Doug Chaplin, our Discipleship and Lay Training Officer recently attended a conference on peace in Wittenberg, part of the Evangelical Church of Central Germany, with whom we have a partnership link. Here he reflects on the event.
“The number of refugees crossing the border is down to two or three thousand a day now.”
The speaker was a Slovakian police chaplain who had been regularly on border duty dealing with Ukrainian refugees since the start of the war, when numbers were much higher. His job was both that of a police officer seeing to make the border chaos as safe and orderly as possible, and providing support for his fellow officers. Police chaplains in Slovakia are both fully qualified, uniformed and armed officers, and trained theologically and pastorally as pastors.
It was very different from our limited UK experience with refugees, and our awareness of the Ukraine war at a safe distance. I was privileged to have been asked to represent the Diocese of Worcester at a conference organised by our German partners. The other churches involved were mainly those owing a debt to the Lutheran tradition. As well as the Slovakian pastors, there were representatives of the Church of Sweden, the Church of Finland (this at the time both their governments were breaking with past tradition and seeking to join NATO), and the American United Church of Christ. There were two Polish Orthodox priests (sympathetic to the Moscow patriachate) very conscious of being a minority in a Catholic country, and the sole Lutheran pastor in Belarus, sharing the day to day experience of Western economic sanctions hitting people living under a government in which they have no say.
The conference, reflecting on the churches and peace, had been planned before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but it was this that coloured all our reflections. I found myself very much in the position of learner from those who were very much closer to the situation then we in England are. We are praying for peace, but is there any government or organisation which is either in a position to, or has a serious interest in, brokering a peace that would be acceptable to both Russia and Ukraine? And what would such a peace look like? Do the churches have a distinctive voice that is not simply that of their nation? Bringing people together to ask that question was very valuable, even if we may be some way away from a practical answer.
The conference challenged its participants, and repeated that challenge to the churches in its closing document, to include more room for lament for and solidarity with victims in its worship and prayers, while still finding the grace to pray for perpetrators, and to make our churches safe spaces for those who have experienced violence and exclusion. Finally the closing statement sought to remind everyone that “only through exchange and encounter is reconciliation possible.”
