Peace

Introducing Garden Chapel

May 14, 2013 by Emily Ralph Servant

We are “The Garden Chapel” from Victory Gardens, New Jersey. We are a small, diverse, loving, and growing congregation located in Morris County, New Jersey. The borough of Victory Gardens was founded in 1941 by the federal government to house workers from a nearby munitions factory. It was named after the vegetable gardens people planted during World War II in response to food shortages. It is the smallest municipality in size (91 acres) and population (1,520) in Morris County, but the most densely populated.

During the Vietnam War young men were being drafted into the military services. Since serving in the military is completely contradictory to our beliefs, the Mennonite Church negotiated an “Alternative Service” arrangement with the government. This allowed conscientious objectors to serve our country in a manner consistent with our understanding of the Lord’s commands. Instead of going to war, these men served at Greystone State Psychiatric Hospital assisting patients in various capacities. Initially, the men formed a house church, but they saw that the community of Victory Gardens was not served by a single church. With the assistance of the Franconia Conference, they planted our church in 1971. To this day it remains the only church in the community. How truly wonderful it is that God would plant a peace church in a community founded for war!

We have been blessed with our new Pastor Tim Hart since last March. Tim grew up in the community and has attended our church since childhood. He is keenly aware of our strengths and our needs and has a dynamic vision for the future.

Our mission statement is “Loving God, Loving Our Neighbors, & Loving Each Other.” We try to live this out by our outreach to the community. We have an annual “Community Day” picnic were we reach out with food, fun, and fellowship with our neighbors. This year we distributed 105 book bags filled with school supplies to needy children. During the holidays we prepare and deliver meals to shut-ins and seniors. When we visit and fellowship with them we are reminded to “… remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’” (Acts 20:35)

We are praying that God will enable us to develop a Hispanic Ministry and also help us to restore our summer youth program which in the past has shown God’s love to many young people. Please pray for us as we are praying for all of you.

Find Garden Chapel on the web: http://www.gardenchapelchurch.org/. Download the pdf: Introducing Garden Chapel.

Seeking peace and pursuing it with Conference youth

April 16, 2013 by Emily Ralph Servant

by Don McDonough, Arise

What happens when a youth group from a 274-year-old congregation (Methacton) meets with the youth from a community outreach that is just about a year old (Arise)? What happens when you then pile those youth in a couple of vans and drive two hours to a cabin where they will be cooped up for a couple of days? What happens when you add to this mix three 50-something-year-old leaders who want to connect with these kids and have a serious discussion about being peacemakers? You get a weekend when all of us learned a lot about each other and probably a little more about ourselves, a weekend when we all learned that we can have a lot of fun together.

The teenagers could not have been more different. The ethnic differences were the first to fade away and as we got to know each other better, a variety of other differences began to surface. The students were raised and shaped in different contexts and by different influences. Some attend church regularly, others don’t. They came from five different high schools, each of which had its own culture and its own idea of what is cool. One youth described the car that they wanted their grandfather to buy for their 16^th birthday. How must that have sounded to the person next to them who never knew their grandparents and for whom the hope of owning a car seemed so far out of reach?

Despite our differences, we were able to bond and soon shared freely about ourselves and our lives. Our discussions centered around peace issues; more than just war or mass shootings, we talked about an attitude of peace. The youth shared about bullying, social media abuse, and sports violence. For the older leaders, it was sad to see how the very activities we used participate in for relaxation and community building have turned into a competitive, anxiety-causing force. Even the cheerleaders shared how their focus was less on encouraging their team and more on degrading the other team. How do we become peacemakers in this environment?

We were so blessed to have Ron Wycoff-Kolb along. Ron shared passionately about how God convicted him to become a conscientious objector even though he had voluntarily joined the military during the Vietnam War. We listened intently as he told the story of his family’s rejection and the price he had to pay for following this call to peacemaking. We were challenged; in the end, a diverse group of teens and a few post-mid-lifers found some common ground. May all of us be brave enough to take a costly stand for peace, whatever our context and whatever our age.

Preventing Gun Violence

February 21, 2013 by Emily Ralph Servant

Drick Boyd, professor at Eastern University, and Fred Kauffman from Mennonite Central Committee (both from West Philadelphia congregation) shared stories of gun violence and redemption and encouraged leaders to engage their congregations around the topic of gun violence and gun control. There are deeper issues in our culture, Boyd said, and getting rid of guns won’t remove those deeper issues, but “at least we’ll live long enough to address them.”

Kauffman and Boyd are available to come speak at your congregation on the topic of preventing gun violence; they also recommend the book America and Its Guns.

