A new book titled A Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace: Global Mennonite Perspectives on Peacebuilding and Nonviolence, edited by Fernando Enns, Nina Schroeder-van ’t Schip, and Andrés Pacheco-Lozano, is related to the emergence of the new Global Anabaptist Peace Network.
The book includes chapters by Nathan Hosler, director of the Church of the Brethren’s Office of Peacebuilding and Policy–which is a member of the network, and Scott Holland, Bethany Seminary professor emeritus, who is the Church of the Brethren and US representative on the steering committee of the network. Holland’s chapter is titled “Make Art, Not War: Toward an Aesthetics of Just Peace.” Hosler’s chapter is titled “Drone Warfare, the Incarnation, and Historic Peace Church Peacemaking: Interfaith Engagement in Washington, DC.”
Holland describes the network as “very active in inter-Anabaptist and ecumenical (World Council of Churches) peacebuilding. The steering committee is made up of country representatives from around the world. North America has a Canadian and a USA representative.”
The network is a formal follow up to organizing done by the historic peace churches (Church of the Brethren, Mennonites, and Quakers or Friends) and Anabaptist churches over several decades of association with the World Council of Churches and other ecumenical peacebuilding efforts. These included the WCC’s Decade to Overcome Violence and Ecumenical Call to Just Peace Convocation in Kingston, Jamaica, as well as a series of Historic Peace Church consultations that were held on every continent except Antarctica.
Please pray… For the work of the new Global Anabaptist Peace Network.
“Much of this mutual work of seeking cultures of peace has been occasional and ad hoc, thus lacking continuity,” Holland said. “A new organization has been formed to better facilitate more consistent ongoing networking, conversation, and cooperation in peace education and action.”
The Global Anabaptist Peace Network functions under the organizational umbrella and support of the Mennonite World Conference and includes in its membership various Anabaptist, Mennonite, and Brethren organizations and agencies.
This past June, the network put together an organizational profile and held its first in-person international meeting on the campus of Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Va.
Find out more about the network at https://mwc-cmm.org/en/global-anabaptist-peace-network.
Purchase the book through Brethren Press at www.brethrenpress.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=1666713813.
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