Baptist Peacemaker Turns 40

A few months after the BPFNA celebrated its 25th anniversary at the 2009 Summer Conference, the late Glenn Stassen wrote an obituary for Robert Broome in which he declared, “Had there been no Robert Broome, there never would have been a Baptist Peacemaker.”

Stassen also said, in that same article, “Had it not been for Robert Broome, there might be no Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America.”

Broome himself wrote in 2005 (see The Birth of Baptist Peacemaker, Baptist Peacemaker, Vol 25 No 4, Winter 2005, page 3) that his first thoughts of publishing a newsletter/journal about peace issues came in Stassen’s “Classics of Christian Devotional Literature” class at Southern Seminary in Louisville, KY.

In 1978, Robert Parham and David Matthews managed to get a resolution on peacemaking and the nuclear arms race passed at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). It made national news. After that, a group in Louisville organized the Southern Baptist Conference on Peacemaking and the Nuclear Arms Race, at Southern Seminary and Deer Park Baptist Church.

Stassen wrote that, although the idea elicited a dismissive response from the SBC Christian Life Commission, 400 people came from 14 different states. Again, this drew national media attention. Stassen wrote:

It all could have ended right there. But Robert Broome urged us to organize a newspaper so the movement would thrive, would not go back to sleep. Deer Park Baptist Church pastor Carman Sharp and I expressed skepticism. Who would subscribe to a peacemaking newspaper for Southern Baptists? But Robert Broome had vision, and he had persistence. Glenn Hinson [then a church history professor at Southern] agreed to be the editor, and others of us gave in to Robert’s vision. 

The group published the first issue in December 1980. Soon letters and donations began coming in, and Deer Park Baptist Church provided office space. Stassen wrote:

So Southern Baptists now had a peace newspaper, but had no peacemaking organization. By contrast, American Baptists had an organization, a Baptist Peace Fellowship, but no newspaper. Someone got the idea that we could propose a marriage, producing an organization and a newspaper, South and North—the Baptist Peace Fellowship and Baptist Peacemaker.

As two and a half years passed, Dick Myers of the Baptist Peace Fellowship (BPF)—an American Baptist group that dated back to the 1940s—began organizing a visit to the Soviet Union in a Friendship Tour made up of the BPF and the Baptist Peacemaker network.

After that, 50 members came together to visit Baptist churches and peace communities in the Soviet Union as part of a Friendship Tour. They took and distributed 350 copies of Baptist Peacemaker (Vol. 3, No. 2).  A number of joint delegations then nurtured a close working relationship between the two peacemaking groups.

In 1984, several people, including George Williamson, Jr. and Ken Sehested, recognized, as Broome wrote, “a kairos moment in the lives of Baptists longing for peace.”

Stassen wrote: We met at Deer Park Baptist Church in 1984, decided to merge and here we are—the BPFNA, encompassing the US, Canada, Mexico and Puerto Rico, and Baptist Peacemaker, together and thriving. We are literally Robert’s baby. 

In June 2014, the BPFNA board and staff met in Burlington, ON, and voted to embrace more fully our four-nation status by changing our name to BPFNA ~ Bautistas por la Paz. We began to extend our family farther into Central and South America. We also began a journey of several years to make Baptist Peacemaker fully bilingual. With the next issue, Rubén David Bonilla Ramos will be on staff as the Spanish editor.

Writing about his original vision just before the 25th anniversary of Peacemaker, Broome wrote that he first wondered if Southern Baptists could find a network of peacemakers:

And could it be organized around a newsletter/journal? Could Baptist churches be reminded of their need to do peace and justice in a more effective way—or at all?

It would seem that it could—and that it could grow to reach Baptists of all kinds in many countries. Robert Broome’s baby seems to be doing well.