Pray with Tuvalu, September 14, 2025
Lectionary Selection: Luke 15:1-10
Prayers for Tuvalu:
God of the ocean and the atoll,
you formed Tuvalu within your vast Moana and taught your people to live by winds, tides, and communal care.
We lift up the Ekalesia Kelisiano Tuvalu—pastors, elders, women’s and youth fellowships—
who shepherd a nation discerning what it means to remain a people of faith if their islands are lost to heat and rising seas.
Steady households whose graves, gardens, and shoreline churches are already battered;
comfort fishers and farmers whose livelihoods falter;
watch over children who wonder where “home” will be if the sea keeps coming.
Grant wisdom to leaders planning for relocation with dignity,
and grace to partner churches preparing to welcome Tuvaluans in diaspora.
We join the Pacific churches in praying:
“Creator God, you call us to live in right relationship with You, with one another, and with Your creation.”
Teach us to hear Earth’s cry and to respond with justice and compassion,
so that peace and right-relationships may flourish for people and all creatures you love.
Through Jesus Christ, who calms the waters and calls us into solidarity. Amen.
Adapted from the Pacific Conference of Churches, “Season of Creation 2025:
Peace with Creation,” Opening Prayer in the Youth/Children guides
Mission Moment from Tuvalu
On Sundays in Funafuti, the singing begins before the sun burns the lagoon—and on Kioa Island, Fiji—purchased and settled in 1947 by Tuvaluans from Vaitupu—the same hymns rise over a different reef. The first 37 settlers arrived on October 26, 1947, planting gardens, building a school, and carrying their faith into a new land.
The Ekalesia Kelisiano Tuvalu (EKT) is the spiritual heart for most Tuvaluans, shaping identity, language, and public life. As the Pacific Conference of Churches (PCC) has explained, Pacific spirituality is braided to land and sea—“the land, the sea and people are integral parts of one entity”—so displacement is not only logistical but profoundly theological.
As seas warm and rise, habitability—fresh water, arable soil, safe housing—shrinks. Tuvalu and Australia have established the Falepili Union pathway, opening a climate-visa stream (up to 280 per year); in June–July 2025 the first ballot drew strong interest, signaling both hope and the wrenching reality of planned migration for an entire country.
For the EKT and its PCC partners, the call is pastoral as well as prophetic: to sustain worship, language, and mutual care when elders, youth, and choirs are scattered across Fiji, Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, and beyond; and to practice “radical hospitality” for those displaced while comforting those who cannot yet leave.
Kioa Island offers one living template: diaspora community that kept covenant through church life, communal governance, and song. Yet Tuvaluans ask hard questions: How do we recreate village and congregation when graves, breadfruit, and reef are far away? What does it mean to be Tuvaluan if the atolls become uninhabitable? Through Global Ministries, Disciples and UCC partners accompany EKT and PCC in liturgy, advocacy, and welcome—honoring a faith tied to land and waters while preparing to receive Tuvaluans wherever “home” must next be found.
Partners in Tuvalu
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