On Saturday, Peace Catalyst staff and volunteers in Seattle came together with our Bosnian friends in remembrance of the Srebrenica genocide their people experienced in Europe only twenty years ago. They asked us to join them in the act of remembering the horrific events so that massacres like this never happen again.

23 Burmese refugee leaders gathered for a Peace Feast in Denver. We all sat cross-legged on mats, enjoying a variety of delicious Burmese foods and talking. But this was different than most Peace Feasts.

Two leaders from the Hizb ut-Tahrir spoke to our group in Jogjakarta, Indonesia. These men outlined a bold, utopian Islamic vision. They saw themselves at war with Western civilization and sought to establish a global Caliphate - an Islamic government with a leader over their entire Muslim community, known as a Caliph. 

Even if one disagrees with my assessment of Muslims, I think we can all agree on the clear teaching of the Prince of Peace. A couple weeks ago I spent three of the most intense and exciting days of my life making peace in a city in Central Java, Indonesia. Everywhere I went I told my favorite stories from our work in Peace Catalyst International and shared key verses from the Bible about peacemaking.

What do peacemakers do in a country like Indonesia? Here’s an example from my recent visit, highlighting the essence of what we do in Peace Catalyst International.

Conversations about peacemaking can tend to communicate the notion that all force is always wrong. However, peacemaker Eric Patterson believes that we can work for peace while also supporting the use of force by legitimate authorities under the right circumstances.

For the past five years I have been working with Muslim refugees in the Phoenix area and trying to get the Church to faithfully love the neighbors that God has brought to our city. On this journey God has been faithful to teach me, through many failures, how to effectively move people toward loving the neighbors they would never otherwise spend time with. Here are some lessons I've learned.

I arrived at the Mosque that afternoon with an outline for the day’s event, a Muslim friend to co-facilitate with me, and a trust in God to do good things. It was going to be a discussion on caring for sisters of other faiths. But I left the Mosque with a heavy conscience, shaky hands, and no small amount of confusion. So much for my first “real” peacebuilding events. They did not go as planned. They went worse.

Last month I had the great privilege of traveling to to the Indonesian city of Padang, West Sumatra for two weeks of speaking, learning, and relationship-building. In my first week in Padang I only encountered one other foreigner, a German man that I met in passing, and was not, to my knowledge, in the presence of a single other Christian.