A note to our subscribers and readers,

This month marks a new chapter for the CPCT Substack as we broaden the voices, perspectives, and expertise contributing to the conversations on Christian peacebuilding we share through our Substack platform. Helping lead this transition is Jacqueline (Jacque) Isaacs, CPCT’s new Managing Editor.

For her first conversation, Jacque sits down with CPCT Senior Research Fellow Dr. Nick Scott Blakely to discuss the newly released Peace in Practice report, what pastors and Christian leaders across the country told us about the impact of division and polarization, and what the findings suggest for the work ahead.

Our world is increasingly polarized, a reality that is rightly drawing the attention of many organizations. To best support efforts to address polarization, the inaugural research initiative of the Center for Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation (CPCT) listened to Christian leaders across ministry, nonprofit, academic, and marketplace settings to better understand how polarization is shaping their communities and their work.

Nicholas Scott Blakely, Ph.D., a senior research fellow with CPCT who helped lead the project, found that despite significant differences in background, community, and conviction, leaders share a sense of exhaustion from the weight of polarization. Bringing these leaders together to discuss the challenges of polarization created opportunities for them to be seen and listen more closely to each other. That won’t resolve polarization on its own, but it offers a place to begin, and therefore a reason for hope.

I spoke with Dr. Blakely about the project, its important findings, and what we can learn about the effects of polarization to make us better advocates for peace. The full findings of the Peace in Practice Project are now available. Learn more about the project and access the full report here.

What is the Peace in Practice Project, and why did CPCT undertake it at this time?

Dr. Nicholas Scott Blakely: The Peace in Practice Project was a roughly year-long research and listening study that we conducted through the Center for Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation to help inform the Center’s mission for the years ahead.

Why did we need to do that? Because we are a brand-new center as of last year, when the Ideos Institute founded by Christy Vines joined forces with Fuller Seminary to bring a nonprofit focused on what we’re now calling “peacebuilding and conflict transformation” into the auspices of a seminary.

We are all aware that we are living in very polarized, conflict-ridden times. We wanted to start our first year as a center by listening to people’s experiences, as opposed to entering with predetermined solutions for situations that we may not fully understand.

Through this project, we asked very basic questions—sometimes deceptively simple questions—to different Christian leaders from the marketplace, nonprofits, theological education, and, by and large, pastors. We wanted to hear about their experiences, what polarization is to them, and how they are navigating it in the communities where they lead.

As we are trying to identify what meaningful work CPCT should engage in beyond the immediate Fuller community over the next few years, the most important outcome for us was to discover what these leaders actually think they need to better navigate polarization.

Before the project began, what did you expect Christian leaders would say about polarization?

Blakely: In the different ways that we encountered leaders’ words, through survey responses, listening sessions, and a leadership convening at the end of the project, I expected to hear stories of individual instances largely surrounding political conflict and political disagreement. I had assumed that many leaders were influenced by the same news cycles I was, and that the stories we would hear would be microcosms of the national reality that we find ourselves in.

I expected a lot of stories along the lines of, “I used to talk to my mom; I don’t anymore,” or “a beloved community that we used to work with through our nonprofit realized we’re a little more ‘blue’ and they’re a little more ‘red,’ so we just don’t work together anymore and we lost donor support through that.” I expected those kinds of singular instances.

What surprised us was how few stories we heard about things like politically driven disagreement or conflict because of the sheer exhaustion and overwhelming fatigue, guardedness, and pressure that leaders reported they were experiencing.

No matter the person’s context, many people we engaged through the different stages of the project were simply so overwhelmed by the multifaceted forms of polarization, whether political, theological, racial, some type of identity-based or gender-based polarization, institutional pressures, or family, friendship, and community strains.

We discovered the problem was that there are so many things all at once—this overlapping spider web of conflict and polarization—that it was actually difficult at times to get a singular, isolated incident that you could focus on and address. When political conflict did surface, it rarely appeared alone.

A key finding of this project is that polarization is rarely experienced in a singular moment. Instead, it operates as an ambient pressure, an ongoing background condition that can malform leaders over time.

A key finding of this project is that polarization is rarely experienced in a singular moment. Instead, it operates as an ambient pressure, an ongoing background condition that can malform leaders over time. I kept being surprised by that phenomenon. We repeatedly heard from leaders just how exhausting it is to carry the weight of navigating polarization in their communities.

What did the stage two listening sessions reveal that the stage one survey alone could not have shown?

Blakely: Certainly a lot of added texture. Just by virtue of being in the room with other Christian leaders, the listening sessions helped these people talk a little bit more honestly about these experiences.

They were closed-door sessions where we didn’t record anything, and we didn’t advertise the people who came. We really tried to create a safe space so that the hesitation, the grief, the uncertainty, and the profound loneliness in trying to navigate polarization in the communities that they lead could really surface. There was a way in which this exhaustion and isolating loneliness that a lot of these Christian leaders were experiencing created something they shared.

It didn’t matter that they had significant disagreements between them and that their communities were so different. What mattered is that we were giving them a space to share those struggles.

There is loneliness, exhaustion, and grief from being looked to as the primary person who should be able to navigate their community through the polarized context we find ourselves within. It didn’t matter that they had significant disagreements between them and that their communities were so different. What mattered is that we were giving them a space to share those struggles.

What did leaders say they needed in order to navigate polarization?

Blakely: One participant said to me, essentially, “You’re asking us what we need to better navigate polarization. We need more listening sessions like this, with a meal, just to get together to talk.”

The desire was not for more training or to fill in a skills gap. Good tools and training are essential, but even leaders who have invested significant time in developing their skills in navigating conflict expressed the difficulty of doing so at this moment.

Consistently, we heard leaders saying that they need community themselves because they are so exhausted by the multilayered, charged, and often serious forms of polarization that are going on in their communities. These leaders feel that they haven’t figured it out themselves, but they are being looked to as the mediators who are going to save the community from the angst and frustration that is threatening to pull it apart and tear it down.

Something about that was really rich in the listening sessions. We were trying to listen to what leaders thought they needed to better navigate polarization, and yet they just kept coming back to the need to be together. The need to brainstorm together. To maintain relationships with other leaders and establish trust. To discuss together how to handle these issues, and how to be leaders when they themselves don’t have everything figured out.

Why is the distinction among disagreement, conflict, and polarization important?

Blakely: Something highlighted in the report that can help all of us think about this topic is that there is an important distinction between polarization, conflict, and disagreement.

Originally, in the first iteration of the survey, we were using the terms “conflict” and “polarization” synonymously. Then I came to realize, through listening to people’s experiences and seeing survey results come in, that people feel like we are living in a different national moment.

Disagreement and conflict still allow families to eat at the dinner table together. Polarization has led to those families no longer being able to eat together.

It feels like something more than conflict and disagreement is shaping our communal life.

The idea I’ve learned is that disagreement and conflict still allow families to eat at the dinner table together. Polarization has led to those families no longer being able to eat together.

