The National Council of the Churches of Christ, a broad-based coalition representing over 100,000 congregations, has called on Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to work for passage of the Armenian Genocide Resolution, H.Res.252, the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) told PanARMENIAN.Net.
In a letter, dated May 20, 2009, the Council’s General Secretary, Rev. Dr. Michael Kinnamon, restated the organization’s 2007 resolution that found it “unacceptable” that the U.S. government continues to refuse to use the term genocide to describe the events of 1915. The highly regarded church leader then urged, as a step toward true Armenia-Turkey healing, that all parties, the White House and Congress included, use “the proper term under international law to classify the event for what it was: a genocide.”
The Council’s President, Archbishop Vicken Aykazian, has publicly noted his own deep disappointment with President Obama’s avoidance of the word genocide in his April 24th statement. “I speak on this issue as a person who lost 50 percent of my family to the Armenian
genocide in Turkey,” Aykazian said in a letter to Kinnamon and the NCC Governing Board.
Since its founding in 1950, the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA has been the leading force for ecumenical cooperation among Christians in the United States. The NCC’s member faith groups from a wide spectrum of Protestant, Anglican, Orthodox, Evangelical, historic African American and Living Peace churches include 45 million persons in more than 100,000 local congregations in communities across the nation.
