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 Gods work to save the world.

The Kingdom of God is In Reach

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“The Kingdom of God is in Reach”

“And as you go, preach, saying, the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”(Matthew 10:7)

                Every Church A Peace Church comes to its present work in an unusual time. It occurred to me how unusual listening to President Obama’s speech in a region of Africa culturally connected to the Middle East. This is a strange moment. Time has turned and opened a window. There is a techtonic shift occurring and new landscapes of possibility are taking shape. History has lent its ear to truth. We must speak boldly while it listens. For time will shape the future by what it hears. Truth is gaining traction. We will live this moment, but will not live long enough to appreciate what it means. Yet when it has passed, we will have changed the world. The full living of these days is an act of faith.

                Not everyone will grasp this moment. So the real question before each of us is will we have the courage to embrace this time of transformation. Not everyone will. Perhaps they cannot. It is of the nature of such moments. “I tell you, in that night there shall be two men in one bed; the one shall be taken, and the other shall be left. Two women shall be grinding together; the one shall be taken, the other left. Two men shall be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.” (Luke 17:34-36)

As we organize Unifying Visions I cannot help but feel that ECAPC is a part of this strange and unusual moment. The promise of the Kingdom lay in fragments on life’s sea; the imperishable fragments of an eternal promise that would not sink beneath the waves. What we are doing is helping to bring coherence to the fragmented possibilities adrift on the sea of our time.

                Historic change for the good, like the Kingdom, comes in sundry times and in larger and smaller fragments; but is now like no other time close at hand and in reach. It is a hopeful moment of supreme possibility. Yet, the hope of which I sing is not that of the “progressive era”; the blind optimism of an inevitable progress. I sing of hope but of a different texture and discipline. This is a hope amidst many failures; of noble aims and cataclysmic misfires; amidst noble experiments and would be republics whose maiden voyages floundered on slavery at harbors edge; amidst lynching and Jim Crow; of the “freedom loving” more intent on incarceration than education. This is a hope amidst Auschwitz and Dachau; of soaring rhetoric of liberated workers amidst the communist hungry, genocide and the enslaved. This is the hope after the bomb.

A Friend of the Crucified,

Dr. Matthew V. Johnson, National Director ECAPC

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