This past weekend we led and worshiped with Salem Mennonite Church in Shickley, NE; a church I will soon be attending regularly. We joined the youth on Saturday evening for time to talk and then played a game of ultimate Frisbee. Sunday morning we led Sunday School hour, the church service and then following a potluck we re-joined with a smaller crowd for a time of story telling from the three men left in the congregation who did CPS (Civilian Public Service) during WWII as alternative service to entering the army.
It was interesting to hear their stories and reflections but what struck me was how entering CPS was: (1) not so much a decision made alone, but a decision made primarily by their home congregation and their family; (2) a time in their life when they learned to know other Mennonites and built relationships with those others Mennonites who they wouldn’t necessarily associated with because of divides in the Mennonite church. The other thing that struck me that wasn’t necessarily spoken, but was clear in how each man talked, was that CPS led into a lifetime of service. These men continued to be active in the church and in volunteer activities even as they aged. These activities included prison ministries, Mennonite Disaster Services, Mennonite Central Committee and numerous boards and leadership at the congregational level.
What I continue to wonder at is: why haven’t we done a better job of “selling” voluntary service? That may seem like a comment from nowhere, here is my train of thought. It seems as if we discourage our youth and young people to take a path other than armed services, we should be putting in its place a strong encouragement for voluntary service. I realize it is called voluntary service for a reason (it’s voluntary, not mandatory) but if we take from Christ a message of peace that only tells us not to go to war and not to use violence then we’ve missed half the message.
Peace is not just about being anti-violence and following a path that walks the line around the violence; if this is so we are just as much apart of the violence as those actually doing the action. If I bring in the subject of structural violence, well then we are all guilty. So in what ways are we working for peace, and not just avoiding violence?
The more we talk with people about the Gospel of Peace and God’s vision for Shalom the more and more convinced I am that the heart of this message is about being relational. The original Shalom, God’s vision, was in the Garden of Eden and here was a place where all God’s creation, people, animals and earth lived together in relationship with each other and with God. Obviously we have a long way to go to reestablish God’s vision for peace but if we all start small, what could happen?
Let’s just imagine the transforming, rippling power when we have established a relationship with God and taken Jesus as the center of our life. This relationship as it develops leads to peace with ourselves and we naturally take that peace into other relationships. Well, right Elizabeth, sounds easy but it’s not as easy to live it as it is to type it. That, my friend, is why we’re on a journey. This journey to live into God’s vision of Shalom is uncomfortable but it’s relational. We can always count on our relationship with God to give us strength to build relationships with others whether they are friends, perceived enemies or just scary because they are different than we are. That’s where peace comes in. Living a relational life, of loving those strangers and enemies in our lives is the crux of peacemaking! Avoiding violence just doesn’t cut it. Being a Christian is a call to action and to a lifestyle.
Now, I digress. Before I rambled onto this tangent, I was talking about voluntary service. Maybe it wasn’t as tangential as I think… it seems that saying no to military service means we say yes to a lifestyle. Maybe that lifestyle doesn’t include voluntary service as Mennonite Mission Network sets up, maybe for you it is volunteering in your community. (I must insert here that I am a strong advocate for voluntary service as I did Service Adventure, MMN, out of high school; but further explanation of that will have to be at a later time.) What I believe such a lifestyle should include is a lifetime of active peacemaking at the relational level. War in places where your friends are from is harder to support than a war in an unknown place.
Elizabeth
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