Intercessory Prayer about Gun Violence

Listen to the podcast:

[podcast]http://www.mosaicmennonites.org/media-uploads/mp3/Gun-Violence.mp3[/podcast]

Incarnation in the suburbs

January 30, 2013 by Emily Ralph Servant

by KrisAnne Swartley, Doylestown congregation

My fingers and toes are still somewhat numb as I sit down to write this account of the prayer walk in Hilltown Township (Pa.). I also feel somewhat numb on the inside. I wonder how I got here… the associate pastor who was just interviewed by a local news station for walking and praying on a neighborhood street. This is weird.

Then I remember how I got here. I have been asking God to show me what it looks like to incarnate God’s love in the suburbs because it isn’t always obvious to me. My suburbs look beautiful and well-kept and peaceful when you drive around on the streets. What need is there here? It is hidden under the surface.

I got an email last Friday from my children’s school district office saying that there had been a home invasion and murder in my township and that their school would be increasing security. I quickly looked up the news story and read the report. My first instinct was to lock my doors, hunker down and pray. I felt violated and fearful.

My second instinct was to get outside and be present, to stand in the middle of the darkness and bring the light of hope and faith. I had been asking God what it looked like to do incarnational ministry in the suburbs and I felt in this moment that it meant going against any normal instinct to insulate myself or rationalize away what had happened.

A group of us from Line Lexington Mennonite, St. Peter’s Covenant, and Doylestown Mennonite have been meeting to pray once a month. We called an emergency meeting to pray specifically about this tragedy and discern a response. Lowell Delp, the pastor of Line Lexington congregation, Jim Fox, the pastor of St. Peter’s congregation, and Sandy Landes and I from Doylestown congregation decided that walking Swartley Road and praying for our neighbors there would be a faithful and redemptive way to incarnate Jesus. Lowell and Jim visited some of the residents the day before our prayer walk, to let them know what was happening and invite them to join us.

Today, a group of ten of us met in a parking lot on Route 309. One man who joined us there but could not brave the cold walk said, “I want to see our community come together after this. We can’t change anything by ourselves. Our community needs prayer and our churches need prayer.” I was sure I saw the hint of tears in his eyes and heard a tremble in his voice.

We carried candles in glass jars and sang songs of grace and God’s faithfulness. We walked against the freezing wind to “Amazing Grace” and “The Steadfast Love of the Lord Never Ceases.” We prayed for the woman and the teen boys who were traumatized by the violence, for the neighbors whose street was violated by this horrific incident. We prayed for beauty to come from these ashes, for God’s redeeming power to be at work.

I am tempted to look forward and ask “What’s next?” But maybe for now it is enough to be visible. To be present. In a community with no sidewalks and few places to be together as neighbors, maybe even that presence is miraculously transformative. I will keep choosing presence and incarnation over insulation. I will tell my first instincts to step aside in favor of what Jesus is prompting deep inside. And I find I am not numb anymore.

KrisAnne Swartley is pastor for the missional journey at Doylestown (Pa.) Mennonite Church. She wrote this reflection last Thursday (January 24^th). Read the news report.

U.S. War-culture, Sacrifice and Salvation

January 10, 2013 by Emily Ralph Servant

Following the events of Sept. 11, 2001, Rev. Kelly Denton-Borhaug, Associate Professor and Chair of the Religion Department at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pa., began to investigate the links between Christian understandings of sacrifice and U.S. militarism and war.

This morning, Denton-Borhaug spoke at the Pastors and CRM Leaders’ Breakfast about the topic of her book, U.S. War-culture, Sacrifice and Salvation. A “war-culture,” said Denton-Borhaug, is the increasing interpenetration of the ethos and practices of war into ever-increasing facets of daily human life. Drawing on information from economists, sociologists, and pop culture, Denton-Borhaug gave illustrations of how this war-culture has developed and overdeveloped, especially in the years since 9/11, and how the language of sacrifice fosters what can be considered a national “war religion.”

Peace advocates must talk about and study the reality of war-culture in the United States, Denton-Borhaug encouraged, to begin to diffuse the mystery that surrounds it. This will be the topic of the upcoming Winter Peace Retreat, sponsored by the Franconia and Eastern District Conferences’ Peace & Justice Committee.

Listen to the podcast from this morning’s breakfast and view the PowerPoint presentation, which includes additional information and statistics beyond what Denton-Borhaug covered in her presentation. Contact Kelly.

[podcast]http://www.mosaicmennonites.org/media-uploads/mp3/War-Culture-Kelly-Denton-Borhaug.mp3[/podcast]

Delivering Christ to a waiting world

December 20, 2012 by Emily Ralph Servant

by Donna Merow, Ambler

The live nativity at Towamencin congregation. Photo by Casie L. Allebach.

