What If Every Church Had Been A Peace Church?¹

Let's review the last 1700 years of Christianity through the honest and uncensored lens of an academic historian. If you are a Christian you will not like what you are about to hear. The history of the Christian church reads like a litany of horror and cruelty that has been perpetrated, with the blessings of the church, upon the peoples of the world.

First, the most current sins of the church need attention.²
1. For generations Christians have killed each other in Northern Ireland.
2. Christians in so called "First World Countries" condone, by their silence, the agonizing deaths of thousands of innocent Iraqi children monthly via the UN Sanctions program.
3. Rwandan Christians brutally massacred hundreds of thousands of their fellow Christians a few years ago.
4. US Christian soldiers, with the prayers and blessings of their home churches, have mercilessly destroyed Afghanistan and her people, both physically, emotionally and spirituality.
5. At the same time the church-endorsed military continues to inflict homicidal violence against Christian peasants in Colombia, under the guise of the Pentagon's discredited drug interdiction policy.
6. And the organized church, out of fear of the unknown and a lack of faith in the clear gospel message of unconditional love, remains essentially invisible and almost totally silent on the un-Christ-like human slaughter known as, modern war.

Now let's review earlier history. The reality of the Crusades, where Christian soldiers killed without mercy the "enemy of God" who occupied the "Holy Land", is a dark blot on the history of the church.

The Inquisitions, where Jews, wise women and other "heretics" were tortured and burned at the stake, went on for 600 years, with the blessings of the official church leaders who justified the Inquisition as being the will of God.

The Protestant Reformation and Counter-reformation wars, starting in the 16th century, were perpetrated by those in charge of church. All sides, Lutheran, Calvinist, Catholic and Anglican, believed that one could follow Jesus and simultaneously massacre members of the body of Christ who were not part of their particular fellowship.

The American Civil War resulted in the brutal deaths of over 600,000 Americans, virtually all-claiming Christianity as their faith. The North used the Bible as justification for total war, and the South justified the heartless and cruel institution of slavery in the same way. Both sides participated in carnage unequaled in American history.

Both World Wars I and II were started and fought by Christians against fellow Christians, with the pulpits on all sides ringing with flag-waving patriotism, shouting for blood, glory and victory in the name of their "god."

The atomic bombing of Nagasaki annihilated the historical and spiritual center of Oriental Christianity. That bombing is still regarded as pointless overkill by all credible historians. Did you know that an all-Christian bomb crew carried out that bombing? And did you know that mission was solemnly blessed by its Catholic and Lutheran chaplains? So on August 9, 1945, an all Christian Army Air Corps crew obliterated a Christian Community of faith, that had taken hundreds of years to establish, in one second.

The on-going genocide of indigenous peoples ever since the time of Columbus are largely accomplished with the full knowledge, consent and participation of decent, "God-fearing" Christians.

Given the fact that Christian theologians and most of the non-Christian world knows that Jesus, a pacifist Jew, preached active nonviolent resistance as the appropriate response to evil, one has to wonder what went wrong with the Christian church.

It is helpful to recall that Gandhi, a religious Hindu, was also a follower of Jesus, and often said that the only people who don't think Jesus was nonviolent were Christians. And herein lies a serious spiritual problem for the church. Historical documents clearly show that the Christian church of the first three centuries took Jesus' teachings of unconditional love of friend and enemies seriously. In fact, the church of Jesus Christ started out as a peace church. So, if the church of the first 300 years was a peace church, and the latter church of the last 1700 years has been a Justified War church, one has to wonder: "What would the world be like now if Every Church Had Been A Peace Church?"