In some sense, you might say the antithesis of polarization is peace. So when we’re thinking about our work at the Center for Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation, we can very much start in communities that find themselves deeply polarized and entrenched in their differences.

What do you hope pastors, nonprofit leaders, and other practitioners will do differently after reading the report?

Blakely: I hope that, in some sense, it helps a leader, regardless of the environment that they’re leading within, feel a little more seen.

There were a lot of “aha!” moments during the listening sessions. Surveys aren’t very humanizing. They are just a bunch of abstract, generic questions. The listening sessions allowed people to see each other a little more, and to be seen.

I think the majority of people who participated in the listening sessions especially realized that their situations, the polarizing moments that they find themselves within, are unfortunately not very unique. There was a lot more solidarity and understanding between the leaders, and I think a real desire to find ways to be together.

My hope is that, as time goes on, CPCT and other organizations motivated by this report and by some of the work going on through the Center can turn our attention to providing opportunities for leaders to be in community with one another.

That’s not going to solve polarization, but it’s going to provide a much-needed environment for people to share their struggles because of how wildly exhausting leaders are finding these times to be.

Editor’s Note: Learn more about the Peace in Practice Project and access the full report here.

On the opening night of the Understory Festival, my son Christian was somewhere among the more than one thousand people gathered beneath the vaulted ceilings of Washington National Cathedral. He had come as a volunteer while completing his fourth year at Howard University, where he studies political science. It was the first time one of my children had attended a professional gathering with me, and I found myself unusually aware of what he was hearing and how he might be receiving it.

Understory was a three-day civic and spiritual gathering convened by my friend Anne Snyder and the team at Comment, a magazine rooted in Christian social thought and devoted to the renewal of public life. Through conversation, art, music, and shared meals, the festival brought together writers, pastors, scholars, civic builders, and people working across many corners of our common life. At the center of the gathering was a question both ancient and urgently contemporary: How might we rehumanize our common life and renew trust between people and within our shared institutions?

The festival’s name suggested where the beginnings of that renewal might be found: beneath the places where power is most visible, within the quieter ecology of relationships and communities that rarely attract public attention. Like the life growing beneath a forest’s canopy, these hidden connections nourish what rises above them, even when the overstory has forgotten how much of its strength comes from below.

Convergence

The festival opened with orchestral music and poetry, accompanied by light and images moving across the Cathedral’s pillars. Anne’s opening address was what remained with Christian. In the days that followed, he recalled the vision she had offered of a world ordered around the fullness of the human person and the conviction that people, particularly those of us who consider ourselves people of the Word, bear a distinctive responsibility to nurture a more generous and durable common life. Watching her words find a home in him became one of the most meaningful parts of the gathering for me. An idea spoken in one person’s voice had ignited the moral imagination of another.

At the center of the gathering was a question both ancient and urgently contemporary: How might we rehumanize our common life and renew trust between people and within our shared institutions?

That night, I was also keenly aware of how many relationships had converged in that room. Everywhere I turned, I encountered someone from a different part of my life: members of the Center for Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation’s Advisory Council, former and current colleagues, organizational leaders with whom I had worked, professional acquaintances, writers I admired, and dear friends. I had rarely been in one place with so many people to whom I was connected in so many different ways.

The experience also carried a certain paradox. A crowd of more than a thousand people can make even a well-connected person feel anonymous. Proximity is not the same as belonging, and the presence of familiar faces does not automatically create community. Anne and the team at Comment, however, had convened something more relationally substantial than a large audience assembled around a program. People had arrived carrying histories with one another, overlapping communities, shared work, and relationships whose full reach no one in the Cathedral could see.

Sadly, the following morning, I was no longer among those who’d traveled from near and far to bear witness to what promised to be one of those rare gatherings people talk about for years after it concludes. For some time, I have had episodes of a racing heart and other cardiac symptoms that remain undiagnosed, a condition shared by generations of women on my mother’s side of the family. However, when the familiar sensation appeared following the festival’s opening night, I was far from my team of physicians back home and uncertain about what to do. So, as so many of the vulnerable do in the United States, I called 911 from my hotel and was advised to go to the ER the following morning.

The nearest emergency room was at MedStar Washington Hospital Center, the largest and busiest hospital in the Washington metropolitan region and a safety-net provider for its surrounding community. Here, I spent seven hours while physicians monitored my heart and searched for an explanation. I was eventually discharged, still searching for an explanation, yet remaining without a diagnosis.

During those long and tedious hours spent waiting, I became keenly aware of how many of the other patients were there without anyone visibly accompanying them. Many were elderly, and their circumstances seemed to reflect the vulnerability of the community the hospital serves. Though I had no way of knowing who might have been calling from a distant city or waiting at home, I could observe that many people in the room appeared to be facing a frightening and disorienting experience alone. It became clear rather quickly, however, that my experience would be very different.

Vulnerability’s Gift of Clarity

An emergency room reveals how quickly one’s relational ties become a critical part of a person’s continuum of care. Illness makes it harder to process information or advocate for ourselves. Pain can make it difficult to ask the right questions, while uncertainty often narrows our attention to our immediate needs. The presence of another person can affect whether medical instructions are understood and what happens after a patient returns home. In moments of vulnerability, the relationships surrounding that person become part of the conditions through which care is received.

However, during those first few hours of initial tests and even more time spent simply waiting my turn, word of my absence moved through the Understory. Suddenly, piercing through the overlapping chorus of alarms, monitors, and mechanical beeps that form the ambient soundtrack of an emergency room, the ringtones of my cell phone began to fill the small triage area where I’d been placed with notifications of text messages and voicemails. Fuller colleagues offered to leave the Cathedral to sit with me. My boss and Fuller Seminary’s president, Dr. David Emmanuel Goatley, reached out to assure me that he would happily step in to lead the session I had been preparing to lead myself. Members of the Center’s Advisory Council checked on me. Friends and professional colleagues shared the news with others, some of whom then reached out themselves. And after the festival concluded, Anne and the president of Comment’s U.S. operations reached out to make sure I was okay and to ask if I still needed help.

During those long and tedious hours spent waiting, I became keenly aware of how many of the other patients were there without anyone visibly accompanying them.

Some of these relationships were close. Yet most belonged to the wider circles of my professional and institutional life. Together, they became a local community in a city where I had little connection to place. In fact, their care moved through relationships that had been cultivated long before any of us knew what they might one day be needed for.

Only later did it dawn on me how closely my ER visit reflected the ecological image from which Understory took its name. Far from home, I had been sustained by a web of relationships whose strength remained largely invisible until a moment of need revealed it. Like the life beneath a forest’s canopy, these connections had been quietly growing in ways I would only come to fully appreciate after my return home to the familiar and thick relationships of family and primary care practitioners.

