Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed met about 400 Protestant church leaders at his office on 20 June 2019 and asked them to settle disputes that had split their community. The Prime Minister’s Office said the talks belonged with a series of meetings he had already held with religious leaders, teachers, artists, health workers, and lawyers. His recommendation was a committee of 15 members to work through the differences and bring the churches together.
He told the leaders that religious institutions should respect their differences, put weight on what they share, and work together. He also said they should set an example for their followers and help address the problems facing the country. Those problems included ethnic violence that had displaced more than three million people and killed hundreds of civilians. Fana Broadcasting Corporation reported that the discussion was meant to strengthen unity among evangelical leaders.
The leaders raised complaints of their own. They spoke about bureaucracy in obtaining and renewing licences, and about what they called interference in the affairs of their faith. Protestant churches in Ethiopia go back to at least 1951, with early missionaries from Finland and Sweden. Abiy is widely described as a Protestant believer, as was his predecessor, Hailemariam Desalegn. He had already helped mediate leadership disputes among Muslims and inside the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The June meeting extended that effort to the evangelical congregations, with a committee still to be formed rather than a split already closed.
The committee of 15 was a recommendation, not a finished institution. The Prime Minister’s Office presented the meeting as one more conversation with a profession or a faith community, aimed at internal quarrels among Protestants. Church leaders left with a request to magnify what they hold in common, and with their own list of grievances about licences and state interference. In a month of displacement and civilian deaths, Abiy was asking pulpits to model unity. Whether the 15 members would be named, and whether the congregations would accept them, was the next fact to watch.
Sources: Borkena