TODAY IN MISSION YEARBOOK
Mission Yearbook: Cornerstones of God’s kin-dom
Continuing the theme of “reconciliation” on “Leading Theologically,” the show’s host, the Rev. Bill Davis of the Presbyterian Foundation, invited the Rev. Dr. Laurie Lyter Bright, the executive director of Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, to talk about the multifaceted work of the 80-year-old organization. Their 29-minute conversation is here.
“What does PPF do? There are hundreds of answers to that because expressions of peacemaking have been different throughout the decades,” Lyter Bright told Davis. “The throughline is this commitment to nonviolence.”
The bulk of the work is around gun violence prevention, prison abolition, Israel-Palestine, accompaniment and the Peace Church, which she said is a “group that helps congregations reflect deeply about what it means to be nonviolent.”
Of late, Lyter Bright said she’s become “obsessed with understanding conscientious objectors.” She started by hanging out with conscientious objectors from recent wars, “asking questions and being a nerd about it, which is what I do when I’m curious.”
“I now have a much deeper appreciation for what conscientious objection is. It’s an act of resistance much like nonviolence is. It’s about living with this deep personal alignment: ‘This is what I say I believe, and this is how I’m enacting it.’”
There’s “a growing movement of folks who want to create the necessary paper trail to declare themselves conscientious objectors if and when a draft should return to this country,” she said.
“There’s all kinds of research on the moral injury that occurs for folks who enact violence, even when it’s violence they’ve been told, ‘This must happen. This is the only way to stop evil in the world, the only way to resist damaging forces that are harming lots of people.’”
She called conscientious objection “that moment of self-reconciliation with, ‘I believe in a nonviolent Jesus who told me very clearly to love my neighbors and in a God who very clearly commanded not to kill.’”
“How could I possibly ask someone else to go do that for me?”
Nonviolence is a resistance strategy, she said, comparing what’s required to the organizing work of the civil rights movement, which she called “creative and hard, with the amount of time those leaders spent on training people to find inner calm when violence is being threatened and enacted on their bodies.”
“This was not a fight for justice” that’s out there somewhere, Lyter Bright said. “This was right in the heart, and I take that lesson with profound humility. Most of the peace and justice work that I’m involved in doesn’t come quite so close to my own life, at least not yet.”
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “articulated over and over again that this is a reconciliation — the world as it is, and the world as God intends it to be.”
“Do I see our fates as intertwined, or am I here to help [people] out, which is lovely — go help people, that’s great,” she said. “But if you truly believe your liberation is tied and we belong to each other in those ways … then it changes how you move through the world.”
PPF does accompaniment work alongside the Presbyterian Church of Colombia when it’s asked to. The relationship is more than 20 years old. Some people “go back year after year on their own dime and embed in the communities there” to help secure the safety of the peacemakers they’re with. “I think it is both an opportunity for PPF to go and support and hopefully offer some measure of protection for peacemakers there,” she said, “and it’s a huge opportunity to learn how much better this can be done than it frequently is.”
The Rev. Bill Davis is senior director of Theological Education Funds Development. Learn more about the Presbyterian Foundation’s Theological Education Fund here.
Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)
Let us join in prayer for:
Rosa Miranda, Associate, Hispanic/Latino-a Intercultural Congregational Support, Interim Unified Agency
Carrie Mitchell, Church Consultant, Princeton, NJ, Board of Pensions
Let us pray:
Father God, may our lives always reflect you, and may we also see that reflection in others. Help us see past self-imposed barriers to what you have for us in the friendships of those around us. Amen.