09/17/2026
Rev. Pirie's Weekly Blog
What can you or I do to bring about peace in this fractured world? Here a story about a new way of peace we at Chalmers United Church are connected with. It’s worth a read.
The Story: The Bread Not Bombs Movement
In the 1970s, a young Canadian professor named Ernie Regehr and United Church of Canada minister Murray Thomson looked at the global arms race and asked a fundamentally progressive Christian question: How can we follow the Prince of Peace in a world obsessed with preparing for war?
Instead of just praying for peace in isolation, they looked at the economic and social structures causing harm. In 1976, they founded Project Ploughshares—named directly after the biblical prophet Isaiah’s vision of beating "swords into ploughshares."
The Interfaith Table: What began as a small working group quickly grew into the official peace agency of the Canadian Council of Churches. It brought together United, Anglican, Presbyterian, Catholic, and Quaker communities across Canada.
The Progressive Shift: They reframed peace not merely as the "absence of war," but as the presence of justice, human security, and resource equity. They argued that money spent on weaponization was stolen from the poor, echoing the progressive Christian call to prioritize marginalized communities.
The Canadian Impact: For decades, this Canadian movement mobilized thousands of churchgoers to write letters, protest testing of cruise missiles in Alberta, and successfully lobby the Canadian government to sign the international Landmine Ban Treaty in 1997.
What can you or I do for the matter pf peace? Worth a thought or two. See you next Sunday
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