In recent years, the initial stages of what could become a strong and vibrant peace movement has emerged within the churches of this country. This newfound attachment to peace is due to the convergence of a renewal of faith and an awakened perception of the unprecedented danger of nuclear war.
In a time when the nations are courting political and military disaster, there are signs of hope in the church. With increasing frequency, the call to peace is being heard from pulpits, seminary classrooms, and Christian publications. In many places, Christians are reaching a critical turning point. They see the nuclear threat as having everything to do with their faith in Jesus Christ.
As with any fresh and untested conviction that is spreading in the lives of Christians, the peace concern requires discernment, direction, and leadership. The churches need to construct an appropriate focus and method to incarnate the peace of Christ. Most importantly, the emerging peace mission requires committed people who will pursue it in costly ways.
Strong and active peace and justice organizations are already available to Christians. The Fellowship of Reconciliation, with a large membership and many local chapters, is deeply rooted in the religious pacifist tradition. In recent years, Pax Christi--for Roman Catholics--and New Call to Peacemaking--for the historic peace churches--are involving growing numbers of people. The Atlantic and Pacific Life Communities network has long offered persistent resistance to the arms race. World Peacemakers, an outgrowth of Washington's Church of the Saviour, gives important help in starting and maintaining peace groups both within and across congregational lines. Many denominations have "peace fellowships."
But some local churches are sensing a need to develop indigenous peace ministries or peace mission groups within their congregations. The church is the primary social context of Christians' lives, the place where we gain, and maintain our identity. It is only natural that our principal concerns and our calling be grounded and worked out there.
The feeling of many Christians that they need to look beyond their congregations for ways to witness Christ's peace is a telling indictment of the church's life. The church's very purpose is to be evidence of Christ's peace to the world.
Peace is Christ's gift to those who participate in his kingdom. It is a mark of the reconciling love that exists between brothers and sisters. The church has no greater peace to give to the world than the quality of peace it experiences in its own fellowship. A peace ministry should emerge naturally from the church as its members experience solidarity with Christ and one another.
In the Community of Communities, a network of church communities of which Sojourners Fellowship is a part, peace ministry is becoming accepted as a normal part of the church's life. It is not seen as special or somehow dissimilar from the church's other work. It is supported as are the church's other ministries of preaching, counseling, pastoral care, and work with the poor.
In our experience, ministry develops as church members are made aware of a need and make decisions together about gifts and calling. Ministries are given the authority of the local church so that they may act on its behalf. The peace ministry, like any other, is only as strong as the support it receives from the members of the congregation.
In a recent Community of Communities combined peace ministries meeting, several of the churches shared their stories of how they had reached consensus on active opposition to war. In each case the process was long, slow, and painful. Yet the fruit of those struggles is already significantly aiding the cause of peace.
Since the members of so many U.S. churches still accept the assumption of the need for nuclear strength, this gradual and painstaking process will of necessity be repeated. The church desperately needs the small pockets of people who are willing to stay home and do the difficult work of evangelizing, educating, and leading it into peacemaking. The hope that the local churches can become building blocks in a new peace movement is grounded in our belief that faith is already present in the churches and in our experience of the Spirit bringing change in our own hearts.
Most of us who are now committed to peace and disarmament can look back to a time when we weren't. Somehow, somewhere, we began to change, usually with the help, understanding, and encouragement of a brother or sister. Peace ministries will be built on the conviction that the Spirit is active, making repentance and change realities.
At Sojourners our peace ministry has a threefold purpose: to serve our own congregation, to put our commitment to peace into public witness, and to raise peace as a call of faith among brother and sister congregations. Any peace ministry will have a crucial role to play in the church's internal or common life. Its initial and ongoing task is to lead members of the congregation to strengthen their identities as peacemakers. A peace ministry's first job should be to encourage church members to explore deeply the foundations of their faith in Jesus, where peace is found. Prayer, biblical reflection, and study will begin and facilitate this process.
While peace work has always been a part of Sojourners, we inaugurated our own specifically full-time peace ministry with a special Lenten series on prayer and the arms race in 1979. The series was a time to make our desire for peace an integral part of our prayer life and to reflect theologically on the role of the church in resistance to nuclear war. It included a study of military and political analysis to inform our prayer and to direct our action.
Essential to a peace ministry is a reliance on worship. In worship the church claims and exhibits its loyalty to Christ. Worship is the primary place where Christians cast off their need for protection from the nation's nuclear arsenal. Through worship the churches undermine the idolatry of the arms race.
As with every work of the church, the peace ministry's focus is deeply pastoral. The church's approach to peacemaking has too often been top-heavy with efforts to pass resolutions applauding peace and condemning nuclear weapons at regional and national church levels. These documents are usually directed toward the federal administration or Congress and never get back to local churches. Often the church has asked more of the government than it has been willing to ask of its own people.
