When the Peacemaking Offering was established in 1980 it was set in the context of World Communion Sunday.* The General Assembly requested “each congregation, on the occasion of World Communion Sunday each fall beginning in 1980, to celebrate our common life in the global bonds of Christ’s peace-giving body and, as part of the celebration, to receive a special offering to support initiatives on peacemaking and peacemaking education throughout the church.”

Peacemaking: The Believer’s Calling affirmed, “As we break bread together, our eyes are opened and we recognize [Christ’s] living presence among us—Christ crucified by that tragic inequities on the earth—calling us together. We are Christ’s people, compelled by the Spirit and guided by our creeds to listen to a gospel that is addressed to the whole word. We are gathered around the Lord’s Table with people from North and South and East and West. A new integrity is required of us: integrity in worship, integrity in secular life, integrity in relationship with Christ and Christians everywhere.”

The General Assembly specified that congregations would keep 25 percent of the offering for their own peacemaking efforts; 25 percent would be used by synods and presbyteries and 50 percent would come to the General Assembly.

The evidence is that Presbyterians have embraced the idea of the Peacemaking Offering as an opportunity to practice the love and compassion celebrated around the table. When a congregation uses Peacemaking Offering funds to support a health clinic in Vietnam, when it cares for emigrants who have been tortured, when it provides shelter to sufferers of family abuse, when it destroys land mines, when it shows school children that violence is not the way, it takes seriously the words often prayed in the Great Thanksgiving, “As this bread is Christ’s body for us, send us out to be the body of Christ in the world.”

The 2003 Peacemaking Packet includes activities for children, worship resources, minutes for mission and bulletin inserts that describe how congregations “do” peacemaking. The packet (70-612-03-282) can be ordered from PDS. This year, a new resource, Steps along the Way: Living as Peacemakers in a Violent World by Jan Arnow and Arch Taylor, is included in the packet. This new resource can be used in church school classes, with small groups, or in a retreat setting. Available from PDS, it is $3.00 (70-270-03-011).

* The Peacemaking Offering was proposed in Peacemaking: The Believer’s Calling, adopted by the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (UPCUSA) in 1980, and by the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS) in 1981.

The author, Maureen O’Connor is Associate for Interpretation, Mission Education and Promotion, and Interim Production Coordinator, Congregational Ministries Publishing. She has worked cooperatively with the Peacemaking Office in the development of Offering materials for the past nine years. To order Peacemaking Offering materials, call (800) 524-2612. Click here to review the Peacemaking Offering materials on line.