These pages have been prepared as a study book for the uniting general council of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and the International Congregational Council, which will meet in Nairobi, Kenya, from August 20 to 30 1970. The theme of the council, "God Reconciles and Makes Free", is the subject of the opening essay by Professor Jürgen Moltmann of Germany, and the four subthemes, dealing with creation, man, society, and the church, are treated by Professors Hendrikus Berkhof of the Netherlands, George B Caird of Great Britain, Charles C West of the United States, and Principal CS Song of Taiwan.

Here is a guide to a fresh understanding of the meaning of reconciliation and freedom. The authors ask us to consider the difficulty of reconciliation., including its cost and its pain. They challenge us to undertake a pilgrimage that has profound personal and theological implications. Hence these brief pages should be carried far beyond the conference for which they are written. They point the direction the church of Jesus Christ must take in its mission to the world.

It is significant to find five men, writing from different geographical points, at one in their emphasis on the centrality of Christ and the cross to a church which is called to witness in a world marked by suffering, alienation, and growing polarization. In every conflict and issue discussed, they recognize that men who have been made new in Christ are responsible for the work of bringing forth a new and transformed world in which human relations, and the relations of the structures in which mankind dwells, will be characterized by the justice, love, peace, and unity that are the gifts of God's reconciling mission in Christ.

Freedom, man's greatest conundrum in the twentieth century, is set in the context of a new creation and in relation to reconciliation. A careful study of these papers will help us to remember that the liberating work of reconciliation is first of all God's work and that it must begin with us. Such a study will also remind us that if reconciliation begins with our relationship to God, it also includes every man's relationship to God, in order that we all may be transformed into the new reality which God is bringing into being in the midst of time.