Welcome to Pursuing Peace
Welcome to Pursuing Peace! We have much to discuss.
Pursuing Peace was born out of the conviction that followers of Jesus are called to be peacemakers, to lay down our arms, and to love our enemies. We are called to push back against the darkness in the world not by matching the world blow for blow, but by the ways and means that rhyme with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Why Pursuing Peace? The name comes from Psalm 34:14: “Turn from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.” Peace does not seem to be the default mode of the world and the Bible recognizes this. Thus, we are told to seek it out and pursue. We at Pursuing Peace take this command seriously (even though we don’t take ourselves seriously whatsoever).
The Barna Group conducted research in the United States and discovered that
“while three in five Americans (and a nearly equal number of practicing Christians, 57%) would say they have a right to defend themselves with violence, only one in ten (11%) think Jesus would agree with them” (27).
There are two alarming conclusions from these statistics:
Being a Christian makes no apparent difference regarding justifying the right to violently defend oneself.
Most Christians readily acknowledge they are out of sync with Jesus.
If Christians are out of sync with Jesus, then the fault is ours and not his. Because of this, Pursuing Peace has a very simple vision statement: Make peace famous! We are convinced that most Christians simply lack an imagination for peace and we want to help add to the chorus of peacemakers calling the Church to be faithful to Jesus and to the way of Jesus (Acts 9:2).
We have been wrongly taught that the options are kill or be killed.
We have been taught that the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
We have been taught that we can follow the Prince of Peace in our hearts and live violently in the world.
Jesus routinely rejected either/or thinking. We believe that peacemakers are called to imagine ways through these false dichotomies. We just need to be equipped.
In order to increase our imagination for peace, Pursuing Peace will engage with:
Scripture
Story
Study
We will do so through written words on the Pursuing Peace Blog, through interviews and conversations on the Pursuing Peace Podcast, through gatherings at the Pursuing Peace Conference, and through video storytelling on Pursuing Peace Video.
The work of peacemaking involves many topics that we need to talk about: neighborhood violence, international war, race, gender, justice, economics, and ecology.
Please join us in this conversation. This is not a conversation only for Christian pacifists. Christians who take the just war tradition seriously are interested in less violence as well. This is not a conversation only for Christian Anabaptists. We are connected with Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Wesleyan, Reformed, and Pentecostal Christians who take seriously the call to be peacemakers (is there something about being peacemakers that causes us to be ecumenical?).
Pursuing Peace is a ministry of Plowshares, a church in and around Lexington, KY.