Bartholomeos I, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, has joined the Dalai Lama as one of two international religious figures named in the "Time 100" list, the people deemed by Time magazine to be the world's most influential persons.

The French cleric who heads the main grouping of Anglican, Orthodox and Protestant Christian denominations in Europe has proposed the creation of a Council of European Churches that would also include the Roman Catholic Church.

Churches should be prepared to confront their differences honestly and to examine them in the light scripture, Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomeos I told a service to celebrate 60 years since the World Council of Churches was founded.

This year the World Council of Churches, the primary post-war instrument of global church cooperation, is 60 years old. Sara Speicher explores its role and future in a radically changed world, and asks how churches today can negotiate togetherness and difference.

A unique gathering of high level church leaders starting on Tuesday 6 November 2007 near Nairobi, Kenya, features the broadest range of Christian traditions ever represented at a global meeting, says its organisers.

Anglicans in Canada and the United States are pushing ahead with local procedures for blessing lesbian and gay people in the church. The US Episcopal Diocese of California has authorised the use of three trial rites for same-sex unions.

A second round of dialogue between World Council of Churches (WCC) members and Pentecostals has been inaugurated in Baar, Switzerland. A group of Protestant, Orthodox, Anglican and Pentecostal Christians met to continue work begun in 2005.

Metropolitan Daniel of Moldavia and Bucovina, who studied in the West and taught at an ecumenical institute near Geneva while his country was under communist rule, has been elected Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church.

Delegates at the Third European Ecumenical Assembly in Sibiu, Romania, concluded their weeklong gathering on 9 September 2007 with a call to the churches of Europe to deepen their support for migrants and other victimised minority groups.

Representatives of Europe's main Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican churches say they hope a six-day ecumenical assembly in the Romanian city of Sibiu will give a new impetus to the movement for Christian unity - and enable them to meet today's challenges.