Newsletters

Date: July 16th 2009

From Rick

Friends,

By now, I hope that many of you have taken ten minutes to see some of the reflections of Rev. Fred Maier, who has the distinction of being the member of longest standing in the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship. Fred has such a clear memory of becoming a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation on January first, 1938, and of his early participation in the formation of the PPF six years later.

His reflections have caused me to reflect on the meaning of the word "Fellowship." In those early years, the Fellowship was really a support system for folks who were willing to be ostracized for their commitment to pacifism in the midst of a very popular war. I've been wondering just what it means to be a Fellowship in the year 2009. Can we breathe new life and imagine a new way of being a Fellowship that is equally meaningful for our time?

Today, I think the word Fellowship still fits as a descriptor for those of us who have committed to God and to one another that we will stand for nonviolence in a world addicted to violence. At our best, we're a support system for one another, providing information about events, sharing ideas, and most importantly, encouraging one another to stand fast when the pressure mounts for us to back away from the call we hear from God to witness boldly to the power of nonviolence.

In our time, the internet has dramatically changed our potential to build that kind of Fellowship, though in too many instances our efforts to connect on the web have fallen far short of the deep meaning of Fellowship that we've inherited from Fred's generation. It's for that reason that our web developer, Matt Black, and PPFer Maggie Leonard have been working together to develop a new tool for the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship. Their goals are simple but illusive - to connect us across the miles, to provide a way for us to share our stories with one another, to help us to meet up with one another to build a strong presence of Presbyterians committed to nonviolence, and to encourage one another to stand fast.

Please take a moment to look at what Matt and Maggie have come up with, and to begin to experiment with it yourself:

presbypeacefellowhsip.org/network

It seems to me that they are breaking new ground in defining what "Fellowship" will mean for the next generation of the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship.

My own belief is that the most important role of a Fellowship today is to provide the fertile ground for a movement. That movement, more necessary now than ever, will articulate a bold vision of nonviolence in a world increasingly addicted to war. If we dream big enough, that Fellowship will sow the seeds that will eventually lead the PC(USA), and it's sister denominations, to embrace nonviolence over the Just War Theory as our principle commitment that underlies all of our work on peacemaking in the midst of a never-ending "war on terror."

Join the network, plant the seeds, grow the vision, create the Beloved Community. The work of the Fellowship, 65 years old this year, is just beginning.

Rick

Getting Started on the PPF Network Site

Follow these steps to create an account on the new PPF Network site.

1. At the log-on page, click the “Click Here to Register” button.  
2. Choose a “Display Name” (What actually gets displayed on the site; we recommend your first and last name) and “Username” (make sure it has no spaces – this will be what you use on the log-on page), enter an easily remembered password, and click Register!
3. Go check your email, because the site will send you an email with a link in it to click, confirming your email address and activating your account.
4. After activating your account, you can sign in from the homepage

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