Every Church A Peace Church

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Following Jesus in nonviolent struggle for justice and peace, we love our neighbors and enemies as God loves us all, becoming a peace church to share in God’s work to save the world.

Vision: Why Focus on the Church?

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Part 2 of 7.

2. Why Focus on the Church?
   Complete Series here http://www.ecapc.org/visionofecapc.asp

The motto, or vision statement, of Every Church A Peace Church is: “The church could turn the world toward peace if every church lived and taught as Jesus lived and taught.” This motto deserves some review and expansion, which is my project now in this series of essays.

    Why “church” when it comes to the project of peacemaking?

    How to deal with people who threaten us (in the serious, hard cases called enemies), individually and corporately, is the most difficult and enduring question of human existence. Do we overpower them by whatever means necessary? Do we flee from them in fear? Or is there another way, even a third way, of dealing with seriously threatening people? According to Jesus, there is. He lived and taught another way, and the church could well be expected to understand and demonstrate that way with its own life and teaching. But does it? Has it, over the centuries, shown anything better than the fight and flight responses to enemies? Here it is worth noting that these two responses directly parallel the responses of annihilation and separation we identified above in the book and story of our ancestors.

    The church is the “family” which many have chosen, which many find themselves in or near today, and it is the family image which makes it appropriate to call the Bible the book of the ancestors. In spite of the rampant individualism of modern Western society, human beings even here have not entirely lost the sense that we are creatures of community and relationship. We still feel that we need the security of supportive others, and the friendship of people in relationship. We are creatures of family and relationship. That’s the way we evolved in creation.

    But, we’ve traded the security which God intended and Jesus disclosed in trusting relationships for a pact with the devil offering protection through fight and flight, guns and walls, annihilation and separation. This other hostility-based mode of relationships, rooted in envy, greed and blame, is managed in today’s world by states and corporations. They perpetuate history’s greatest protection racket, the false promise of protection from enemies (ranging from next door neighbors to religions and states) for the price of our loyalty, taxes and shopping mall purchases.

    It is not easy to think of the church as a community of trusting relationships and a central key to making peace. But it is possible to think that way, and there is every reason why “Christians,” or people considering themselves followers of Christ Jesus, should think that the church is key in the challenge of peacemaking.

    A community which orders its life, which maintains its relationships, with the principles of embrace, justice, forgiveness and compassion is a community of peace and an peacemaking community. The teaching of Jesus (in Matthew 18, etc) that offenses between people are to be dealt with by an honest assessment of justice breached and truth betrayed, forgiveness extended and relationship restored is not a marginal footnote for religious fanatics. It is a way to run a world. Another way, to be sure- it is not fight nor flight, annihilation or separation way--but it is a way, and a way that works, demonstrated by experience and history.

    Humanity will either learn that you cannot kill enough bad people to make the world work well, or it will kill itself by failing to learn that. This is what Jesus meant when he said that whoever lives by the sword will die by the sword. Like a lot of other things that Jesus said, this is usually falsely and stupidly thought to apply, if at all, only to individuals. The fact is, it is an utterly social and political statement--groups and nations which live by the sword die by the sword. It is a profoundly useful commentary on what kind of behavior is suicidal.

    And so the church, the community charged with bearing witness to the truth which Jesus lived and taught, has the potential to make a decisive difference in humanity’s quest for peace--for sustainable community. Other world religions (How many are there? How many which must be taken seriously? Important questions, without easy answers, maybe no answers.) have their roles as well. I encourage them to do their work well. But Every Church A Peace Church is a call to the church to do its work well, honestly recognizing that it can’t do everything, and especially, not everything at once.

    Anyone who believes in the church enough to see it as a meaningful human community (in all of its varied forms from house church to global denomination and apostolic claimant) is able, on reflection, to see that the church should be the focus of an effort to make the third way of human relationships which Jesus revealed a promising basis of church and world renewal.

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