What happens when Spokanites learn the art of everyday peacemaking?
News Story by Morgen White | FāVS News
Hamblen Park Presbyterian Church invited Global Immersion Co-Founder Jer Swigart to lead an Everyday Peacemaking Workshop on March 29.
Swigart hopes Spokanites who aren’t yet engaged with peacemaking and reconciliation come and participate.
“Too many good people stare evil in the face and do nothing,” Swigart said. “I want to see people who follow Jesus grow in their capacity to address pain in the world with tools to heal.”
Global Immersion focuses on people of faith and their journey toward everyday peacemaking. Swigart said the organization exists to join them on their journey from a “religion that dominates to a faith that restores.”
“Peace and justice don’t orbit our faith. They’re the very essence of our faith. The workshop is to reintegrate our faith into our way of life, love and leadership, such that it means that we’re active participants in fixing broken things around us,” Swigart said.
While Global Immersion leaders have “done a fair amount of speaking and teaching throughout the Inland Northwest, this is the first sponsored, programmatic deliverable or the first formal training that’s happening here,” Swigart said.
Swigart noted that this workshop is not the first of its kind. He said the rich history of faith-based activism in Spokane has paved the way for Global Immersion to continue that work in partnership with various faith-based organizations.
Mending divisions for 13 years
Global Immersion has been working toward peace nationally and internationally for 13 years. And for the last 10, the organization has been facilitating the peacemaking workshop from coast to coast.
Swigart wrote a book with co-author Jon Huckins in 2017 called “Mending the divides: Creative love in a conflicted world,” which is used within the workshop’s content.
During that time he remembers watching entire congregations begin to reshape their missions and programming.
“It begins to change the way that churches are thinking about discipling, or forming children and students into young and emerging peacemakers,” Swigart said. “It’s exciting for us to watch the renovation of congregations into instruments of peace who take this so seriously that now they’re actually embedding it as kind of the core of who they are.”
He discovered his talent for peacemaking through service.
9/11 and its influence on Swigart
Only four years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, Swigart found himself in what he was told was enemy territory — in Pakistan where Osama Bin Laden was known to reside. He also remembers learning over those years Muslims, especially Muslim men, were dangerous.
“I watched that film, and then shortly thereafter, it was always a picture of Muslim men and so this constructed enemy was fed to me, and I willingly absorbed it. I didn’t know how to be more thoughtful at that time,” Swigart said about the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City.
Just over four years later, he found himself in the epicenter of the Kashmir earthquake in the tribal villages of northern Pakistan.
The moment that sprung him into his life’s work was a four-hour conflict resolution. He was instructed to draft a peace treaty between two warring villages because the only way one of them was going to survive the winter was if there was peace.
“Serving as the communications liaison between the United Nations, the Pakistani military and the tribal villages of northern Pakistan, and woefully unqualified, it was kind of the right time at the right place type of moment,” Swigart said. “I watched that village walk away no longer at war, and that was a moment where everything kind of changed for me.”
He realized then how well he worked in conflict. He got focused, creative and relational, he said.
The experience changed his perception of the world around him.
“Here I am in the middle of all of it, forging unbelievable relationships, and so while the earth shook in Pakistan, it was really my theology and ideology, my construction of enemies, that crumbled. What does it look like to move across boundaries and borders into quote, unquote, enemy territory, and you recognize that your enemy doesn’t live there at all. That person is your brother and your friend,” Swigart said.
After the treaty was drawn up, the Muslim imam of that village told him he needed to replicate the experience he had here back home.
“It was in the commissioning of a Muslim Imam in the tribal villages of northern Pakistan where I think the invitation into my life’s destiny was articulated, and I’ve spent the last 20 years learning everything I can about peace and conflict,” Swigart said.
After that pivotal moment he found himself navigating war zones across the world de-escalating conflict and using the lessons from those experiences to educate those around him. After moving to Spokane almost two years ago Swigart has continued working toward the goal of peace, partnering with other organizations to do so.
Peacemaking comes to Hamblen Park Presbyterian
One such organization has been the Presbytery of the Inland Northwest.
Swigart was introduced to its leaders by Whitworth University Director of the Office of Church Engagement Mindy Smith. This led to an invitation to one of their meetings where he led a short workshop that caught the Rev. Jennie Barber’s attention.
Although Barber, who pastors Hamblen Park, didn’t find the workshop to be rooted deeply in theology, she did think what Swigart taught was an important lesson for her church community.
“I want to take some of these things that he shared with us to folks in my congregation. What I most appreciated was that it was really practical. He’s equipping people to engage in peacemaking on an everyday level, which is what we all need,” Barber said.
In an increasingly divided America, Barber said communities won’t move forward until they listen to each other and try to find commonalities.
In Spokane, recent debates over homelessness policies, political polarization and religious differences have created tension in many communities. Barber believes the workshop offers practical tools for addressing these local divisions.
“I think why we need something like peacemaking is because it encourages difficult conversations with people that we might be tempted to just label and leave over there and say they’re not really being Christian. I don’t want to engage with them. I have no reason to. But there is a different way,” Barber said.
Peacemaking in Spokane, for Spokane
Whitworth’s Office of Church Engagement will sponsor the event to keep costs low and make it more accessible for the Spokane community.
“Whitworth’s mission is to honor God, follow Christ and serve humanity. What our office does is just an extension of that. Any chance that Whitworth has to support the church, to support the message of Jesus Christ, to support any opportunity that we can serve and bring peace, especially in our city, we’re just going to support that. So this is just one more way in which we can invite the community to learn and grow and connect with each other,” Smith said.
Swigart says that the workshop is a full day of active learning and includes a copy of “Creative Love in a Conflicted World” by Swigart and John Huckins, as well as a catered lunch from Feast World Kitchen all of which is included in the $25 cost to attend the 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. workshop.
He hopes that the workshop can add to the work that’s already taken root by faith-based activists in Spokane and bring people together in solidarity toward a more peaceful future.
Registration for the workshop will close when capacity is reached.
“There’s going to be all sorts of experiential learning. There’s going to be moments of listening to stories by impacted communities or the most vulnerable communities in Spokane,” Swigart said. “And so the emphasis is, this is a training for people of faith into the work of peacemaking here in Spokane, for Spokane.”
