Peacebuilders, You Are Not Alone
by Bryan Carey
“Then Elijah said to them, ‘I am the only one of the LORD’s prophets left, but Baal has four hundred and fifty prophets.'” - 1 Kings 18:22
We all can feel like Elijah felt. “I’m all alone! There is no one else!” Christians discovering God’s shalom vision and shalom-building mission can especially feel very isolated as they begin to catch glimpses of a re-imagined faith. Depending on how much one’s community of origin allows wrestling with questions or diversity of thought, discovering a peace-oriented faith can be a lonely and isolating experience.
Recently, an organization that has hosted peacebuilding camps in the Balkans since the 1990’s, Renewing Our Minds, contacted me to discuss our overlapping peacebuilding trainings and work. They invited me to speak at their 2022 Renewing Our Minds peace camp in Trebinje, Bosnia and Herzegovina to share about “Challenges in Peacebuilding.” I had the privilege to share with about about 40 people, mostly Christians but also non-religious and Muslim folks, from incredibly diverse ethnic and national backgrounds, from Tanzania to Uganda and Ukraine to Albania, Serbia, Romania, Croatia, Brazil, and Bosnia. In brief, I focused on several peacebuilding challenges starting from Peace Catalyst International’s Understand-Connect-Collaborate peacebuilding learning journey framework:
Challenges as we seek to understand: The process of unlearning and relearning that occurs as people engage across divisions can be quite painful as our worldviews and narratives (ethnic, racial, religious) shift. This is true for oneself but is also something we must consider carefully for participants, especially when we lead people from divided communities into new relationships. The experience can be incredibly isolating, lonely, and depressing for people, but it doesn’t have to be. Each of our communities must become better at creating space for unlearning and relearning as we encounter differences in our diverse, connected, global world.
Challenges as we seek to connect across boundaries: In conflict situations or when perceived threats exist, the boundaries of each community become more rigid as they seek to protect their own in-group members from those perceived threats. Because peacebuilders seek to connect across group boundaries, peacebuilders often appear as traitors to their community of origin, which requires us to carefully navigate our in-group markers and prove that we are good group members, even while trying to build bridges across divisions.
Challenges as we collaborate together: Although there is great joy as we stand shoulder to shoulder working together in diverse groups, there are also numerous challenges to sustaining collaborative work and creating substantive change in institutions and structures that undergird conflicts. As we collaborate across group boundaries, leaders from each group do well to be sensitive to the previously mentioned challenges (the pain of unlearning and rigid group boundaries) so as to not spark unnecessary resistance from each group. However, the most significant challenge as we collaborate is to identify and address institutional and structural root causes and injustices that undergird societal divisions. This collaborative work to address root causes is most necessary, most complex, and most often ignored. Small projects are a great place to begin in our collaborative work, but sustainable, positive peace requires us to address root causes.
Personally, I was deeply encouraged to meet the Renewing Our Minds team and connect with another set of folks engaging in peace camps in the Balkans and helping participants from around the world develop skills and awareness for peacebuilding. As a result of the camp, I had the chance to connect with people involved in peace work in the Baltics, Croatia, Serbia, Albania, Tanzania, and Uganda, and I look forward to seeing how we can collaborate further to help both Christians and all our neighbors develop understanding and skills to get involved. While I was unable to attend the entire Renewing Our Minds camp and hope to do so in the future, I was very encouraged to hear other conversations and workshops related to biases, deconstruction, and practical work merging pastoral work and environmental activism. For those of you Christians just getting started in peacebuilding, you are not alone. There are more of us than you know.