The gathering’s location made this image especially resonant. Washington, DC, is one of the clearest embodiments of the American overstory, and the National Cathedral carries a similar weight through its scale and history, as much as through the symbolic place it occupies in public life. Many people I spoke with noticed the tension of a gathering devoted to the understory taking up residence inside one of the overstory’s most imposing monuments. Yet when I needed community, it was the network beneath the Cathedral’s soaring architecture that became visible; a network of relationships similarly activated to address the need of a colleague despite the fact that many were equally far from home.

We tend to assume that the relationships most consequential to our lives are the ones closest to us. Family members and dear friends deserve their central place, offering the safety, relational security, identity, and accumulated wisdom that come from accompanying someone across time. Yet intimacy is only one measure of relational significance. Beyond our closest circles lies a wider network of colleagues, acquaintances, former collaborators, neighbors, and people encountered through shared institutions or common work. Sociologists call these relationships weak ties. Their significance often remains hidden in ordinary life. But during a crisis, they can reveal how much of our well-being depends upon people at the edges of the social worlds we inhabit.

Mark Granovetter gave us a language for understanding this phenomenon in his landmark 1973 essay, “The Strength of Weak Ties.” In it, he observed that our closest friends often inhabit overlapping social worlds, while weaker ties extend beyond those familiar circles and bridge otherwise separated groups. The significance of these relationships can remain hidden for years. For example, a former colleague knows someone inside an institution we have never entered, or an acquaintance belongs to a community that sees the world differently from our own. Or perhaps, a person encountered briefly at a gathering remembers us later and recognizes a moment when connection might matter. Across these networks, such ties give communities reach and resilience.

Research on social relationships and health adds another dimension to this insight. In a meta-analysis involving 148 studies and more than 300,000 participants, psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad and her colleagues found a significant association between social connection and survival. Notably, the strongest association appeared in studies using multidimensional measures of social integration, suggesting that health is shaped not only by our closest relationships but by the breadth and structure of our relational lives.

Morality and the “Weak Ties” Theory

Yet the existence of connection tells us little about the moral character of a network. The same networks that circulate care can circulate suspicion, misinformation, or even grievance. A distant acquaintance can open a path toward understanding or transmit a distorted story into a community with little ability to test its truth. Relational reach can strengthen our capacity for mutual care as much as it can accelerate the forces that divide us.

This ambiguity becomes especially consequential during conflict. Rumors gain credibility when they arrive through someone we know. Accounts of injury expand with every retelling, while dehumanizing narratives move easily through communities already formed to receive them. Weak ties can carry fear across boundaries just as effectively as they carry concern. Though Granovetter helps us understand how influence moves between social groups, his theory leaves us with a deeper moral question: What kind of people must we become if the connective power of weak ties is to serve the common good?

Christian theology answers this question not only by calling us into relationship, but by forming us to carry certain things through the relationships we possess. In Ephesians 2, Paul describes Christ as our peace, the one who brings near those who were far away and breaks down the dividing wall between estranged peoples. Peace takes social form through a community in which inherited hostility no longer determines the limits of belonging. Yet the existence of such a community is not enough. Its members must learn how to inhabit their relationships in ways consistent with the peace they have received.

…the existence of connection tells us little about the moral character of a network. The same networks that circulate care can circulate suspicion, misinformation, or even grievance.

Paul turns to this work of formation in Ephesians 4, calling the community to humility, gentleness, patience, and truth spoken in love. He instructs its members to use words that build up and “give grace to those who hear.” This is a remarkably relational account of Christian speech. Words do not remain with those who speak them. They travel, carrying something into the life of another person and potentially into communities beyond our own. The question is therefore not only whether we are connected, but whether we have been formed to carry truth without distortion, conviction without dehumanization, and concern beyond the boundaries of our closest relationships.

This helps clarify what I mean by the grace of weak ties. Their grace lies partly in reminding us that care can arrive from beyond the relationships we consider central. God’s provision often moves through people whose future significance in our lives we can’t anticipate. Grace also enlarges our sense of responsibility, forming us to recognize that those at the edges of our social worlds remain fully within the horizon of Christian concern. A weak tie can therefore become a site through which grace travels. The relationship supplies a pathway; the character of the people within it shapes what the pathway carries.

Weak Ties and the Work of Peacebuilding

This is where weak ties become especially important to peacebuilding. Communities can possess deep internal bonds while remaining isolated from one another, offering generous care within the group while rarely encountering credible accounts of those outside it. When conflict emerges, the absence of trusted relationships across communal boundaries allows fear to intensify without interruption. Peacebuilders cultivate ties that cross those boundaries: a relationship between pastors divided by denomination or ideology, or a credible connection between a neighborhood organizer and an institution residents have come to distrust. Such relationships can appear peripheral during ordinary times. In a crisis, they may keep accurate information and the possibility of cooperation alive.

Words do not remain with those who speak them. They travel, carrying something into the life of another person and potentially into communities beyond our own.

John Paul Lederach has long described peacebuilding through the image of a web. In his book, The Moral Imagination, he directs attention to relationships within conflict-affected settings that possess the capacity to generate constructive change. Peacebuilders learn to see how people are connected across a system. They can also quickly identify which people or relationships can bridge its separated parts and where a different quality of interaction might be possible.

This work requires moral formation alongside network analysis. A tie across difference becomes peacebuilding infrastructure when those within it have learned to carry truth responsibly, remain present across disagreement, and resist the seductions of dehumanization. The same relationship can become a conduit for fear when humility and moral courage have been displaced by the desire to defend one’s own group. The peacebuilder’s task is therefore not merely to create connections, but to help form people and communities capable of carrying through them what builds up rather than destroys.

Relationships formed across old divisions can bear witness to the peace the apostle Paul describes. They become small openings through which another future might enter. Their strength often develops slowly, through encounters whose eventual significance remains hidden from us. We seldom know which relationship will matter during a future crisis or whose voice will remain credible after an institution loses the confidence of a community; yet, a healthy social ecology contains more connections than any present need appears to require.

This may be why the cultivation of weak ties receives less attention than it deserves. It resists the logic of immediate usefulness. Its value cannot always be captured by counting current collaborations or tracing obvious outcomes. Some relationships matter because they preserve access across a boundary. Others quietly accumulate enough trust to carry an unwelcome truth when conflict makes every other messenger suspect. Their significance may not become visible until a community is under strain.

This insight has increasingly shaped how I understand the work before us. The health of the peacebuilding field depends upon the quality of relationships within its communities, the credibility of the ties between them, and the formation of people who can carry something truthful and humane when conflict places those relationships under strain. Peacebuilding requires more than a dense network. It requires a social ecology in which truth, mercy, courage, and concern can travel farther than fear.

I was grateful to return to Understory for its closing sessions on the final day. After seven hours in the emergency room, I entered the Cathedral with a different understanding of what the gathering had made visible. The words offered from the stage still mattered, but they were now joined in my mind to the quieter exchanges taking place throughout the room: messages sent, responsibilities assumed, concern passed from one person to another, and offers of presence extended across varying degrees of relationship. Beneath the Cathedral’s architecture and the festival’s public program was a living network whose significance could be measured, at least in part, by its willingness to respond when one person disappeared from the room.

