Drive for religious conversion code gets boost

GENEVA, Aug 15 (Reuters) A drive by Christian churches to agree on a code of conduct on how they win converts has been boosted by the decision of a major evangelical movement to join in, the World Council of Churches (WCC) said today.

At a gathering in Toulouse last week, the Vancouver-based World Evangelical Alliance (WEA), which says it represents some 420 million believers in 128 countries, announced it would sign up to the project, the WCC reported.

''We see this as a major step forward on the way to getting the code agreed among organisations representing a huge body of Christians,'' said spokesman Juan Michel of the WCC, which is leading the project jointly with the Vatican.

Michel said a draft of the code, which will be voluntary but will establish what methods should be banned for Christians in missionary and proselytising work, was expected to be drafted at another meeting next year and finalised by 2010.

The WEA focuses on spreading the Christian gospel and was for years at odds with the WCC, which groups movements that emphasise ecumenism, or finding common language among faiths.

But recently it has moved closer to the WCC, whose member churches -- including the Greek, Russian and other Orthodox faiths as well as major Protestant movements like the World Lutheran Federation -- represent some 560 million believers.

There is mounting antagonism in some Islamic countries towards Christians suspected of trying to spread their faith among Muslims.

The fiercely Islamic Taleban seized 23 South Korean church workers in Afghanistan last month, killing two of them.

Officials involved in the code project say the rulebook would be meant to apply to all proselytising, both between and among faiths -- sometimes dubbed ''sheep stealing''.

In Latin America, Africa and Asia, there has been tension setting Catholics and mainstream Protestant churches against evangelising groups seen as unfairly competing to win souls.

When the WCC and the Vatican launched the effort last year they declared that although freedom to choose a religion was a ''non-negotiable'' human right anywhere in the world, what they called ''the obsession of converting others'' had to be cured.

The WCC report of the meeting did not specify which conversion methods might be banned, saying that deciding this was ''a daunting task given the many contexts involved''.

These included ''living as a Christian minority in India,'' ''preaching the gospel to Turks in Austria'' and ''being a Lutheran missionary to Muslim Nigeria''. The code should also ''address other religions' concerns about Christian proselytism''.

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