We were only a small group of people of faith in Louisville, Kentucky--not exactly the center of national power. And for some of us, at least, it was becoming a problem of faith: Is God really Lord of history, or are the forces of nuclear madness in control?
We were becoming increasingly aware of dangerous and powerful forces moving us toward a nuclear war that would end the lives of those we love. We were experiencing some fear, despair, and frustration because we seemed unable to divert those forces. Was there some way we could participate in God's activity so that we would not simply be waging a lonely and losing battle against the principalities and powers?
And so we were driven, not by clever strategizing, but by our own need for faith, to meet together to pray.
It was the Sunday evening before Hiroshima Day, 1978, at a downtown Presbyterian church, when we first met to pray for peace. We invited respected representatives from various denominations who shared a concern for peacemaking to lead our prayers and meditations.
The service had been announced in church bulletins and during congregational services. But primarily we relied on personal invitations: We got busy asking individual members of our congregations to come and offered to give them rides. Not only did a large number of people come, but we were given an indication of interest and need that resulted in a sense of shared community with fellow church members from all over Louisville. The service had an impact on the ongoing life of all our congregations. Ever since then, prayer for peace has been a likely occurrence in regular Sunday morning worship services around town.
After our first joint service we served refreshments and stayed around to talk. This, too, we have come to do regularly. We believe people feel lonely in opposing the nuclear threat, and we believe sharing in community is central to biblical faith. As we talked, the excitement and sense of release and hope that people were expressing made it clear that praying for peace together had met a deep need and had been profoundly meaningful.
We learned that many people have fears about nuclear war that are seldom or never confessed in formal worship. Consequently, they experience an internal split between a formal worship that does not make contact with their deep concern and a life full of concern that is not honestly confessed before God and community. To fuse the two together, to confess the anxiety in prayer before God and to experience community with others expressing similar fears can be a moving experience which breaks one out of tightly held bonds and joins one to others with new wholeness and integrity.
And so it should not be surprising that we did it again; and that we felt a sense of affirmation when we began two years ago to join in calling for annual prayer services for peace on Memorial Day weekend and later learned that 150 congregations and communities across the nation had met to pray in response.
Two years ago we held our prayer service on Monday evening at Crescent Hill Baptist Church; it was a beautiful evening, and we met outdoors on the wide front steps extending upward toward the sanctuary. We were facing north, the direction from which the nuclear missiles will come, if and when they come. We were facing the threat we usually prefer to repress. The prophets and Jesus often warned of the threat of war, and we believe honest hope cannot come unless we face the threat.
We prayed, on Memorial Day, that there would not be another war to give more dead to be memorialized. We prayed for victims of past and present wars, not only in this country but in others: Ireland, Iran, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, Palestine, Israel. And we prayed for future victims of nuclear war in the United States and the Soviet Union and elsewhere around the world.
As we prayed and listened to meditations on the front steps of the church that quiet Memorial Day evening, there were occasional passers-by on foot and in cars. Apparently they were surprised to see us; you could see it on their faces; many waved, smiled, and honked a brief hello. Our worship turned into celebration and a sense of community with one another and with the passers-by. The free feeling of moving from the sanctuary to the outdoors, the sense of moving from private prayer to open confession in communal worship, the opportunity to participate in witness to passers-by, the beautiful May evening, the fresh air, all combined to give us a sense of celebration and participation in God's creative and redemptive action.
We wanted to help other congregations share in the experience of praying for peace, not just when we came together from many churches, but within their own congregations. Many have severed the connection between Christian worship and peacemaking. So last year we worked together with several pastors representing the major denominations and the Jewish Temple to form a Council on Peacemaking and Religion. (For information on the council's work, write it at 3940 Poplar Level Road, Louisville, KY 40213.) At its first meeting, the council succeeded in persuading six churches to hold their own Memorial Day prayer services for peace. We found it much easier to reach out to new congregations if we worked through their pastors. The pastors suggested that we would reach more people if such services were held on Sunday at a time when people were used to attending worship, and if they were held indoors.
We approached other pastors about holding a prayer service on the Sunday before Hiroshima Day and Nagasaki Day (August 6 and 9), and on a Sunday during Advent. Then we encouraged them to make prayers for peace a part of their regular worship services during the year. We suggested that they might consider forming a World Peacemaker group with our help. These groups are an idea of Church of the Saviour. (The church will send a peacemaker manual; the address is 2852 Ontario Road NW, Washington, DC 20009.) We also offered to help them undertake their own study of peacemaking issues, which could lead them to form an ongoing group.
In our own Memorial weekend prayer services we often invite people from various nations to lead prayers, as well as people who represent various age and interest groups. In one service, a South Korean Christian, an African seminary student, an Indian, and a Japanese, all from nations where the impact of war are real, led us in prayers for peace. A member of the church youth group, who symbolizes our caring for the future of our youth, a leader of the Woman's Missionary Union, who represents our concern for other nations, and a middle-aged veteran, who bears in his own person the memory of wars we are memorializing, each led us in prayer. We want to heal potential differences of viewpoint and group loyalty by bringing together persons of faith from different groups in the church.
At the same time, we have sought people not only for their representativeness, but also for their sincere faith. In our service last year, the most moving prayer was offered by the veteran, who remembers the agony of war and who prayed profoundly about the roots of war, confessing how they reach down into our own selfhood, asking that we root them out so war might not do its awful damage once again.
We usually include time as well for silent prayer and for spontaneous prayer. Openness to the Spirit to speak in different ways through different people is important if we are to pray deeply and urgently.
We pray about the causes of war, and about our relation to those causes. We utter our own fears and anxieties, we pray for our children and those we love and for children and loved ones in other countries. Mostly we pray prayers of confession and repentance; we find that until we can confess our deep, usually repressed concerns, admonitions to action feel superficial and burdensome. But when we do come together in deep and real prayer, there is a sense of release and an experience of new wholeness from which more centered action can flow.
On some occasions we have invited the newspapers and television, and have been given dramatically extensive coverage, especially when we prayed on Sunday afternoon in the Catholic cathedral downtown. Ironically, we made much more news praying, when we were not looking to make news, than when some of us paraded together in picturesque fashion before the Federal Building, or dramatized the story of the nuclear arms race at the Belvedere, Louisville's public plaza. (The next issue of The Baptist Peacemaker, 1733 Bards-town Road, Louisville, KY 40205, will have practical suggestions for the content of Memorial weekend services.)
Our services do move toward celebration. We celebrate our sense of community with one another in prayer. We celebrate the presence of God, who does not will the awful destruction of nuclear war, who suffers with those who suffer, and who allows us to participate in his redemptive action.
In the Memorial Day Service at Christ Church Cathedral in Louisville, people wrote their prayers on pieces of paper and fastened them to helium-filled balloons. The releasing of the balloons was an expression of hope, as well as a symbolic joining with other nations toward whom the winds were blowing. And while the balloons were beginning their flight, members celebrated their community with one another by sharing in strawberry ice cream and warm fellowship.
This year we have sent letters to 97 congregations, inviting them to have their own prayer services on Memorial Day weekend, and offering to help them plan services and find speakers. Again, the principle of personal invitation is the key: We are organizing pastors and people from each denomination to follow up the letters with phone calls urging other pastors to hold services.
We'd like to issue an invitation to non-Louisvillians to pray with us on Memorial Day weekend in your own congregations or communities.
Glen Stassen was an associate professor of Christian ethics at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky when this article appeared. He was also a deacon in the Crescent Hill Baptist Church, and on the board of the local Council on Peacemaking and Religion.
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