In the U.S., very often it is the Christians who have their fingers on the nuclear button. If the church would get its own house in order, the threat of nuclear weapons could be powerfully confronted. Congregations must together make decisions to support and encourage one another in their opposition to the arms race. For the members
of the churches who build, finance, maintain, and threaten to use nuclear weapons, a call to self-examination is sorely needed. Perhaps the most important contribution many churches could make to disarmament would be for their members to simply repent of their participation in the arms race and give up their warmaking vocations.
When church members do take up the challenge of changing their lives, the peace ministry will need to respond with support and counsel. The internal congregational issues of war taxes, military-related jobs, and military service need sensitive and honest pastoral guidance by the peace ministry.
The peace ministry also has an external function. It must lead the congregation in public witness. Christian peace ministry is built on the belief that the church's witness can reduce the level of violence in the world, can help bring a halt to the arms race and show forth the possibilities of new life based in faith and hope in God. The peace that Jesus freely bestows upon his people can never be contained. As it is nurtured in Christian fellowship, it is to be simultaneously shared with a world obsessed with war.
The peace ministry can begin serving the church by helping to identify the particular issues the church should engage and places where the church should be present. A local church may often find itself unclear about where it should give its attention and energy. The peace ministry can help facilitate a process of discernment.
A church with little or no experience in active peacemaking and public witness may need to seek outside help for orientation, education, and training. One of the first tasks of a peace ministry may be to setup workshops and training sessions led by experienced and trusted people from other Christian and peace organizations. Church members should also be encouraged to participate in regional and national disarmament conferences. It is also helpful for new people to receive training in nonviolence to help them feel more comfortable in an unfamiliar role.
The style and content of the church's witness is of critical importance. The peace ministry should help in the selection of the forms of witness and symbols which will communicate the church's message.
Public peacemaking needs to be seen as an opportunity to witness to faith in Jesus and to make evident its fruits--peace and justice. Increasingly, many Christians are finding worship to be a powerful form of public protest. In worship we can not only say no to false lords and competing saviors, but Christians can also offer to the world the alternative values of faith in God and hope that new life can overcome death.
Almost every church in the U.S. will find itself in geographical proximity to an installation where nuclear weapons are being built, deployed, promoted, or displayed. Military bases, construction and production sites, weapons exhibitions, defense contractors, and federal buildings are literally everywhere in this country. With growing frequency, churches are taking on ministries of presence at these facilities as a protest to their existence and as a call to spiritual, political, and economic conversion. Peace ministries can coordinate these activities.
Already many Christians are leafletting, vigiling, worshiping, and often simply praying at these places. In the past year, Christians in cities like Detroit and New York have sponsored Good Friday stations of the cross marches, stopping to remember the passion of Jesus at sites connected to the arms race, such as corporate headquarters and senatorial offices. A year ago hundreds of Christians gathered in front of the Sheraton-Washington, D.C., Hotel for worship and protest of nuclear weapons being promoted and displayed inside at an arms bazaar. On Memorial Day in Tucson, Arizona, an Episcopal church celebrated the Eucharist in front of the federal building on behalf of those who will die in nuclear war if the arms race is not reversed. It is this kind of public demonstration accompanied by persistent educational efforts that
can build a favorable political climate that will lead to change in public policy.
Another possible pursuit for a local church's peace ministry may be to take its church's peace concern before a neighbor congregation. A cross-congregational evangelization and education process is crucial if the church's peace witness is to grow. This means establishing relationships of integrity and understanding which raise the question of the arms race as a matter of faith. A local peace ministry may also want to carry its commitment to denominational gatherings and judicatory meetings.
Who makes up a church's peace ministry? It begins at the point of church members' interest, commitment, and gifts. Some churches will find it helpful to commission full-time people for the peace ministry just as it does for the pastoral or educational ministries. These full-time people need to be supported by a mission group or committee. Other churches have appointed a task force of part-time people to oversee and carry out their peace ministry.
Indigenous church peace ministries are already serving a vital function in some congregations and are an important goal for others. These ministries can be a significant force in congregational and parish renewal by helping people understand that authentic faith must be rooted in real historical events. Peace ministries can foster renewal by presenting the nuclear threat not simply as a call to political action or merely as an historical crisis, but as an occasion for the renewal of faith in the churches. The churches will never make a costly commitment to peace until there is a renewal of the Spirit in the church's life. The reawakening of faith and peacemaking will go hand in hand.
The church's peace witness will only be theologically and politically viable as the church regains a sense of its vocation as the people of God. The church's life and its ministry are dependent on its prayer, fellowship, pastoral accountability, and nurture. The church's action and witness are intrinsically related to its renewal of authentic worship. A vital part of the peace ministry's task is to serve the local church in bringing about a whole and healthy congregational life.
Renewal does not occur in a vacuum but rather in the midst of the historical issues that impinge on the church's life. No other event or situation can compare with the nuclear arms race in calling for a response of faith. Perhaps it is set before us as a test.
Mernie King was a pastor of Sojourners Fellowship and worked full time with Sojourners peace ministry when this article appeared.
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