Christmas. I have long been ambivalent about this holy season. Don’t get me wrong. I LOVE Christmas—the anticipation of Advent, the children’s pageant, singing “Silent Night” by candlelight with guitar accompaniment, the live nativity, the retelling of the familiar story, the making and wrapping of gifts.

But I also dread its coming—the gaudy lawn decorations, inane songs like “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” blaring from the radio, the excesses of the celebration. I lament with Linus its commercialization and long to discover if the Grinch’s Whoville observation is farther reaching and that it can, indeed, come “without packages, boxes, or bags.”

I trace my ambivalence to singing “Will Santy Came to Shanty Town?” for a school program when I was about nine. The song is a child’s first person wondering if Santa will visit his side of the tracks this time around or if his mother will have to repaint his toys the way she did the year before. At the time I needed to believe in the magic of Christmas more than anything. My parents had recently divorced, which necessitated a move, and my world was turned upside down by the addition of a stepfather who drank too much. But Eddy Arnold’s musical autobiography captured my youthful imagination. The revelation that Santa apparently didn’t come to all deserving children was an epiphany for me and one that has shaped my Christmas-keeping in the decades since.

The Irish have a beautiful custom of having the youngest child light a candle in the window on Christmas Eve, lest Christ should come in the guise of a stranger. I count the strangers I have met during this time of year to be among my most treasured gifts.

One year we were able to connect with a woman we read about in The Inquirer. She lead a group of fearless females who stood on the corner in their neighborhood with their mops and brooms to reclaim it from the drug dealers, and she often provided sanctuary to a dozen or more children in her home.

Then there was the mother of the family we had adopted through the Visiting Nurses Association who selflessly offered a sleeping bag that she had requested to another mother who showed up at the center because she had nothing to give to her little ones.

I generally avoid the mall as much as possible, but one year I was approached there by a stranger as I was enjoying a snack after a fruitful search for flannel sheets for my newly-separated father. Within a half hour I had learned about her painful spiritual journey through divorce and the sexual abuse of her children.

Liberty Ministries Christmas — Volunteers with Liberty Ministries pack Christmas gifts for inmates.

That same year, my family traveled into Philadelphia for a performance of The Nutcracker. A young woman struck up a conversation with me (I am an avowed introvert and rarely initiate such encounters) as we waited on the platform at Market East for the R5 to take us home. Our conversation continued until she got off at the stop before us. She was a recovering drug addict trying to put her life back together. Her grandfather was dying in a nursing home in the area, and friends were taking her to visit him. He had believed in her even when she didn’t believe in herself, she explained.

This year the world was too much with me, and I feared that Christmas might not come, “but it came just the same.” It came through offering a ride to an elderly woman in front of me in the check-out line at the Dollar Tree store who would surely have struggled walking home with her cane and packages. It came in attending a nursing home concert in which several members of my congregation performed. It came shopping with a neighbor for an immigrant family facing its first Christmas without a mother/wife/daughter/sister. It came helping to prepare nearly 2,000 brown paper packages for the inmates at Montgomery County Correctional Facility and having the privilege of joining others from Liberty Ministries in their distribution to the women who eagerly awaited them and gratefully received them. It came with a real “baby Jesus” in the pageant this Sunday and our own costumed angels poignantly drawing us in as we mourned the slaughter of the Holy Innocents in a sleepy New England town.

Christmas. The celebration of God with us invites us all to be open to possibility and opportunities—to “deliver” Christ to a waiting world, to serve Christ among the least of these, and to be surprised anew by the ways Christ comes to us in the midst of our isolation and loneliness, our longing for things to be different, our busyness and self-absorption, and our grief and pain, our hopes and fears.

Walking in the Way of Peace

December 19, 2012 by Emily Ralph Servant

Last spring, the Eastern District and Franconia Conference Peace and Justice Committee sent invitations to our congregations for any member, young or old, to write reflections on “Walking in the Way of Peace.” We weren’t sure what response we would receive, but we offered this as one way for people to consider and express how their experience of following Jesus in everyday life led them to reconciling conversations, or choices supporting justice for vulnerable people, or perhaps what tensions they felt in trying to live Christ’s peace. As it turned out, the best submissions did speak of struggle and uneasiness – especially the conflicted feeling of desiring the well-being and fullness of life God intends for us and all creation, and cringing in our awareness of our own part in continuing the gap between God’s dream and our present reality. Thanks be to God that we are not left alone in acknowledging the gap, but live with the Spirit within us, moving among us to create peace that eclipses human understanding! May these two honest reflections feed our common hope in the Prince of Peace, who comes to us in weakness and poverty–that the glory of the Lord would be revealed, and all people would see it together.

