The 2008 Peacemaking Conference addressed the variety of causes that combine to create and sustain poverty both locally and globally. Challenges came through preaching in worship, teaching in workshops, and informal interactions of sharing fellowship and life with one another.
Zealous singing opened the final evening’s session. Throughout the conference, Patrick Evan
s, associate professor of the practice of sacred music in the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale Divinity School, helped participants worship through music.
In his address to the conference, Bruce Reyes-Chow, new moderator of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), acknowledged the various responses to the recent actions of the General Assembly. The situation in the PC(USA) is “going to be solved by you and I opening ourselves to the possibilities that God has in store for us,” said
Reyes-Chow. “It’s far too easy for us to fall into the old ways of doing things,” suggesting that often we live within our own idea of what can be real. “If we believe that we are joined together by the Spirit and that nothing is too wondrous for God, then shouldn’t we be hopeful and optimistic about the future?” Reyes-Chow challenged.
Noting that the office of the moderator garners much expectation he asked participants to be the bearers of that hope. “Until we grasp that hope that we are joined by Christ, until we live that out, we are going to head nowhere,” he cautioned.
Mark Lomax led the conference in theological reflection. He is interim dean at Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary and chair of the homiletics department at Interdenominational Theological seminary in Atlanta. “We do a lot of talking.
We talk a lot about what is wrong,” he said, “but we so rarely speak truth to the lie, speak hope to the despair, and speak love to the hatred.”
Conference participants also heard from the international partners of the
Joining Hands partnership, a program to build bridges of solidarity between coalitions of churches in the United States and networks overseas churches, grassroots organizations and NGOs. Partners from Bolivia, Palestine, Cameroon and Peru were amongst those who shared with the conference and got to know each other’s stories over the course of the time spent together. The Joining Hands partnership seeks to nurture these global partnerships surrounding issues of land reform, water, food security, and trade.
Such partnerships are critical in the “new world” of globalization that opens doors of both economic possibility and exploitation.
Lisa Schirch, professor of peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University and
Program of the 3D Security Initiative, confessed to the group that she often did not make the ties between her own comfortable life in the U.S. and what was happening to people in other parts of the world. “We are all one and we are all influencing each other,” said Schirch. But we in the west can have a tendency toward what she termed global chaos overload, or compassion fatigue, the impact of which can be disempowering. “There is a cognitive dissonance between what others are suffering and what we are living,” Schirch admitted. From our vantage point it doesn’t look like there is a food shortage or a water shortage. The answer to injustice and our own soul sickness, said Schirch, is very simple — by “truly loving our neighbors as ourselves and living as if everyone matters.”
Throughout the week conference participants were challenged by the illustration of the mustard seed, which though small and unassuming, has the power to grow and ultimately, to change the world.
“We are called and sent to proclaim the Word,” Lomax said during the closing communion service. “Go into all the world and preach the gospel, baptizing them in the name of the heavenly parent, and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” he said. “That’s the charge.”
