Shawn Graves - The Gospel of Peace in a Violent World: Christian Nonviolence for Communal Flourishing

WE WOULD LIKE TO OFFER OUR PROFOUND thanks to each person who took the time and energy to contribute to this book. This could not have happened without you. We affirm your gifts, insights, and work and believe them to be crucial to our world and in furthering the Christlikeness of the church. We believe in this project and in what each of you have to say. For us this has been a labor of love, a long time coming. We want to thank IVP Academic for taking on this project, and David McNutt, who has been patient and kind in his feedback. In addition, we would like to thank each and every person at IVP who has been involved in bringing this book to the public.

We also want to offer our deep thanks to our dear friend, scholar, and pastor, Michael W. Pahl, who is one of the most loving and just people we know. Michael W. Pahl was a coconspirator in conceiving of this project at the very beginning.

We are deeply grateful for our readers and trust that as we learn from one another in these pages, and as we hear your feedback, we will become more just and loving people who reflect the way of Jesus in the world. We give God thanks.

Shawn Graves and Marlena Graves

THE VOLUME YOU HOLD IN YOUR HANDS is the result of blood, sweat, and tears. Lived experience. The contributors are activists, pastors, theologians, philosophers, and more. This project was a tremendous undertaking especially because the contributors are intimately involved in the topics they cover. None of it is mere lip service. As a result, sometimes the writing and editing had to stop so they could practice the gospel they preach and thus live out their convictions. This is why it is strong. This is why it took a good while to bring it all together. This is why this book is a labor of love, a contribution to and an extension of the work of nonviolence itself.

Much has happened in the United States specifically and the world generally since this effort began and individual essays were written. And no doubt much will happen once the manuscript has left our hands and landed in yours. Frankly, its impossible for projects like this to keep up with the frightening pace of injustice and catastrophe. Tragically, human rights violations abound, wars persist, violence multiplies, injustices radiate, and hateful ideologies take root and blossom. We are all witnesses: vulnerable and abandoned communities ravaged by a global pandemic and at the mercy of unevenly distributed health care resources and overburdened medical systems. Erupting racial terrorism, police brutality, voter suppression, and the undermining of democracy. Widening wealth inequality, climate catastrophes, gender-based violence, political scapegoating, vigilantism, humanitarian crises at the border, blatant and bald-faced lies and misinformation campaigns, truth decay, and vanishing public trust in political, economic, scientific, and religious institutions.

Our hope is that wherever you find yourselfand at whatever point in life you happen to beyou will use this book as an informative and inspiring field guide for exploring the gospel of peace. Jesus has not called us to do violence to one another nor to participate in the culture of death no matter how it manifests itself. We are to discern and use Gods means to accomplish Gods ends. If we use whatever means we believe will accomplish Gods ends, can we truly say we are living out the gospel? No, not at all. Martin Luther King Jr. made this very point in a sermon delivered to the congregation at Ebenezer Baptist Church on Christmas Eve 1967, just a few short months before his assassination:

So if youre seeking to develop a just society, the important thing is to get there, and the means are really unimportant; any means that will get you therethey may be violent, they may be untruthful means; they may even be unjust means to get to a just end. There have been those who have argued this throughout history. But we will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize that ends are not cut off from means, because the means represent the ideal in the making, and the end in process, and ultimately you cant reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.

Jesus used Gods means to accomplish Gods ends and so must anyone who professes to follow Jesus and model their life after his. Such was the way of Jesus and his earliest followers. It is to be our way.

These essays open, and contribute to, conversations; they offer a way of living, a blueprint for nonviolently navigating this world riddled with injustice, indifference, indigence, inhospitality, and misinformation. But it is up to each one of us to jettison pious platitudes and put gospel truths into practice in the particular places where we find ourselves. That requires wisdom and guidance, so we encourage you to use this volume in your classes, churches, and communities, to listen and learn from one another, and together to discern how you might live out the gospel of peace with and among your local and global neighbors.