warned the “Holy War” decree contradicts core Christian teaching,²⁰ yet when General Secretary Jerry Pillay responded, he merely wrote to Patriarch Kirill seeking “clarifications.” This seemed absurd, given that Kirill himself had chaired the council that adopted the decree.²¹ Meanwhile, the WCC condemned Ukraine’s religious freedom legislation, which seeks to protect citizens from institutions actively supporting their destruction. The Council remained largely silent on Russia’s systematic persecution of religious minorities. This disparity prompted Danish Churches to observe that the WCC was “criticising Ukraine laws more than Russia’s ‘holy’ war.”²²

Institutional Paralysis

Meanwhile, Christian voices inside and outside the World Council of Churches have spoken with far greater clarity. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, whose church is a founding WCC member, told worshippers that “Ukraine’s sovereignty is not up for debate, nor can it be negotiated under the guise of diplomacy.”²³ 233 Russian Orthodox priests published an open letter in early March 2022 calling the conflict a “fratricidal war”²⁴ and pleading for an immediate ceasefire. Historic peace churches issued a Quaker “Peace Testimony,”²⁵ condemning Russia’s aggression, and the continuing flow of weapons that fuels it. Baltic and Ukrainian church leaders, themselves WCC members, petitioned the Council in July 2022 to suspend the ROC until it renounced its “Holy War” rhetoric.²⁶ 

Dutch theologian Matthias Smalbrugge more directly rejects the WCC’s posture of procedural neutrality. He has argued from the war’s outset that the WCC’s decision to keep the ROC at the table is “morally far below standard” and proof that “churches cannot escape power-politics.”²⁷ In 2022, he urged Geneva to “take sides; you can’t be friends with everyone.”²⁸ These remarks frame his charge: A church that treats aggression as a matter for endless dialogue has chosen the side of the status quo. Smalbrugge argues that fellowship (koinonia) without accountability collapses into complicity whenever churches bless—or tolerate—violence. His intervention reveals how consensus rules, designed to prevent majority domination, now allow a single aggressor church to hold the entire fellowship hostage.

These challenges expose the WCC’s paralysis. The organisation once showed clear resolve by suspending South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church between 1982 and 1998 for blessing apartheid.²⁹ Yet today, facing similar questions about a member church’s relationship to state violence, the WCC remains unable to act. Earlier action was taken when the ecumenical consensus on racial justice was nearly universal. With the same consensus absent, the WCC is caught between its consensus-rule procedures and demands for moral clarity. 

Status Confessionis

Three years into Europe’s largest conflict since 1945, UNESCO counts 149 damaged Ukrainian religious sites.³⁰ Russian clergy like Father Alexey Uminsky face defrocking for praying for peace instead of “Victory of Holy Rus’.”³¹ This forces the WCC to face its own status confessionis. 

Each blessing of missiles, each equivocating statement, each day of paralysis strains the rope of koinonia until fellowship threatens to snap, forcing a choice between gospel truth and institutional comfort. This choice means suspending ROC membership until specific conditions are met: public renunciation of the “Holy War” declaration, cessation of blessing weapons, support for war crimes investigations, and reparations for destroyed religious sites. Only through such accountability can dialogue become meaningful and Christian unity retain its credibility in a world where churches bless the weapons that destroy churches.

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