Back in February of 2020, just before COVID-19 re-ordered life as we’ve known it, myself and a crew of international, multi-faith urban thinkers and place practitioners gathered in Abu Dhabi to participate the United Nations, Habitat’s tenth convening of the World Urban Forum. Today the official report of WUF10 was released, so I thought I’d post it here.
I thought I’d also include here the list of Declared Actions which emerged from WUF10 and which were presented at its closing ceremony. It is my sense that statement #9 which speaks of an “integrated approach,” and the content under the heading “Civil Society” were crafted – in part – to contain our multi-faith work.
Our collective participation in WUF10 marked an important step forward in the process of UN-Habitat acknowledging the important role of religion, faith, and spirituality play in helping move toward The City We Need for a sustainable future for human life on our planet. This was the first time that a “faith forward” conversation had an place at the World Urban Forum. While there is no doubt that people of faith from most religions have participated in every WUF event ever held, this was different. Religion was officially in the program and had space in the event. I have to add that an unintended gift from the event being held in the UAE was that the Islamic call to prayer (Adhan) sounded five times each day and throughout the venue were spaces for prayer. Faith was present this year in a way it never had been at any other WUF gathering.
It’s taken years and the persistent work of people from all over the world and from different religious traditions gathering together to explore the UN Sustainable Development Goals as expressed through the “10 Principles for a New Urban Paradigm” in The Cities We Need document from the particularity of our respective faith traditions… building relationships, learning to hear each other, listening to our own traditions, discerning together how to bring our shared learnings to UN-Habitat in openness without a religious agenda, but as an expression of love and service from our respective traditions.
I continue to pray that God will grant us wisdom, courage, unity, favor, and creativity as we seek to activate people to make constructive changes toward a sustainable future through the rich narratives and traditions our faith traditions.
For me as a person who seeks to live in the Jesus Way, I find deep motivation in our creation stories in which God creates all that is and calls it good. Our Creator places human beings within an ecosystem of relations that reflected and imaged the very being of God. Yet into that life of harmony between all facets of creation humanity turned away from loving relations, introducing a profound rupture in the ecosystem of relations. The entire narrative of scripture – culminating in the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ – tells the story of God reconciling all fractured and fragmented relations. This is gospel work. God reconciling all things in Christ.
Peace, dwight
