Speaking at the Baptist World Alliance (BWA) conference in Toronto, Canada, World Evangelical Alliance Secretary General Rev. Adv. Botrus Mansour called Baptist leaders from 65 nations to a deeper vision of Christian unity. Drawing from Romans 15, he told the gathering that unity "is not something we merely admire—it's something Christ creates at His table," challenging participants to move beyond polite ecumenical gestures toward genuine interdependence.
The conference, hosted at Tyndale University, brought together several hundred participants under the theme "All Sitting at the Table of Christ." Mansour participated in five separate sessions, using each to explore different dimensions of evangelical-Baptist cooperation. His keynote emphasised that the table of Christ is not only a place of fellowship but also of healing, where historic divisions between evangelical traditions can be acknowledged and addressed without glossing over real differences.
Mansour, a former Baptist pastor himself, drew on his unique position as a bridge figure between the global evangelical and Baptist communities. He urged delegates to recognise that in many parts of the world — particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, where he has deep roots — Christian witness depends on believers standing together across denominational lines. "The world does not need our divisions," he said. "It needs a Church united around the person of Jesus Christ." The WEA, representing over 600 million evangelicals across 143 national alliances, has made ecumenical bridge-building a priority under Mansour's leadership.
Source: World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) — worldea.org
