Peacemaker Conference in Puebla
This afternoon, Lord willing, we’ll be heading to the city of Puebla for a conference 
on biblical peacemaking. The material comes from Peacemaker Ministries. The conference is part of an initiative to train all our mission’s workers to learn more skills for dealing with conflict.
Peacemaker Ministries was started by attorney Ken Sande, who grew frustrated with the lack of conflict resolution among believers. After all, once anyone reached his office they were not interested in reconciliation but just “winning”. I discovered Sande’s book “The Peacemaker” a number of years ago, and gained permission from the organization to use some of their material to train our teams at vti. It was an excellent way to help people understand the biblical basics.
Today they have material for children, churches, short term teams and more. But I would highly recommend that you add their main book to your library. So many people pray for peace on earth – God has given us many tools to bring peace to our own circles of life, if we would only listen. It’s hard to do sometimes, but if we don’t even know what God says about it, we’re not even out of the gate!
If I have the chance, I’ll try to write a little during/after the conference about what we’ve talked about.
28 January 2007 @ 9:00 pm
My husband has been a pastor for many years and also taught in a Bible College several years. I have long been concerned with the great need for something like this in Christian churches and organizations as I’ve seen so many relational challenges. And in so many cases the individual believers involved have tried various ways to solve the problems (including “putting up with it” and hoping it would go away, which never works!)
Often, when there’s a difference of opinion, both parties are right, but each emphasizes a different side of the same coin. And then, instead of working together to come to a helpful conclusion, they get angry with one another and the relationship begins to deteriorate.
Why is it that sometimes non-Christians seem to have a better way of working things out than we do? Could it be that we are often too judgmental of others, thinking that our way must be the Scriptural way and the other person’s is not?
Anyhow, I look forward to reading/hearing more about this seminar! Sounds fantastic!