A little clear thinking for those who know a little bit about of history would come up with a multitude of tantalizing possibilities, including the following:

1) The baptized Catholic leader of Nazi Germany, Adolph Hitler, would have been raised within a progressive peace church by a strong pacifist Catholic mother who would have nurtured and loved and protected little Adolph from the cruelty of his father and the cruelty of his society.
2) The Lutheran Adolph Eichmann, the Orthodox Christian Joseph Stalin, and the Catholic Benito Mussolini and many others of fascist infamy were baptized Christians. But none of them were ever taught that the Sermon on the Mount was central to the theology of Jesus and that nonviolence was at the core of Jesus' teachings.
3) If every church had been a peace church, the American Christian churches of the South would have rejected slavery (or their faith in Jesus) and the American Civil War would not have happened.
4) If every church had been a peace church, Christian European monarchs and their obedient Christian soldiers would not have brutalized and raped Africa, Asia and the Americas into colonial submission over gold, silver and slaves. If they had been peace churches then, the bloody armed revolutions of liberation that happened a century later would not have occurred.
5) If every US church was a peace church, a unified, benevolent United States Christianity would be working hard right now to nurture and reconcile with Afghani Muslims, Palestinians, blacks, gays, lesbians, and non-white foreigners, including Colombian peasants, Iraqis, Sudanese, Hispanics, Orientals, Jews, and so on.
6) If every church was a peace church, military spending would not cripple every program of social uplift available in the USA today.
7) If every European church had been a peace church, there might have been a World War I, no oppressive Treaty of Versailles, no Nazi party and no World War II.
8) If every church was a peace church Christian school children would not be bullying their school mates in the Columbine high schools of this land, and the victims of those bullies would have no reason to shoot back.
9) If every church had been a peace church, professed Christian presidents would not be trying to outspend their predecessors on lethal weapons systems.
10) And if every church had been a peace church, those who claim discipleship to the non-violent Jesus would be leading the world to peace, rather than into war--and the Peaceable Kingdom of God would be at hand.

We, who belong to the nonviolent movement of Jesus Christ, must recall our early nonviolent roots and draw spiritual strength from the truth that peace is the will of God. War, on the other hand, was and still is SIN and, it is not the will of God. On this Ash Wednesday, we Christians must repent of our addiction to violence and ask God to remove this evil from the Christian church.

A rebirth of the peace church movement is currently underway. There are Christians from many denominations, banding together under the banner of Every Church A Peace Church, or ECAPC, who believe that the Christian church could turn the world toward peace if every Church lived and taught as Jesus lived and taught.

Such peace churches have at least the following five characteristics:³

1. Proclamation of the gospel of peace.

We announce God's good news of reconciliation and peace (2 Cor. 5:19) through Jesus Christ who is our peace (Eph. 2:14).

2. Love of all human beings - even the enemy.

We have learned through Jesus Christ to love our enemies and to pray for them (Mt. 5:44), even when we are called to resist nonviolently their unjust actions.

3. Rejection of violence

We are learning first to recognize and reject our own violence. We refuse to use violence personally or to justify the use of violence as an instrument of power whether on a family, societal, national or international levels. We seek to learn and to practice the skills and disciplines of nonviolent conflict transformation, and to train others in these.

4. Commitment to the victims of violence

We are determined to not close our eyes to the horrific sacrifices which violence requires. As Jesus in his time stood with the victims of oppression and violence, so we are committed to standing with today's victims.

5. Community and solidarity

To realize this vision, we need each other, in our own congregations and communities, and in solidarity with other Christians around the world. Our citizenship is in 'heaven' (Phil. 3:20), and we are the Body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:27). Therefore all ties to nationality, ethnicity and land - important though these are - have been relativized. We seek to be a social expression of God's New World, alternative societies in whose climate justice, peace, mercy and truth will flourish. We invite others to share this vision with us and to discover its reality in their own congregations and communities. Come and join with us in this new movement of God within present day history. I call upon all Christians to begin a small cell group of ECAPC in your present congregation. Or, if you are one of many people who have been turned off by the actions of mainline Christian congregations, then seek out others like your self and begin your own ECAPC small group. God is a-foot! Become a part of this new grass-roots movement, which attempts to align itself with God's creative, nonviolent Spirit!

WWII General Omar Bradley once said, "We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we do about peace, more about killing than we do about living."⁴ It's time we Christians stop this trend and it is time for your congregation to become a peace church. To find out more information about this new movement, direct your web browser to www.ECAPC.org

Sources
1. Every Church A Peace Church is a 501 c 3 non-profit organization with headquarters in Washington, DC. Their web site is www.ecapc.org
2. This speech is the work of Gary G. Kohle, MD, Duluth, MN, and Dick Davis, Dallas, TX.
3. From the ECAPC web site.
4. Taken from a friend's email signature section without source being noted.