Campus Ministries: "Making Peace with God"

Tamara Shantz, Assistant Campus Minister

Every year, Campus Ministries works with a theme for the year. This year, we are exploring the theme of “Making Peace with God”, in a variety of ways, but especially in our weekly chapel services.

This is an intentionally broad theme and the interpretation of this theme hinges on this one little preposition: ‘with’. Are we making peace as a companion of God? In support of God? Or perhaps we’re making peace in our relationship to God? In our understanding of God?

At first glance, when we were first considering how to phrase our theme, I thought that Making Peace with God was an easily divided idea. This phrase as two clear definitions of ‘with’: one that focuses on the vertical or our individual relationship with God; one that focuses on the horizontal or on how we work alongside God in our relationships and the world around us.

It is all too easy to see, as we look at the larger Christian church in the United States, that our communities tend to focus more on one of these directions than the other. Some churches tend to focus on the individual’s relationship with God while others prefer to focus on how we work at building the kingdom of God and living into God’s vision for Creation.

Our hope is that Goshen College students will come to understand that these two ways of making peace with God cannot be separated. That in fact they are intimately and indivisibly connected.

In Ephesians 2, one of the Scriptures that we have been exploring as one part of our theme, Paul tells us that the wonder of the Gospel is that Christ is our peace. In Christ, the Jews and the Gentiles were made one, the barriers of hostility were broken down, and in doing so, Jesus reconciled all people to God. In this passage, there is an intimate connection between the division of the people, amongst themselves, and their separation, as a community, from God.

Since we believe that Jesus is our starting point, our guide, and the sustainer of our work of peace, our peacemaking cannot be only about struggling against injustices in the world without tending to our personal relationship with Jesus. Nor can our peacemaking be only about getting saved and making sure that we are right with God and ignoring the plight of our neighbors in need.

The peace of Christ is a holistic calling, not something to be narrowly defined.

Here at Goshen, we are seeking to be rooted in the peace of Christ while striving for that peace for the world that we live in. As can be seen in the pictures posted with these words, GC students (your children – although it’s strange to think of them using that word!) are deeply engaged with making peace with God in many forms, and we hope that you will join us in this work, and hold us in your prayers.

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