The tension between understory and overstory also felt newly clarified. The Cathedral represented the visible institutional life of faith in public, while the people gathered beneath it revealed the relationships upon which any institution’s moral credibility ultimately depends. The overstory may give a community form and public presence. But its capacity to serve human flourishing is sustained by what grows below: habits of attention and networks of trust sturdy enough to bear responsibility for another person.

I left Washington thinking about the messages that reached me in the emergency room and the words that moved my son beneath the Cathedral’s vaulted ceiling. Both traveled through relationships whose consequences could not have been planned in advance. One network became a source of care when my body faltered. Another carried a vision of human dignity into the moral imagination of a young man preparing to enter public life.

Peacebuilding requires more than a dense network. It requires a social ecology in which truth, mercy, courage, and concern can travel farther than fear.

Together, these experiences returned me to the central promise and peril of weak ties: not only can they extend the reach of our social worlds, allowing care and truth to cross distances that our closest circles cannot span, they can also carry fear and distortion across those same distances. The work of peacebuilding therefore asks more of us than the creation of connection. It asks us to form people and communities capable of carrying something worthy of the human beings who will receive it.

Much of what holds a society together grows through these quiet connections, beneath the institutions that tower over us and between people who may scarcely know one another’s names. Peace takes root when we tend these relationships before they are needed and form communities in which truth, mercy, courage, and concern can travel farther than suspicion. In doing so, we help cultivate an understory strong enough to sustain the common life rising above it, and we give grace somewhere to go.

This is the grace of weak ties—their importance only visible when a crisis activates them or a word spoken in one place takes root in another. Somewhere beyond our closest circles may be the person who will keep open a path between estranged communities or recognize our need in a distant city and decide that our well-being is worthy of concern. We may also occupy that place in someone else’s life, close enough to hear and distant enough to connect them with a world beyond their own.

Last month, I returned from a gathering at Rose Castle carrying a question I haven’t been able to shake: what if the work of peacebuilding rises or falls on something far more relational than we’ve been willing to admit? This piece is my attempt to name that conviction.

In early March, I had the privilege of hosting twenty Christian leaders from across the United States at Rose Castle in Northern England. We gathered to discern how God might be inviting us into the challenging and often lonely work of peacebuilding in this moment.

Rather than beginning with frameworks or strategies, I made a last-minute decision to open our time together with an excerpt from my friend David Corey’s essay, Politics, Friendship and the Search for Meaning. It felt almost out of place to begin not with action, but with reflection. And yet, it proved to be exactly the right place to start.

Over the following days, our conversations regularly circled back to friendship—how we might define it, and whether it could truly hold us together as a community of peacebuilders. Time and again, I found myself wondering whether we fully understood what such an invitation might demand.

This question didn’t arrive all at once. It surfaced in honest conversations about the cost of staying in this work. It lingered in heavy, emotional moments, where we were practicing what we so often ask of others. And it appeared in encounters that didn’t shy away from the weight of things, but instead held it with care.

And perhaps most clearly, it revealed itself as we began to name the risks, both large and small, of trusting that friendship might actually be enough to hold us together.

What if the work of peacebuilding rises or falls on something far more relational than we’ve been willing to admit?

After all this, I left with a growing conviction that perhaps what this moment requires is not more ideas, or even better strategies for peacebuilding, but courage: the kind that allows us to enter into the strange, stretching work of friendship that can hold difference, tension, and hope all at once. The more I’ve sat with this, the more I am persuaded that beneath many of the challenges we face within the church and across wider society lies a quieter, more foundational crisis: a crisis of friendship.

Loneliness and the Limits of Strategy

We are living in a time marked by profound loneliness. Not simply the loneliness of physical isolation, but the deeper ache of being unseen, unknown, and ultimately unaccompanied. This is the kind of loneliness that persists in crowded rooms and in spaces of gathering, even when we are among those who share a common confession of faith.

This loneliness is not incidental to our divisions; it is deeply entwined with them. Where there is no durable experience of being known and held in relationship, difference begins to feel like a threat. Disagreement becomes rupture. And the work of peace, often imagined as a matter of ideas or interventions, becomes nearly impossible to sustain.

We are adept at naming the symptoms of our time: polarization, fragmentation, distrust. Yet, we often overlook the relational conditions that allow them to take hold. Part of the challenge is how thin our understanding of friendship has become. In modern terms, friendship is often reduced to affinity, shared interests, or emotional ease, or something we curate by surrounding ourselves with those who reflect our experiences or affirm our instincts.

Where there is no durable experience of being known and held in relationship, difference begins to feel like a threat.

Yet, the Christian tradition offers a far more demanding vision. In John 15:15, Jesus tells his disciples, “I no longer call you servants…Instead, I have called you friends.” This is not casual language. To be called a friend by Christ is to be drawn into a life of presence, mutual care, and shared purpose; a relationship that we receive as a gift and that helps shape the person we become.

This kind of friendship cannot simply be reduced to a social preference. As a theological reality, it reflects the very nature of our life with God and, by extension, our life with one another.

In his most recent book, The Centuries Wrap Round Us, John Paul Lederach introduces us to the concept of “weird friendships.” A concept that sharpens this reality. These are relationships that form across lines most of us would expect to remain uncrossed. They do not erase difference or resolve tension prematurely. Instead, they sustain a relationship in the presence of both, revealing a form of friendship built not on sameness, but on a shared commitment to remain in communion.

If this is true, friendship is not just a virtue to encourage; it is a form of relational infrastructure. It is the connective tissue of communal life; the set of relationships that determine whether a community can absorb tension or fracture under its weight.

When that infrastructure is weak, differences have nowhere to go. They pile up, harden, and eventually rupture the relationships meant to hold them. Polarization, then, is less about ideology than relational deficit. Where bonds are thin, even small disagreements become unmanageable. Where they are strong, significant conflicts can be navigated without collapse.

Any approach to peacebuilding worth the name must reckon not only with strategy, but with the cultivation of relationships capable of sustaining it.

The Practice of Shared Life

The early church offers more than inspiration; it offers a blueprint. In Acts 2, we see a community devoted to teaching and fellowship, bound together by koinonia, a shared life in which relationships were central. Verses 42-44 describe it clearly: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship…All the believers were together and had everything in common.”

Here, the Greek word koinonia points to more than social connection; it describes a deep, participatory belonging in which spiritual, cultural, economic, and relational life were intertwined. Meals were shared; resources were redistributed, and presence was given freely. It was a form of life that was both costly and countercultural. A shared life that made their unity tangible.

But it was not without conflict. Disputes over leadership, cultural division, and sharp doctrinal disagreements were part of their life together. What set them apart was not the absence of conflict, but the way it was carried. Because their lives were already bound together, disagreement did not immediately fracture them. Instead, it became something to work through within the context of relationship.

