Together with our good friend and colleague Orhan Hadžagić, we’re hosting our first 6-week workshop series in September and October on conflict transformation. Learn more about it, and contact us to bring the workshops to your community.

At Peace Catalyst, we’re working to equip and mobilize Christians for collaborative peacebuilding across lines of difference. In light of today’s hyperdiversity, church decline, and polarization, the need for a holistic, healing-oriented framework at a popular level among local pastors and their congregations has never been greater. With a shalom-centered theological framework and PCI’s peacebuilding toolkits, congregations have the opportunity to both reconstruct their faith in ways that fit with their core faith priorities and values and to collaborate with their diverse neighbors on issues that affect all of society. 

In a world rife with conflict and division, peacebuilding is a felt need in our families, communities, and wider society. Traditional approaches to conflict resolution often focused on political strategies and the most visible leaders, but there’s a growing awareness that sustainable peace requires a more holistic approach that involves everyday people like you and me. One innovative approach that we are leaning into at Peace Catalyst is the idea of a “peacebuilding learning pilgrimage” that includes active local participation. This transformative experience combines groups of foreign and local participants who learn from local peacebuilding practitioners about challenges and successes in their peace work. By including and valuing the voices of local participants, this approach empowers local populations in conflict-affected zones like Bosnia & Herzegovina (BiH) while simultaneously creating a lasting impact on participants from foreign countries.

Last month, the Slovakia Missions Network invited me to lead two workshops to introduce peacebuilding and how it relates to God’s mission and how Christians understand the Good News and witness. Since so much of my work with Peace Catalyst is to help Christians catch a vision for God’s shalom vision and peacebuilding mission, I was very excited to see how these ideas might connect more broadly with others in Eastern Europe.

For the first time since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, we are very excited to announce that our registration is open for individuals and small groups to come to Bosnia & Herzegovina on our fall 2022 Catalyze Peacebuilding Pilgrimage.

At Peace Catalyst International, we're dreaming of a day when churches across the world are known as communities of peace, when their Christian witness is recognized through their reconciliation with enemies, their pursuit of justice, solidarity with the marginalized, and commitment to truth. But we know we can't get there through good intentions alone, and that’s why we’re expanding our capacity to provide aspiring peacebuilders with high-quality training and an intentional community of practice.

If you’re excited about learning Nonviolent Communication in a way that can support your desire to address larger systemic inequities in addition to supporting personal change, join us for this new eight-week training course!

Our first ever Trauma-Sensitive Peacebuilding course has officially wrapped up! It deepened participants’ awareness of the reality of trauma in all our lives and the ways in which we can personally experience post-traumatic growth or live with courage in order to help our group move toward healing. Here’s how it went and how you can be involved in future courses.

We're SO pleased to be offering a 5-week course this Fall specifically focused on Trauma-Sensitive Peacebuilding. We've partnered with the Peace Academy in Bosnia and diverse international instructors to provide a high-quality interactive course to equip you to recognize and respond to trauma in your work.