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In the summer of 1984, Ron Sider warned the Mennonite World Conference in Strasbourg, France, that the following decades could be the bloodiest the world had seen. He also warned Mennonites and other pacifists against a pacifism that condoned war if pacifists didn't have to fight. If Jesus taught a nonviolent approach to reconciliation, he said, pacifists ought to show the world what that was like—even if it meant dying "by the thousands."

After the rescue of three Christian Peacemaker Teams workers from their kidnappers, Sider talked to Christianity Today about his original vision for CPT.

Ron Sider is president and founder of Evangelicals for Social Action and professor of theology and culture at Palmer Theological Seminary.

You said that Mennonites and another historic pacifist churches suffered from an "isolationist pacifism." What did you mean by that?

We withdraw into our own communities and basically let the world go to hell in a handbasket rather than say that we think Jesus has taught us some things about peacemaking that we want to share with the world. I was urging the second route. My ancestors go back to the 16th century Swiss Alps. I have a deep appreciation for why we withdrew. We were getting killed by the thousands.

But that has led to a tendency to withdraw rather than say Jesus is Lord of all, and we want to invite everybody to follow him.

So you proposed a peacemaking force. What did you hope they would do?

I basically said if we Mennonites think we have an alternative in peacemaking, then we'd better put ourselves on the line. We'd better go into the midst of difficult, dangerous situations and try to stand between warring parties and understand both sides and try to help them hear each other. The Mennonite church engaged in a very careful, two-year process of discernment. The question was, does this kind of activist, confrontational engagement fit with our understanding of what Jesus taught? And the answer was yes. The Christian Peacemaker Teams was launched.

I had hoped that the center of the Mennonite church and other bodies, those that are historically pacifist, would become engaged, and in relatively short time, we would have hundreds and hundreds of people engaged in different places. That didn't happen. What happened was the center of the church said, "Yes, this is right," and basically let the peace activists go and do it.

If I were doing it, I would make prayer and Bible study more central, but overall I would say they do incredible work. I think the stuff in the West Bank and Hebron, for example, is an ideal illustration of what is possible. Probably because of that work, many of the radical Muslim groups spoke up for the three [CPT captives in Iraq] who were still alive.

When the four CPTers in Iraq were first captured, some people harshly said that they deserved whatever came to them, even death. In your 1984 speech, you said that CPT volunteers would have to be willing to die by the thousands, that if people were willing to die in war, pacifists should be willing to die for peace.

It seems to me Jesus taught against killing. Since I believe he is true God and true man, I can't say he was wrong. I have to try to live what I believe he taught us to do.

But in terms of the just-war tradition, World War II is a success. And 20 million or so people got killed. The death of some people in a peacemaking effort certainly doesn't mean that effort is not successful. I'm so sorry for Tom Fox's death and the Fox's family's grief, but it seems to me that the people in CPT should not see this as defeat but simply as the cost of being faithful to the mission of peacemaking the world desperately needs.

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March (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50