Any serious approach to peacebuilding must account not only for strategic ideas and interventions, but for the cultivation of relationships capable of sustaining them.

What we see in the church today is, in many ways, a breakdown of this practice. We have learned how to gather, but not always how to remain unified when conflict arises. We have built platforms to amplify our voices, but neglected the slower work of presence. Without authentic friendship, disagreement becomes unsustainable, and reconciliation remains a concept rather than a lived reality.

“A friend loves at all times,” Proverbs reminds us, “and a brother is born for adversity” (Proverbs 17:17). Friendship is defined not by comfort, but by endurance. It is found in the quiet presence that stays when the world is heavy, the hand that reaches out when loneliness presses in. If loneliness is one of the defining conditions of our time, friendship may be one of the Church’s most urgent callings. Not as a program or initiative, but as a way of life.

At the Center for Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation, we’ve become increasingly convinced that any meaningful theory of change must take this seriously. Not only by equipping leaders with tools, but by cultivating the kinds of relationships in which those tools can take root.

Perhaps this is what our moment is asking of us.

Not more ideas.
Not even better strategies.

But the courage to enter into the kind of friendship that can endure tension, remain open to transformation, and even refuse to let difference have the final word. The kind of friendship first given to us in Christ.

For it is this friendship, received and extended, that may yet become the foundation for the lasting peace our world so urgently needs today.

Christy Vines is the Executive Director of the Center for Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation at Fuller Theological Seminary. You can connect with her on LinkedIn or at christyvines@fuller.edu.

There are seasons in the life of God’s people when faithfulness feels less like progress and more like displacement. The world begins to shift beneath our feet in ways that are subtle at first and then increasingly difficult to ignore. Structures that once felt dependable begin to show strain, not because they collapse all at once, but because the pressures placed upon them seem constant and unresolved. Even the Church can sense this movement, feeling unsettled and unsure how to inhabit the moment without slowly absorbing its distortions.

This level of instability rarely announces itself with clarity. Instead, it accumulates over time. A national decision reshapes the texture of local life. A headline lingers longer than it should. A conversation after worship carries a tone that feels heavier than it once did. Pastors find themselves holding questions for which there are no immediate answers, and leaders grow more careful with words that previously came without hesitation. Congregations begin to sense that something fragile is being tested, even if they cannot fully articulate what that something is.

For some communities, this tension is direct and visible. Differences harden into suspicion, and disagreement becomes distance. For others, the change is quieter. Trust erodes in small increments. Fatigue settles in. What once felt shared begins to feel uncertain. Over time, this quiet dislocation can be more destabilizing than open conflict because it leaves people unsure how to respond.

In moments like this, it is tempting either to grasp for certainty or to withdraw from engagement. Both responses are understandable, yet neither resolves the deeper question that hovers beneath the surface. The more searching question is not only what is happening around us, but who we are becoming within it. That question does not accuse. It invites reflection.

Scripture offers language for such seasons: exile. Though not the kind of exile that defined much of Israel’s history, but rather the forced removal from one’s ancestral land. Rather, its use here lies in the experience of living in a landscape that no longer feels secure, where what was once a grounded identity appears altered beyond recognition. Israel knew this terrain intimately. The temple that had anchored their common life was gone, their city lay in ruins, and the promises of God had become elusive if not altogether absent. The psalmist’s image of sitting by the rivers of Babylon captures the very weight of the Israelite’s loss.

And yet, it was into this very condition that Jeremiah wrote to an exiled people and instructed them to build houses, plant gardens, marry, raise children, and seek the peace of the city in which they now lived. It was an instruction that did not minimize their grief, nor did it romanticize their captivity. Rather, it reframed their responsibility. Exile, in this sense, did not nullify their calling; it clarified it.

The Discipline of Endurance

If exile describes the context, endurance describes the posture required within it. And yet, endurance is rarely dramatic. In fact, it is seldom visible. When it does appear, it often takes the form of remaining attentive when disengagement would be easier, or remaining expectant when the outcome is uncertain.

In Luke 24, the disciples on the road to Emmaus laid bare this tension in their understated confession: “We had hoped.” These three simple words expressed disappointment without resolution. Yet it is in that very space that Christ joined them. Not with swift correction, but with patient presence. He walked with them before they could even recognize Him.

There is instruction in these patterns that we would do well to heed. God’s work in unsettled times is rarely trumpeted loudly. Rather, it is often a quiet unfolding of a more powerful message. It comes through accompaniment, through conversation, and through the gradual reshaping of perception. Yes, endurance is less about heroic resilience than about our sustained openness to that work.

In a cultural moment like ours that rewards immediacy and amplifies outrage, this type of endurance can seem wholly insufficient. Yet it is precisely this steady faithfulness that keeps relationships from fracturing and communities from hardening or fragmenting under pressure. It also keeps us open to the work of the Holy Spirit in ways we’d seldom voluntarily agree to. It allows our exile to become formative rather than corrosive.

The Slow Work of Reconciliation

From this understanding of exile, we turn toward the slow work of reconciliation.

There is a temptation to treat reconciliation as a way of moving quickly past exile and endurance, as though it were a resolution that spares us the discomfort they require. In doing so, reconciliation becomes premature and untethered from truth, thinner than the gospel intends. Yet reconciliation does not bypass exile, nor does it replace endurance. It grows through them. The road toward reconciliation is shaped by what displacement teaches us and sustained by the faithfulness endurance makes possible.

Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:18–19 that God reconciled us to himself through Christ and entrusted to us the ministry of reconciliation. These words are not an addendum to the gospel. They are its architecture. The Church exists because reconciliation has already taken place in Christ. We do not strive toward reconciliation to create something new. We participate in what God has already accomplished.

The image of the body of Christ brings this into practical focus. In the Greek language, the "body of Christ" is translated into Greek as σῶμα Χριστοῦ (sōma Christou). It appears in the New Testament to signify both the physical body of Jesus (1 Cor 11:24) and the metaphorical body of the Church (1 Cor 12:27), where sōma represents the "sound whole" or "sum" of a thing. Similarly, our human bodies are not mere collections of independent parts. It is composed of interconnected and interdependent organs and organisms whose health depends upon the integrity and health of the whole. When one part is injured, the body does not discard it. Instead, it redirects its energy toward healing that which is broken or damaged, because its own life depends upon the restoration of each of its parts. In other words, the strength of our magnificent, yet imperfect form, isn’t found in isolation but in integration.

This does not mean that wounds are ignored or minimized. Some fractures within the Church are the result of fear, misplaced allegiance, silence in the face of harm, or the pursuit of influence at the expense of integrity. Naming such realities is not disloyal. It is faithful. If we believe the Church is one body, then honesty about injury becomes part of how healing begins. In this case, reckoning and unity become integral stages in the process of reconciliation and repair.

