Peace Practitioners

One of the programs that we hope will be a hallmark of Hope for Peace & Justice is the Peace Practitioners program. Our goal is to recruit, train and support a Peace Practitioner for every church, synagogue and mosque. This person will have a passion for peace and will work to mobilize her/his own community to create a more peaceful world. They will be the resident peacemaker.

Frankly, this program has taken much longer to launch than seems reasonable. We worked on developing our own curriculum and have some material of which we can be proud, thanks largely to Rev. Shelley Hamilton. However, in this process, we realized two things. First, we lack the resources to be experts in all the various aspects of peacemaking: conflict resolution, advocacy, internal peace, peace education, reconciliation, etc. The other insight we had is that “one size fits some.” Peace Practitioners come with a variety of gifts, experiences, passions and education. We could never hope to customize a single program to certify a person according to a specific criterion called “Peace Practitioner.”

So, after a couple of false starts, we decided that the world didn’t need us to decide what kind of person should be practicing peacemaking. Our job is to utilize the expertise of those who have long been about the task of training and education. We will bring people together to be taught by experts in various fields, and then we will seek to sustain those people with information, training and support. Some of this information will be original from H4PJ, but much of it will be shared from the multitude of other organizations doing this work.

The unique focus of our program is identifying and empowering progressive people of faith to see themselves as Peace Practitioners. Hopefully, in some cases, these individuals will be trained to do conflict resolution. In other situations they will be activists mobilizing the community to a more prophetic peacemaking ministry. Some will be teachers, small group leaders or facilitators. A few actually will do the therapeutic work of helping people find inner peace. In other words, we will not determine how a person fulfills their role as a Peace Practitioner. Our job will be to empower and support an “army of peacemakers” with a variety of gifts.

Our first training is coming soon. In conjunction with the March 1 “Voices of Peace” event with keynote speaker Dr. Maya Angelou, we have recruited an amazing lineup of experts who will lead a weekend-long training called “Wage Peace.” MORE information on Wage Peace!

If you know others whose passion is to help the world be a more peaceful place, please forward this email and encourage them to attend. At the very least, I covet your prayers as we seek partners in making peace.

Won’t you become a Peace Practitioner?