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.

Unifying Visions Program

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     The Unifying Visions program of ECAPC seeks to unite the historic Black justice movement and the historic peace church movement in this country. Martin Luther King's decision to speak out against war as well as racial injustice was an historic step in this direction.

     King's anti-war message is not much lauded in national celebrations of the King holiday. Have you ever wondered why that is?

      Dr. Gary Kohls, energetic supporter of ECAPC in Duluth, MN, reminded us of this today in an email. He quotes Dr. King:

    King said: “As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But, they asked, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.”

      And Kohls shares a poem by Carl Wendell Hines:

“Now That He Is Safely Dead”

Now that he is safely dead let us praise him,
build monuments to his glory,
sing hosannas to his name.

Dead men make such convenient heroes.
They cannot rise to challenge the images
we would fashion from their lives.

And besides,
it is easier to build monuments
than to make a better world.

Carl Wendell Hines

John K. Stoner jstoner@ecapc.org
1/13/10

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