And this is where hope enters. Reconciliation is not sustained by our stamina but by Christ’s finished work. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. Fracture does not have the final word because resurrection already has. This slow work of reconciliation, then, is neither a burden placed upon an exhausted Church nor a means to an end. It is an invitation to participate in the life God is already restoring.

If you have made it this far, then perhaps you have come to realize that we are impotent to control the moments we inhabit. What we are accountable for is how we inhabit them. Exile has long been a context in which God forms his people rather than abandons them. Endurance is not passive waiting but sustained faithfulness when resolution is slow. And reconciliation remains central to the Church’s witness, even when it unfolds without acclaim. In this fractured age, the slow and often hidden work of reconciliation may be the most radical way we can bear witness to the One who reconciled us to Himself.

Christy Vines is the Executive Director of the Center for Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation at Fuller Theological Seminary. You can connect with her on LinkedIn or at christyvines@fuller.edu.

A child is born to us, a son is given to us, and authority will be on his shoulders. He will be named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.
—Isaiah 9:6 (CEB)

In a world marked by fragmentation, violence, and unrelenting pressure, peace can feel distant—sometimes even unattainable. Many imagine peace as something possible only later: after the conflict subsides, after the grief softens, after the systems change. Yet Advent meets us precisely here—not with escape, but with presence. It does not deny darkness; it enters it. And within that darkness, it announces Love’s enduring gift of peace.

Love Born Under Pressure

We often encounter the birth of Jesus through sanitized nativity scenes. But an honest retelling reveals a story shaped by threat, displacement, political violence, and vulnerability. Mary and Joseph were not insulated from terror. They were poor, colonized, and searching for shelter under imperial rule. As poet Drew Jackson reminds us in God Speaks Through Wombs, this is “history, told by those lovers of Adonai from the underside.” Love arrived under pressure.

Even there, hope took root. Mary and Joseph carried the promise of a coming Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6). They lived forward in faith that God’s covenant with Abraham was unfolding through this child. They did not possess certainty—only trust. As Søren Kierkegaard observed, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” We interpret Bethlehem through the cross and resurrection. They lived it forward with trembling hope.

Looking backward from the cross, the meaning of the manger becomes clear. The connective tissue between Jesus’ birth and his death reveals why Love came and what Love is determined to accomplish.

This becomes unmistakable in Jesus’ Farewell Discourses in John 13–17, spoken in the shadow of his impending death. Here Jesus speaks not about strategy or survival—but about Love. Scholars note that his primary concern is the community he is leaving behind: the quality of their life together and the witness they will bear. Their credibility will not be rooted in power or persuasion, but in Love.

“So I give you now a new commandment,” Jesus says, “Love each other just as much as I have loved you” (John 13:34, TPT). And then, as Love prepares to depart, Love offers its final gift: “Peace I leave with you. My peace I give you” (John 14:27, NIV).

The Message renders this tenderly:

“I’m leaving you well and whole. That’s my parting gift to you. Peace.… I don’t leave you the way you’re used to being left—feeling abandoned.”

Here, peace is not escape or the absence of suffering. Peace is wholeness—what Love leaves behind in the bodies, relationships, and communities of those who follow the Way.

This is the heart of shalom: not merely a ceasefire, but fullness of life—well-being that is spiritual, physical, emotional, relational, and communal. Shalom is the restoration of harmony between God, self, neighbor, and creation.

Making Peace With Yourself

And yet, for many of us, this kind of wholeness can feel aspirational. Trauma lingers. Grief reshapes the nervous system. Fear governs institutions. Division erodes trust. Peace sounds beautiful in theory and unreachable in practice.

Psychologist and theologian David C. Wang suggests that thriving is not about bypassing pain or fixing what is broken, but about “accepting, making peace with, and becoming friends with a truer story of ourselves, others, and the world.” In this light, peace is not the denial of wounds—it is the slow integration of them into a life that can still flourish.

This is the peace Jesus gives. Not protection from suffering, but presence within it. Not removal from vulnerability, but wholeness that can hold vulnerability without collapsing. Love’s parting gift is not an easier life. It is a transformed way of being alive.

Still, this gift encounters resistance. Peace must grow within inner landscapes shaped by fear, shame, and survival strategies. It must also withstand outer systems formed through domination and exclusion. We live inside polarized cultures, inherited traumas, and unjust structures that oppose the logic of Love.

An old wisdom story speaks of two wolves at war within each person. One is driven by fear, anger, and ego. The other is formed by Love, compassion, humility, and peace. The one that grows is the one we practice into embodiment. Peace is not automatic. It is formed through what we attend to, rehearse, and consent to become.

This helps explain why peace can feel unattainable: it requires inner transformation within outer systems that reward the opposite. Thich Nhat Hanh said, “Peace does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble, or hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart.” This is not passivity. It is disciplined presence—the capacity to remain rooted in Love even when the environment is hostile.

Love’s Crisis of Formation

This tension is also visible in the public witness of the Church. A 2007 Barna study reported that “Christianity in today’s society no longer looks like Jesus,” giving rise to the term unchristian. For many, the faith once known for Love has become associated with judgment and exclusion. This dissonance reveals not a public-relations crisis but a spiritual-formation one. If Love is the defining mark of Jesus’ followers, then the absence of Love is a fundamental contradiction.

Looking backward at Jesus’ life, I come to see Emmanuel—God with us—more clearly as Love with us. Love enters political violence as a vulnerable child. Love confronts hypocrisy with truth. Love heals bodies, restores dignity, and refuses contempt. Love absorbs violence rather than returning it. And at the end of his life, Love offers not revenge, not escape, but peace.

Drew Jackson captures this subversive power: “He claims this is the way the whole system will be undone.” Not by force. Not by domination. But by Love.

Brian McLaren sharpens the question for our time:

“Whatever Christianity was supposed to be, it was supposed to be about Love. What would a system look like that was designed to help people become the most loving version of themselves?”

This is not a rhetorical question. It is vocational. What would happen if our families, churches, classrooms, and institutions were structured to form people in Love? What might change if peace were not only something we advocated for, but something we practiced into embodiment?

Peace: Love’s Expressive Vessel

Peacebuilding is not merely a set of conflict-resolution strategies. It is the outward expression of inner wholeness. It is what happens when Love takes up residence in the nervous system, shapes perception, informs leadership, and reorders power. We cannot sustainably build peaceful systems without becoming people of peace.

This is the invitation of Advent: not to wait for the world to stabilize before we become loving, but to become Love in the midst of instability. Not to postpone peace until after the chaos resolves, but to practice wholeness while turmoil remains. When Love becomes a practiced identity, it reconfigures how we speak, listen, lead, confront, forgive, and imagine what is possible.

What would happen if each of us became Love in our own context and learned to recognize Love in others? What cycles might loosen their grip? What patterns might finally be undone?

Advent does not give easy answers. It gives a Child. A vulnerable Presence. A Love that enters the world unarmed. And with that, Love comes a gift that does not expire when circumstances worsen: peace that makes us whole.

