He completed his tertiary education with a term in Oxford and a doctoral thesis with Oscar Cullmann on the Church Father Basil the Great (1953).

[1] In 1953, Lukas Vischer married doctor of law Dr Barbara Schmidt and began his ministry in the parish of Herblingen near Schaffhausen where their four children were born.

[…] Responsible for the organisation of these consultations and the publication of the results of these meetings is the Secretariat of the Faith and Order Commission at the World Council of Churches in Geneva.”[4] Soon after Lukas Vischer began working in Geneva, he was asked to accompany the conversations between Lutherans and Reformed, which had started in 1955, on a European level.

[6] For the WCC Lukas Vischer maintained relations with the Orthodox Churches of Russia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Poland and Armenia and with the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I.

[7] In the context of Russia, cooperation with the representative of the Moscow Patriarch at the WCC, the Russian Orthodox theologian Vitaly Borovoy, was of particular importance.

The Statement speaks of a “fully committed fellowship” of “all in each place”, who are united through being “baptized into Jesus Christ” and “breaking the one bread”, through confessing him as “Lord and Saviour” and through “holding the one apostolic faith”, through “preaching the one gospel” and “joining in common prayer” and through “having a corporate life reaching out in witness and service to all”.

And “at the same time [they] are united with the whole Christian fellowship in all places and all ages in such wise that ministry and members are accepted by all, and that all can act and speak together as occasion requires for the tasks to which God calls his people.”[11] It remained open how this was to be achieved.

The Commission’s approach to the division at the Eucharist is reflected in the Report of the Section on Unity in New Delhi 1961: “Wherever existing convictions allow for a more direct progress towards intercommunion between Churches, it should be made without waiting for consensus and common action in the ecumenical movement as a whole.”[15] In the question of Ministry, church traditions also lay rather far apart, but during the study process a remarkable convergence in theological positions was achieved.

Shortly after his resignation from the WCC, the Convergence Declaration “Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry” was adopted at the Commission’s plenary meeting in Lima in 1982.

[17] In light of a humankind torn apart by racism, poverty, injustice, war and revolutionary violence, the WCC General Assembly in Uppsala 1968 drew up a vision of Church as a symbol of the coming unity of mankind.

It described “unity of all Christians in each place” as a “truly universal, ecumenical, conciliar form of the common life and witness.” “The members of the World Council of Churches, committed to each other, should work for the time when a genuinely universal council will again speak for all Christians, and lead the way into the future.”[18] In 1971 – three years later – Lukas Vischer notes in the preface of the report of the Faith and Order conference in Louvain: “The Louvain meeting may well be seen as a decisive turning point in the history of the Faith and Order movement.

In this conciliar fellowship, each local church possesses, in communion with others, the fullness of catholicity […][27] From the beginnings, not only witness and service were of high importance to the ecumenical movement, but also prayer.

[28] In order to “make the confessional form of the quest for unity visible”, Lukas Vischer initiated the study “Giving account of the hope that is in us” (1971).

For the Federation of Swiss Protestant Churches, he wrote a statement on the WCC convergence texts on “Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry” and – on occasion of the planned Papal visit in 1981 – the memorandum “The Protestant Churches in Switzerland in the Ecumenical Movement” (original German title: “Die evangelischen Kirchen der Schweiz in der ökumenischen Bewegung”).

[32] As board member of the Swiss section (founded in 1981) of the “Action des Chrétiens pour l‘Abolition de la Torture” (ACAT),[33] Vischer dealt with the violation of human rights worldwide.

The publication “Texte der Evangelischen Arbeitsstelle Ökumene Schweiz” and other papers from the Protestant Office for Ecumenism in Switzerland for use in parishes informed Swiss Churches and congregations about the relevance of international gatherings and encouraged further work.

Until the next General Assembly in Seoul 1989, he put four topics in the focus of his work: He also supported bilateral dialogues with other Protestant world federations as well as with the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodoxy.

[39] Since the 1980s, Vischer had been a driving force for the “Conciliar Process of Mutual Commitment (Covenant) for Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation” on many levels.

The worry about the integrity of God’s creation and solidarity with the victims of climate change received little attention within the Churches compared with human-centric topics like peace and justice.

With the aim to strengthen unity on a local level and with the support by the John Knox International Reformed Centre, Lukas Vischer initiated the movement “Témoigner Ensemble à Genève” (Witnessing the Faith together in Geneva).

[42] In view of the Calvin Jubilee 2009, Lukas Vischer advocated – now in his eighties – on a local, national and international level for a representation of the Geneva Reformer which is relevant for today’s context and not for one that is historicising.

Vischer’s written contributions to Calvin’s view on unity of the Church, social justice, a responsible handling of God’s creation and holiness of life in times of armed conflicts have been published jointly by the WARC and the John Knox International Reformed Centre with the title “Das Vermächtnis Johannes Calvins – Denkanstöße und Handlungsvorschläge für die Kirche im 21.