Peace Messenger

Whether as a Facebook fan or cause supporter, a donor or subscriber to Peace Messenger emails, your name has been connected with the Adventist Peace Fellowship – an informal network linked by conviction that our movement’s heritage and the gospel itself call us to be peacemakers.  So, I hope you’ll stay with this email a bit further, as I touch on some ways APF might be one conduit through which you can address the need around and within us, in the name of the Prince of Peace.

First, our ninth annual book discussion series in collaboration with the Department of Religion at Washington Adventist University begins soon.  This year we'll grapple with one of the most urgent issues of our time, using Christianity, Climate Change and Sustainable Living by Nick Spencer, Robert White, and Virginia Vroblesky.  Find out more, including how you can participate online at the Peace Messenger blog.

APF has no office, no salaried staff and minimal organizational structure.  But we do have some dedicated people who, utilizing the marvels of the internet, put us in touch with broader efforts for peace conducted by interdenominational agencies.  Monte Sahlin is our liaison with the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.  Through Monte’s initiative, APF was one of the first organization to affiliate with NRCAT when it formed in 2006.  Its work has contributed to significant progress, while much remains to do.

Jeff Boyd, an Andrews graduate now taking a graduate degree in peace studies at Associated Mennonite Seminary, and publisher of the Adventist Activism blog, is our representative with Christian Peace Witness.  In an era when so-called evangelical religion has become intertwined with American militarism in more blatant and stunning ways than ever before, CPW brings together representatives of the historic peace churches with those of other denominations for public, counter-witness, pointing to the way of Jesus made clear in the New Testament.

We’ll sustain and develop, as the Lord permits, our online work.  Our web site provides basic information, with perhaps its most valuable contribution being extensive, full-text documentation of gospel nonviolence as an historic Adventist commitment, and the more recent renewal of interest in peacemaking.

The Peace Messenger blog is our more active, day-to-day web presence.  Note that you can now subscribe to the blog and receive links to individual posts by email.

Much gratitude is due Johnny Ramirez, for setting up APF’s presence on Facebook, which has done much to spread the word.

Finally, APF’s online store, Peace Pursuits, is the place to go for the latest and best in books and other resources pertinent to Christian peacemaking.  Peace Pursuits gives you the same discounts and ordering security as Amazon.com along with an opportunity to support the cause of peace.  A small percentage of each purchase goes to support our work, and that includes whatever you might order on the general Amazon site when you get there by stopping in for a browse at Peace Pursuits first!

Yes, in the end, all this remains paltry in view of the need, in the light of what could and should be done.  Yet the need of a seemingly insensate church, the pain of a warring world, and, most of all the great good news of a Messiah risen and victorious over the principalities and powers, summon us forward in hope, however inadequate our response.