An Advent Blessing

May we see Advent with new eyes—understanding it backward from resurrection to birth—so that we may more fully grasp why Love entered this world.
As you practice holy attention, may you experience Love’s peace not as an abstract promise, but as a living reality that steadies you in the storm.
May you become a catalyst for peace in the spaces you inhabit.
May Love be how you occupy until Christ returns.
Blessings as you walk the path of Jesus—the pathway of Love.
Amen.

Jasmine Bellamy is a doctoral candidate in Global Leadership at Fuller Seminary and the founder of Love 101 Ministries and the LOVING Leader. Her research explores the redemptive imagination of the marketplace and the transformative power of love-centered leadership.

There’s a particular ache that comes with the word forgiveness. It stirs memories and emotions we’d rather not revisit—betrayals we’ve tried to forget, wounds that still throb when touched. For many, forgiveness feels less like freedom and more like surrender. It can feel like being asked to give up the one thing we still have left: our right to anger.

And yet, in traditional Christian thought, forgiveness is not a sign of weakness. It is the scandalous center of love—the quiet, radical act of a crucified God who refuses revenge. To forgive is not to excuse or erase; it is to endure pain without passing it on. In that sense, forgiveness is not the end of justice but its beginning.

In my recent essay for the Greater Good Science Center’s Forgiveness Project, How Different Religions Practice Forgiveness–And What We Can Learn from Them, I, along with contributors Rabbi Fred Reeves and Shaykh Ibad Wali explore how diverse religious traditions understand this deeply human act. In its writing, what struck me most was how the act of forgiveness, across all faiths, remains both radically simple and profoundly demanding. In the pilgrimage that is the process of forgiveness, we are called not merely to release resentment, but to live truthfully with the pain of what has been broken; to refuse to let hatred define what remains.

Forgiveness as Grief, Not Resolution

When I first began researching the forgiveness article, one story in particular stood out and continues to haunt me—the story of the Emanuel Nine.

In June of 2015, a 21-year-old gunman and avowed white supremacist walked into a Wednesday night Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and murdered nine parishioners in cold blood. Just two days later, at the bond hearing for their killer, several family members of the victims offered words that startled the world: “I forgive you.”

This story was meant to be part of the Forgiveness Project article. However, it was cut for length. Still, I can't help but think about that omission. Charleston, more than any other recent example, shows both the moral strength and the risks of forgiveness. It highlights the tension between forgiveness as a brave spiritual act and forgiveness as a social expectation that often oversimplifies the pain felt by those who have been harmed.

It’s a tension that theologian Matthew Ichihashi Potts masterfully explores in his book Forgiveness, An Alternative Account. He includes the Emanuel Nine story not as an example of effortless grace but as a reflection of our misunderstandings. For Potts, forgiveness is neither the warm feeling that follows repentance nor the public gesture of reconciliation. It is something more radical and raw: the decision to live truthfully within grief without perpetuating harm in response.

Potts describes this as the “tragic dimension of grace.” Forgiveness, he argues, is not about reconciliation or erasing anger; it is about learning to hold both sorrow and love at the same time without turning to vengeance. It is the rejection of retaliatory violence; a way of mourning what cannot be restored.

This distinction feels crucial in this season of escalating conflict and division, both in the world and within our own communities of faith. Too often, Christian forgiveness has been reduced to sentimentality: a quick moral transaction, a way of smoothing over discomfort rather than confronting it. Potts’ challenge is that forgiveness cannot be an anesthetic for the conscience of the one who has wronged. It must remain accountable to the wounds of victims, to the memory of harm, to the cost of grace.

Forgiveness as Grief and Grace

This distinction and tension also find their home in scripture. In Christian eschatology, forgiveness does not erase grief; it sanctifies it. In fact, one of the clearest biblical stories that presents forgiveness as both grief and grace in the same breath, and with no tidy resolution, is found in Genesis 37-50—the story of Joseph and his brothers.

Following a series of escalating actions, including the plotting of his own death by his own flesh and blood, Joseph does not rush to reconcile. He weeps before he forgives. His tears are not sentimental; they are the ache of betrayal, loss, and years of displacement. When he finally reveals himself to his brothers, forgiveness is not a triumph, but a trembling.

He begins by naming the harm his brothers wrought upon him (“You sold me into slavery”). This is followed by a grieving of what was taken from him as a result (“God has made me fruitful in the land of my suffering”). Finally, he offers grace, not by pretending the past didn’t happen, but by trusting that God could redeem what was meant for evil.

Joseph’s forgiveness is not the absence of grief; it is grief held open long enough for grace to enter. It models what Potts describes so well: forgiveness as the refusal to retaliate even when the sorrow is still raw. It is a forgiveness that remembers, laments, and releases, all at once, holding justice and mercy in a fragile, holy tension.

The late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who helped shepherd South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, understood this tension. He wrote: “Forgiveness is not some sentimental act. It is the best form of self-interest. It is how we break the cycle of vengeance.” Tutu saw forgiveness not as moral heroism, but as a means of survival, an act of spiritual realism in the face of human frailty. Forgiveness, he argued, is the only path forward when there is no way to make the past right.

This is what makes forgiveness so complex, especially in times like ours. Across the globe, we see rising violence, nationalist rhetoric, and dehumanizing language that pits neighbor against neighbor. Closer to home, our churches and communities are often divided along theological and political lines, with faith being weaponized in the process. In such a climate, forgiveness can seem naïve, an abdication of responsibility, or a way to bypass justice.But forgiveness, rightly understood, is not the denial of justice. It is the refusal to dehumanize in the pursuit of it.

Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, puts it this way:

“To forgive is to decide that the offender is more than the offense—that there remains in them something that can be reached, something that still belongs to God.”

This conviction doesn’t erase the need for truth, repair, or restitution. Rather, it anchors all three in the recognition that no one, neither victim nor perpetrator, stands outside the possibility of grace.

Forgiveness and the Coming Season

As I reflect on the conversations here at Fuller Seminary, especially as our faculty read through Potts’ book together, I am struck by how central this tension is to our work at the Center for Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation. Forgiveness, as we understand it, is not just a moral virtue; it is a vital practice in the pursuit of restoring relationships and healing communities, even if full reconciliation seems impossible on this side of heaven. It is how we break cycles of harm—personal, social, and systemic.

The Greek word most often translated as “forgive” in the New Testament is aphesis, which means to release, to set free, or to send away. Embedded in that word is both a letting go and a letting be. To forgive is to create distance between ourselves and the injury that once defined us. It is a form of freedom; freedom not from memory, but from the tyranny of resentment.

Barbara Brown Taylor captures this beautifully:

“Forgiveness is the only way to stop history from holding you hostage.”

In that sense, forgiveness is an act of creative liberation. It loosens the grip of what was so that something new might emerge. It does not restore the world to what it was; it makes possible a world that might yet be.