Walking in the Way of Peace

by Brenda Shelly, Blooming Glen

I have not opened morning eyes to a place torn by bombs or spent a night without sleep due to violence.

But I long for peace in the devastated dark corners of this trembling globe.

I have not tasted the painful bitterness of losing a loved one to war.

But my heart aches for mothers and wives bearing such a profound and agonizing sting.

The mouths of my children have never asked for bread because they could not quiet great hunger from within.

But my soul aches when I remember the millions less fortunate. The gentle, the innocent, the starving. Parents with no way to comfort a dying child.

Never have I been unduly pressed by a governmental or cultural authority, leaving me powerless and desperate.

How I fear for those oppressed beyond any visible hope or release.

It has not been difficult for me to turn the other cheek in my privileged middleclass neighborhood with only the sound of wind chimes and the occasional spoiled dog next door to break the silence.

I’ve had no trouble integrating my nonviolent beliefs in the peaceful way of Jesus with the realities of my tiny, sheltered, personal world. I am sometimes ashamed by my pedestrian untested faith. How can my opinions even matter when resting alongside such global suffering?

I have no answers. Yet my heart burns for peace. Every fiber of my being aches for justice, longs for reconciliation, and desperately hopes that somewhere deep inside each vengeful or frightened heart, we might someday find our common humanity. A humanity in which will can all to look into the eyes of the one we fear (the one we think we hate) and see our own eyes looking back.

Why "walking in the way of peace" requires grace

December 19, 2012 by Emily Ralph Servant

Michael Meneses

Why “walking in the way of peace” requires grace

by Michael A. Meneses, Wellspring Church of Skippack

People hurt people. There is no exception. There are a thousand and one ways in which we hurt one another. And we’re all guilty. We alienate and exclude, and distance ourselves; we give them the silent treatment or rudely dismiss them as inadequate and unimportant; we label and ridicule or nurture distain in our hearts for them; we assume superiority over them, we indulge in profiling and pre-judgment, we take advantage of them, manipulate, cheat, lie, and steal from them, and so-on and so-forth. And so, many become wary, careful in relationships, afraid to get too close, fearful of vulnerability, quietly building invisible protective walls against others.

As such, given our present human condition, walking in the way of peace is contrary to our nature. Why? Upon eating the forbidden fruit, the human race declared war against God, as well as against each other. Each of us in one form or another has declared ourselves a god in our own right in defiance of our Creator. This is reflected in our power struggles with one another. We want our own way. When we don’t get it? It’s fight or flight. That’s our real human nature.

Because of this, walking in the way of peace actually begins with the honest acknowledgement that relationships are dangerous. Conflict, disagreements and hurt, offenses-given and offenses-taken, are a regular occurrence in our day-to-day relations with others. When relationships go awry, many find it much easier to drop the relationship (fight or flight) rather than stay committed to the way of love and its hard work of constructive engagement for peace building. Thus, walking in the way of peace can be quite a challenge.

Furthermore, genuine peace is not merely the absence of open conflict between two parties. For example, there can be much pain and agony between people even where there is no apparent conflict: silent hurt feelings, quiet misunderstandings, and self-righteous accusatory judgment, for example. Real Biblical peace, Shalom, is actively concerned for one’s neighbor, for his or her fulfillment and completion, soundness and wholeness, serenity and tranquility, success and prosperity. If two neighbors passively live side-by-side in distrust and with silent resentment toward each other, and never speak a word to each other unless necessary, there is no real shalom in that neighborhood.

Neither is walking in the way of peace a matter of becoming a doormat to avoid conflict. Seeking wholeness, one-ness, and completeness for all, including one’s self, is a deliberate choice to stay connected and negotiate in and through conflict in order to find a harmonious solution as much as is humanly possible (Romans 12:18). Being a deliberate intent to respect, care for, and consider the needs and interests of “the other,” while at the same time respecting one’s own needs and interests, walking in the way of peace maintains a self-integrity without fabricated self-effacement, a kind of false humility. Avoiding conflict through disingenuous self-denial is motivated out of fear or cowardliness rather than genuine strength of character that is willing to stand for what is true, right, or good. Such avoidance has little integrity and does little to address the actual source of conflict.

All this is not only difficult, it is next to impossible. It takes super human strength. It’s beyond human nature. It therefore requires God’s grace, the work of the Holy Spirit within us, and a ready submission to Christ’s Lordship and Authority in our lives. It requires God’s unconditional love working its way in and through us, toward others. And though we don’t always get it right, we must always keep trying. For it is the way God expands His Kingdom-Rule among us.

Peace

Walking in the Way of Peace

Why “walking in the way of peace” requires grace

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