For those who hope for, long for, and work for a society at peace—a world that knows justice and compassion and flourishing for all—we can feel exhausted, impatient, and distraught by the tension between the urgency of today's conflicts and the reality that we're in an ongoing struggle that will continue for generations.

Who are we so cut off from each other? From the world around us? From our own hearts? Why do injustice, oppression, fear, and apathy so often prevail? How can we be patient when there is so much pain around us? When will our world truly know peace?

How do we as peacemakers hold onto hope when there is so much in the world that needs made right, even as we have so little control over if and when that actually happens?

Friends, the season of Advent is for us.

The post The Practice of Hopeful Waiting: Advent for Peacemakers appeared first on Fiercely Alive.

Minneapolis is wrapping up one of the most momentous elections it has had in ages. We're voting between mayoral candidates with very different visions of public safety, and voting on amendments to our charter that have the potential to drastically change the landscape of mayoral power, policing, and housing stability.

And yet, many residents are largely unaware of the election and the significance of their options.

Why are people so often disconnected or uninvolved in the politics of their community? In some cases, it comes down to apathy—off-year elections typically see a far lower turnout, and people who are comfortable with their life and their community feel less urgency to engage. For others, it can simply be overwhelming—tracking with many different candidates and understanding their positions on a range of complex structural issues takes both time and mental and emotional energy. Not everyone has that to give, or wants to give it to the messiness of politics.

In many Christian communities, another barrier is their political theology. Some Christian traditions—I see this frequently in my anabaptist and moderate/progressive evangelical circles—encourage Christians to understand their primary allegiance as belonging to God rather than any government or institution in "the world." There is much about this theology that I find worthwhile, in that it encourages believers to seek truth, values, and a way of living that are "ultimate," eternal, deeper than the "penultimate" institutions and cultural values that will shift and fade over time.

But taken to an extreme, this theological posture can be harmful to Christians' witness of love. These theologies—often a sectarian Two-Kingdom theology that teaches that Christians should stay out of matters of the State, or a Kingdom theology that prioritizes individualized change—can encourage a worldview that views the realm of politics as worldly, dirty, and not worthy of followers of Jesus.

So, briefly, why should Christians care about politics?

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What does transformative peacebuilding in the community look like? How do you know what to actually do?

At Peace Catalyst, we frame our approach to community peacebuilding through three words:

• Understand: get to know yourself, your community, and and the issues or conflicts you're facing;
• Connect: build relationships with neighbors, leaders, and the "other" across lines of difference; and
• Collaborate: through those relationships, work in partnership with others to build peace in your community.

But what might those collaborations include? "Building peace," working together for the common good, is a very broad category.

I've been sitting with this question lately as I consider how to best explain PCI's work and vision, and as I start developing resources to train up others as peacebuilders alongside us. Finding ourselves at the intersection of several forms of community organizing (a term with multiple interpretations which I am defining broadly here), I've begun describing "Collaboration" through four lenses: Community Aid, Community Building, Community Development, and Community Activism.

The post Collaborating for Peace: Lenses for Community Transformation appeared first on Fiercely Alive.

But running parallel to this, often just below the radar, is also the jump in violent crime that many US cities have experienced since last summer's protests. Minneapolis has certainly experienced this, with a hefty increase in shootings and carjackings. There are many reasons for this, and it is historically common after a city experiences widespread protests. This violence has prompted many conversations about what community safety looks like, and has tempered some people's earlier commitment to defunding the police.
Still, the issue of increased violent crime did not catapult to the center of Minneapolis's attention—at least for this moment—until last month, when within the span of a few weeks three children were shot in the head, innocent bystanders of violence in their neighborhoods. Two of those children have since passed away.

The post Black Lives and Community Violence appeared first on Fiercely Alive.

This begs the question—what does justice look like? What kind of justice are racial justice activists and many Black and Brown communities demanding? This question matters, because we are often talking about very different ideas.

The post What is Justice? From Punishment to Change appeared first on Fiercely Alive.

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This is worth knowing about simply from a justice perspective—social harm doesn't get addressed unless we all pay attention. This new pipeline would carry a very dirty and dangerous fuel, yet is being constructed by Enbridge, a company with an awful track record for spills. It threatens the ecosystems of not only Northern Minnesota, but the waters of the Great Lakes as well. Its danger to natural resources infringes upon the sovereign treaty rights of the Anishinaabe people. And it represents a massive investment in fossil fuels exactly when, for the sake of our planet and for poor and vulnerable people across the world, we need to shift toward sustainable and green forms of energy.

The post The Line 3 Pipeline and the Intersections of Injustice appeared first on Fiercely Alive.

We argue with a friend. We bristle at parents’ well-meaning advice. Our kids refuse to go to bed. Our committee at church disagrees about how to use the budget. Part of the congregation starts speaking against the pastor because they have theological differences. The congregation can’t agree on what its stance should be on Black Lives Matter.

Conflict is normal, but we often struggle to handle it well. It’s uncomfortable, it’s scary, it’s painful. We want it to go away, or to resolve it quickly so life can return to “normal."

At Peace Catalyst, we continually deal with conflict as part of our peacemaking work. But we have consistently found that we do not want things to return to normal; we want people and groups to dive into their conflict, working together to discover what new, life-giving relationships might be possible!

To help our staff practice this, one leading peacebuilder to whom we turn is John Paul Lederach, author of The Little Book of Conflict Transformation, among several others. Lederach encourages us to not only manage or resolve visible conflicts, but to use conflicts as an opportunity to transform individual and group relationships in life-giving ways.

The process of conflict transformation challenges us to look beyond the immediate conflict or argument and focus on the relationships involved. Visible conflicts are usually symptoms of much deeper dimensions of mistrust, miscommunication, suspicion, and pain between people, groups, and societies. Conflict resolution may help end the immediate struggle, which is valuable. But unless the conflict is also embraced as an opportunity to heal the underlying broken relationships and create new relational patterns for the future, then the same sort of problems are likely to occur again and again.

At this point you may be thinking, “that’s all well and good, but what does it actually look like?!”

The post Transforming Conflict and Peace that Lasts appeared first on Fiercely Alive.

You’ve probably noticed—our nation is deeply divided. This is not new. Societies have always had internal struggles. But it can seem as if our current battles have become so calcified, so polarized and entrenched, that there is no way forward together.

Do Black lives matter, or all lives, or blue lives?

Are police departments racist and violent, or are there only a few "bad apples?"

Do the police need more money in order to "keep the peace," or do they need defunded or abolished so that money can be invested elsewhere?

Does America itself have a problem with racism and white supremacy, or are these lies to divide people and promote communism?

The post Peacemaking Lessons from the Uprising: The Need for a Moral Imagination appeared first on Fiercely Alive.

Sound familiar?

A common sentiment (seemingly most often, but not exclusively, among well-meaning white folk) that arises in times of social unrest—and a common sentiment that arose in response to the uprisings sparked by George Floyd’s murder—is to affirm the worthiness of a protest’s message while critiquing or condemning the methods of protest.

“Of course Black Lives Matter and our history of racism is wrong, but they aren’t protesting the right way!”

I understand this sentiment. I’ve thought it myself at times. It crossed my mind frequently when the groceries, shops, and restaurants in my neighborhood, mere blocks away, were ransacked and burnt down. This sentiment comes from a desire for order, for familiarity, for a process that feels safe. Those needs are healthy—having our sense of security and familiarity abruptly disappear can be a traumagenic experience.

But order and process and calm are not synonymous with peace.

The post Peacemaking Lessons from the Uprising: Don’t Skip Justice in Pursuit of Peace appeared first on Fiercely Alive.