As we approach the holiday season, a time when words like gratitude, peace, and reconciliation fill our social feeds, it’s tempting to equate forgiveness with niceness; to domesticate it into politeness at the dinner table. But true forgiveness is far more demanding than civility. It calls us to see those who have hurt us not through the lens of what they deserve, but through the eyes of what God can still redeem.

This does not mean excusing harm or silencing anger. On the contrary, forgiveness begins by naming the truth. As Potts reminds us, “Forgiveness is the work of grief.” It is what allows us to hold sorrow honestly, to lament what cannot be undone, and to trust that somehow, even the most tragic losses can be folded into God’s redemptive story.

So perhaps this season, forgiveness is less a goal to reach than a rhythm to cultivate. Whether expressed as a posture, a prayer, or some quiet weaving of the two, it invites us to hold ourselves open to the possibility of healing, even when reconciliation remains distant or painfully out of reach.

And maybe, in that space of brokenness and lament, we might find again the peace that passes understanding; the peace that begins where justice and mercy finally meet.

This is the kind of forgiveness our world most needs: not cheap grace or forced harmony, but the slow, courageous work of truth-telling and healing. It is the kind of forgiveness that refuses to settle for illusory peace. For in embracing this harder, holier way, we become people shaped not by what was shattered, but by what God still longs to restore.

Christy Vines is the Executive Director of the Center for Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation at Fuller Theological Seminary. You can connect with her on LinkedIn or at christyvines@fuller.edu.

I know I am not alone in feeling the weight of these past weeks. Though it is not the kind of weight you can carry in your hands, I imagine for some it has been difficult to carry nonetheless. For me, it has shifted from a passing heaviness to a steady pressure—like a vice tightening from all sides, or the charged stillness that precipitates a storm gathering on the horizon.

Even here on the Fuller campus in Pasadena, CA, far away from any brewing tempests, I can almost feel the barometer drop. Though the skies are deceptively calm, the atmosphere hints at ominous change. Something is shifting. Yes, a storm is surely brewing.

For some, the storm’s presence has been little more than passing gusts of wind or a quick scatter of rain—the outer bands of a larger system still offshore. Disruptive, yes, but not devastating. For others, myself included, the storm has struck closer to home. Violence, both literal and symbolic, has breached what once felt like safe ground. Suddenly, the storm is no longer out there, beyond the horizon; it is here, at the threshold.

The storms we are facing as a nation, and as community of Christ followers, may look different—less wind and water, more division and fear. Yet, they can stir the same questions. Where is God in all this? How do we respond when the waves rise and the light fades?

It is in moments like these, I often find myself drawn to the familiar stories of Scripture, not as distant history, but as mirrors of our own experience.

The Bible tells of one such story, where fear and faith collided in the hearts of Jesus’s closest friends. In Mark 4:35-41, the story of the disciples on the Sea of Galilee, we find the disciples caught in an actual storm. Though these were men formed by years on the water, this tempest must have been unlike any they had faced before. As the storm found its full voice—wind against wave, chaos against calm—their skill and experience dissolved into terror, until all they could see was their own perishing.

But then Jesus stood. With a word, He rebuked the wind and the waves. The storm stilled, the waters quieted. In this moment, the disciples were left with a different question. A different perspective on their own mortality: “Who is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

I include the disciple’s story because I know well how easy it is for the storm to define what we see. And what we do not. Our world right now feels much the same: the winds of vitriol, the waves of division, the constant pressure of fear and suspicion pressing in on every side. Like the disciples, we know the storm is real. But the apostle Paul reminds us that faith offers us another vantage point: “Let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus.”

To put on the mind of Christ is to see the storm for what it is, but not to be undone by it. It is to stand steady, not because the winds cease, but because our eyes are fixed on the One who is greater than the storm itself.

Perspective matters.

To put on the mind of Christ is not only to stand steady amid the storm, but to see through it. To see past the waves of fear and the noise of the world to the deeper reality of God’s presence. Perspective is what turns panic into prayer, despair into discernment, loathing into love. It shapes how we understand one another, how we interpret the times we’re living in, and how we choose to act within them. The difference between peace and paralysis often begins with where, and in whom, we fix our gaze.

It’s in this same spirit of steady seeing that I welcome you to the first edition of Perspectives on Peace—a space to reflect, reorient, and recover our sight when the winds rise and the waters churn.

For some of you, this is a continuation of our journey together through Ideos Institute, where I regularly shared my “President’s Perspective.” For others, this is your first time joining us. Yet, no matter your entry point, this is a new beginning for us all: the launch of the Fuller Center for Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation and my own transition to Fuller as Executive Director.

The name of this newsletter is intentional. Perspective matters. It shapes not only how we interpret the storms of our time, but also how we respond within them. Through Perspectives on Peace, I hope you will find encouragement, challenge, and companionship as we seek together to embody Christ’s reconciling presence in a fractured world.

A new beginning.

Already, glimpses of that presence are shining through. In September, the Center hosted its first event: Peacebuilding in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Pastor James and Riziki Byensi, founders of Rebuilders Ministry, told their story of choosing reconciliation in a part of the African continent devastated by a decades’ long war. Their testimony reminded us that peace is not an abstract concept—it is an embodied state that resides within the people of God; a state that replaces fear with forgiveness, despair with courage, and destruction with rebuilding. Fuller faculty—Professors Alexia Salvatierra, Sebastian Kim, and Mary Glenn—joined the Byensi’s, reminding us that peace is never solitary but always communal. You can find more about this event, including a replay link, here.

From the beginning, our mission at the Center has been clear: to equip the Church to speak boldly on behalf of peace, to practice reconciliation in divided spaces, and to share Christ’s hope and healing with those wounded by conflict. In the months and years to come, you’ll see opportunities to join us in this pursuit: through events, workshops, webinars, retreats, and eventually a digital journal. We also have plans to launch a Certificate in Peacebuilding for those seeking deeper training and formation.

In the coming months you will have access to a free course, hosted on Fuller Equip. This resource will help explore why our name includes both peacebuilding AND conflict transformation, and why neither is complete without the other. At the heart of it lies a simple truth: Peace without conflict transformation cannot stand; conflict transformation without peace cannot endure. Only together do they form the foundation of lasting change.

While you wait for these opportunities, there are meaningful ways you can begin to walk with us now:

• Ensure future Perspectives on Peace get delivered directly to your inbox, so you don’t miss out on future resources and news of upcoming events.

• Forward this to a friend and invite them to subscribe.

• Follow the Center on social media for updates and additional content.

Though it is a familiar refrain, peace is not the silence of conflict’s end, nor the calm in the middle of a raging storm. Rather, it is the presence of Christ’s reconciling love, made visible through God’s people. My prayer is that this newsletter will always serve as a reminder that you are not alone in the storm. Together, with our eyes fixed on Christ, we can see differently, live faithfully, and bear witness to a peace that endures even as the storms rage on.