MPUC Peace Statement
God’s Covenant with creation is given as grace and peace. Peace (shalom) is the wholeness and community in which human beings are meant to live. God continually renews the Covenant, first made with Noah, through our Lord Jesus Christ. God’s peace heals, confronts, strengthens, and frees.
The God we worship calls us out of ourselves. It is God who calls us to lose our lives for others, to take risks, to be open to change, and to being changed.
Responding to this good news, the church goes into the whole world to point to and become a part of God’s peace-giving. God’s peace is offered wherever there is brokenness-individual lives, families, congregations, communities, and nations. In God’s Covenant, the world and the church experience wholeness, security, and justice.
The General Synod of the United Church of Christ, and the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, through votes in 1983 and 1985, have affirmed each as a peacemaking church. Each and every member is called to proclaim the message of the gospel in a broken and insecure world. Therefore, people of faith engage in peacemaking not as a peripheral activity but as an integral part of their congregational life and mission. Responding to God’s Covenant, the session of Macalester Plymouth United Church now commits itself to peacemaking. In fulfilling this commitment, we will:
Help to provide worship that points to the reality of God’s peacemaking;
Encourage each member of the congregation to receive God’s peace in his or her own life. And through prayer and Bible Study, to seek it for today’s world;
Enable and equip all to grow as peacemakers in their families, in the congregation, and in the community;
Magnify the opportunity to enhance the international understanding we have because of its ties and proximity to Macalester College;
Help the congregation to work for social, racial, and economic justice and respond to people in the community who are caught in poverty, hurt by unemployment, or burdened by other problems; encourage the congregation to support human rights and economic justice efforts in at least one area of the world, such as Central America, southern Africa, the Middle East, East Asia, East Europe or Central Asia;
Work to end the arms race, reverse the worldwide growth of militarism, and reduce tension among nations;
Support the church-wide peacemaking effort financially through special offerings on World Wide Communion Sunday, and specific appeals in times of disaster, and assist those displaced by war.
The Session will lead and support the congregation in the peacemaking response of God’s Covenant. We will appoint a member or commit to be our contact with the presbytery and conference task forces and commit ourselves to be responsive to the information, resources, and opportunities that our representatives bring back to the session.
Adopted by the congregation in 1985
You can learn more about the “Just Peace” designation on the UCC’s website.