by Rev. Eric Foley, former Director of Communication at Peacemaker Ministries
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Top Ten Ways Peacemaker Networks Can Bring Peacemaking to The Community
1. Each Peacemaker Network can meet regularly to share best practices among churches seeking to build a culture of Peace.
2. Each Peacemaker Network can enable other churches in a community to learn about biblical peacemaking, and to begin the training process—perhaps by scheduling the initial Peacemaker Seminar for one church simultaneously with a more advanced training session for one of the existing churches in the Peacemaker Network, to reduce the cost to the new church.
3. Each Peacemaker Network can create and disseminate free biblical peacemaking tools (e.g., Reconciled or the PeaceMeal weekly devotional) that introduce people to biblical peacemaking at no cost, to spur interested parties to explore peacemaking on their own.
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Recently, we at Peacemaker Ministries have been noticing an interesting pattern emerging in biblical peacemaking.
The pattern begins when individual church members, church leaders, and pastors become interested in biblical peacemaking. They seek out the training and become committed biblical peacemakers.
Next, these early peacemakers lead their churches in the same direction. By sharing their own experiences, they stimulate interest within the church. That interest leads to a wider acceptance of peacemaking training, and finally to a churchwide commitment as a peacemaker church.
Finally, these peacemaker churches in a community begin to link up. They witness peacemaking to the wider community, hold mutual training events, and create special celebrations such as Reconciliation Sundays or community-wide peacemaking gatherings. They create what we have started to call a "Peacemaker Network."
Most communities are still in the first stage of this pattern—individual involvement. Since the launch of the Peacemaker Church resource, however, we have seen more and more communities moving into the second phase, with entire churches committing to a peacemaking philosophy. Most excitingly, in several communities around the country—Dallas, TX; Minneapolis, MN; Salem, OR; Orlando, FL; Oklahoma City, OK; Muscle Shoals, AL; and Houston, TX, to name a few—churches are beginning to link together formally and informally to encourage one another and share best practices about peacemaking.
Most interestingly, these transitions from communities with a few peacemaker churches, to communities with full-fledged Peacemaker Networks, are not something that we planned here at Peacemaker Ministries—they're just something that happened! It appears that as churches commit to biblical peacemaking, they also naturally become interested in working more closely with other peacemaker churches in their own community.
We are asking a lot of questions these days about how we can most effectively help to link together churches involved in peacemaking in a given city, in order to strengthen that city's overall capacity for biblical peacemaking. Peacemaker Ministries is interested in building as much biblical peacemaking capacity as possible into local communities through strong peacemaking programs in those local churches, coupled with connections between those local churches that are interested in peacemaking. We feel that an essential part of our role must be the facilitating of this transition to a local Peacemaker Network, to share best practices and encouragement between and among individuals, churches and communities. In the sidebar, I share a few thoughts about what each local "Peacemaker Network" could accomplish.
For information on Peacemaker Networks in your region, please click here.
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