We Got It! Theologian-in-Residence Program

Each year the University of Chicago's Border Crossing Project funds some M.Div. and Ph.D. students to work as a team on a theological problem at an area congregation. As an M.Div. student, I work as an interim pastor at a church where a Ph.D. student in theology from U. Chicago happens to attend—so, we applied as a team to the program and our project, along with a few others, was chosen be funded!

Our church is an urban Mennonite congregation committed to our peacemaking roots; however, we are seeking fresh ways to faithfully navigate the violence of our urban context. Thus, our project addresses the problem of urban violence from a theological and ethical perspective. I hope our project helps to dispel some of the bad information out there that peacemaking churches are “passive.” What follows is a little snapshot of our proposal (click "read more" to continue).

Our congregation of mostly Mennonite converts needs answers to some key questions. How do we, as a peace-making, parish-serving church, constructively engage the typical kinds of urban violence—verbal aggression and confrontation, physical fighting and assault, robbery and theft—that we encounter in our neighborhood? How do we empower our congregants to practically and peacefully engage neighborhood violence, with sensitivity to our racial, ethnic, cultural (and linguistic) differences in both the experience and perpetration of violence? It seems clear that, for our congregation to promote the well-being of both our members and our neighbors, we need to explore and experiment with active peacemaking strategies, available from within our tradition and perhaps beyond it. But what are these resources from both within and beyond our heritage, and by what criteria do we assess their faithfulness to our convictions and their utility in our ministry and mission?

These questions have an unavoidably theoretical element, but they are essentially practical in orientation, concerned with developing personal skills and community practices for faithful Mennonite living in an urban context. This practical orientation is given further focus by two concrete possibilities currently available to Living Water: training in the skills and practices of Christian Peacemaking Teams—a resource internal to our tradition—and training in skills and practices of a traditional martial art—a resource external to our tradition. Living Water has congregants involved in both of these, and our congregation is already experimenting with the latter (martial arts) in our afterschool program and an adult class. Moreover there are discussions underway about training our immigrant/refugees congregants in basic self-defense and general “people-safety” skills (related to but distinct from martial arts training).

Our proposal, then, has three substantively interacting and sequentially overlapping components:
• implementing pilot programs that provide training in conflict transformation, martial arts, and people-safety skills;
• interviewing key participants in our congregations’ ministries—especially immigrant refugees and neighborhood youth—hearing from them descriptions of the aggression and violence they regularly encounter and identifying, if possible, general types of violence and points of overlap and intersection among them;
• encouraging congregational-wide theological reflection with regard to how we navigate and respond to violence in our neighborhood. As an historic peace church made up of congregants from variegated denominational backgrounds, martial arts—a discipline outside of our tradition—will serve as a catalyst to stimulate theological, ethical, and practical reflection on the pervasive problem of violence in Rogers Park. We also hope to empower our congregation to reflect on biblical and traditional stories of and theological principles for proactive peacemaking, looking with fresh eyes for faithful parameters for engaging and transforming violence in an urban context.