Peacemaking 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. Although all people are sinners, God continually renews the Covenant through our Lord Jesus Christ. God’s peace heals, comforts, strengthens, and frees.

Responding to this good news, the church goes into the whole world to point to and become a part of God’s peacegiving. God’s peace is offered wherever there is brokenness - in individual lives, families, congregations, communities and nations. In God’s Covenant, the world and the church experience wholeness, security and justice. The 1983 General Assembly has affirmed in "Peacemaking: The Believer’s Calling" that God’s peacegiving in a broken and insecure world is central to the message of the gospel. Therefore, people of faith engage in peacemaking not as peripheral activity, but as an integral part of their congregational life and mission.

Responding to God’s Covenant, the Session of The First and Franklin Street Presbyterian Church now commits itself to peacemaking during this decade. In fulfilling this commitment, we will:

• help to provide worship that points to the reality of God’s peacegiving;
  
• encourage the members of the congregation to receive God’s peace in their own lives and, through prayer and Bible study, to seek it for today’s world;
  
• Enable and equip members of the congregation to grow as peacemakers in their families, in the congregation and in the community;
  
• 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, East Asia, East Europe, or Central Asia;
  
• Work to end the arms race, to reverse the world-wide growth of militarism, and to reduce tension among nations;
  
• Support financially the church-wide peacemaking effort, through the Special Peacemaking Offering on World Communion Sunday, the Presbyterian Peacemaking Fund, or other means.