As we enter Advent 2024 we experience a second Christmas where war in Israel dominates our headlines, and a third Christmas with full-scale war in Ukraine. In Christian churches we light candles of love, joy, peace, and hope and hear familiar scriptures about a Prince of Peace and yearn with the beautiful twelfth century hymn, O Come, O Come Emmanuel. Will this just be part of our holiday routine alongside Christmas shopping and taking in what we’re told is the next “can’t miss” Christmas blockbuster?
What is the journey we are on together as a tilting planet? With North Korean soldiers now deployed with Russians against Ukraine; with Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas terrorizing Israel; with Israel unapologetically destroying the children of Gaza; with millions of Sudanese displaced by civil war; with a new BRICS alliance forming that opposes the ways of the west, and with western nations having no small part in directing these conflicts while often pretending they aren’t, we’re all together in a heap of hurt. To pretend otherwise is simply obtuse and callous. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” said Jesus, “for they will be called the children of God” (Matthew 5:9).
As Christians who are literally named and identified as people of Jesus Christ, Jesus equates peacemaking with God’s family mission and values. He is Son of God who came as peacemaker. His life, death and resurrection opened up the way of peace between God and humanity and humanity with one another (Ephesians 2:14). We who have been rescued from the kingdom of darkness and are children of God through Jesus Christ have become God’s new household of every tribe and language, Jew and Gentile, and cannot be known as God’s children apart from being peacemakers too.
Christians should always be on a journey of peace. That many Christians are now divided over political ideologies, pandemic reverberations, and how various theologies and eschatologies line up with current world events is just another example of why this journey of peace is crucial, necessary, and difficult. As we light candles of love, joy, peace, and hope, however, is it not incumbent upon us to get serious about this journey in and for this generation we have responsibility for?
The Peace and Reconciliation Network (PRN) is a commission of the World Evangelical Alliance, the global family of more than 600 million Evangelical Christians in more than 140 countries (like the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada). With regional and national teams in Africa, Central Asia, Europe, the Caucasus, Asia, Canada and the Middle East North Africa, PRN serves to inspire and equip every disciple, church, and alliance to know they are a centre of God’s ministry of reconciliation in a complex and conflicted world.
When Paul said that God has given the new multi-cultural family of God the ministry of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:18) he was talking about more than our Christmas eve services but of the robust Gospel of peace that works in the lives of sinners and creates communities through whom principalities and powers are confronted with a different way of being and living. Every Christian fellowship is truly a community of the resurrection, reconciliation and transformation, a new reality in the polis of every nation, a prophetic presence that is a city on a hill for humanity that has lost its way, and the advent of the shalom of God as we pray and act for the Kingdom to come and God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. Surely we would agree, the will of heaven is needed in our neighbourhoods and nations today.
As we keep on this journey of peace, PRN Canada under the leadership of Canadian Coordinator Joel Zantingh, is hosting a British Columbia Advent Tour with renowned scholar and PRN Regional Coordinator for the Middle East North Africa, Dr. Salim Munayer. Hosted in Kelowna and throughout the Lower Mainland November 30-December 8, this Advent Tour will give Canadian Christians the opportunity to hear the perspective of Evangelical brothers and sisters in the Holy Land, ask questions and engage in conversation, and seek together what it means to be on a journey of peace as followers of the Prince of Peace today. As PRN Global Director, I invite you on the journey with us! Details of this Advent Tour are here:
Kelowna, BC (November 30-December 2)
- Monday Dec.2, 10am – Pastor’s and Leader’s Coffee – Mission Creek Alliance Church, Kelowna
- Monday, Dec.2, 7pm – Dialogue Across Divides – Public Event and Panel Discussion – University of British Columbia Okanagan, Room ART 114
Lower Mainland and Fraser Valley (December 3-December 7 – click link for details):
- Tuesday December 3, 7pm – Dunbar Home Gathering, Vancouver.
- Wednesday December 4, 10am – Pastor’s and Leader’s Coffee – West Coast Christian Fellowship (Hastings)
- Wednesday December 4, 7pm – Public Event – Killarney Park MB Church, Vancouver
- Friday December 6, 10am – Morning Pastor’s and Leader’s Coffee – White Rock Community Church, White Rock
- Friday December 6, 7pm – Public Event – New Life Christian Reformed Church, Abbotsford
- Saturday December 7, 6:30pm – Public Event – Gracepoint Community Church, Surrey
Phil Wagler joined Peace & Reconciliation Network as North American regional coordinator in 2019 and became PRN Global Director in 2022. Phil grew up in Ontario, Canada and by God's grace became a follower of Jesus in his late teens. His theological, leadership and mission studies and life experiences have equipped him for the pastoral, mission agency, and college ministry assignments God has called him to. He is deeply committed to inspiring and equipping the local church for holistic mission and the ministry of reconciliation and is author of numerous publications. Phil and his family live in British Columbia, Canada.
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