Peace Sunday is observed on the Sunday closest to the United Nations’ International Day of Peace on September 21. The Peace and Justice Support Network creates worship materials that congregations may use on this or any Sunday throughout the year. Peace Sunday is an annual opportunity to acknowledge and respond to the violence that continues to be our culture’s all-too-frequent response to conflict.
In 2015, Peace Sunday was celebrated on Sunday, September 20.
On Peace Sunday 2015, we call churches to spend time reflecting on race, and the ways discrimination continues in our society. We know that talking about race is fraught with difficulty. We have offered sermon seeds and Scripture suggestions that lead to different levels of tension and different kinds of conversations. We hope there are some that are right for your congregation.
But we also offer these resources as a challenge. These resources were written by two congregations in St. Louis who have spent a lot of time learning from one another, reaching across differences of race, culture and theology to discover what God is doing in their midst.
We encourage everyone who uses these resources to also stretch beyond their comfort zone, and to engage with congregations that are different from them. This might include consulting with a congregation from a different tradition in planning the worship service, bringing in a guest speaker with a different racial/ethnic background, or having a joint worship service with a congregation with a very different worship style or theology. We believe that building relationships is more important than intellectual knowledge.
Service resources include Scripture suggestions and sermon “seeds” to go along with them, children’s story suggestions, options for prayers of confession, hymn suggestions, and some options for further research.