God’s shalom holds it together
By James R. Krabill
What do church growth in Burkina Faso and peace-building in Korea have in common? How about a Bible study group in Ecuador and youth ministry in Paris? Or service opportunities in Chicago and witness to the casino industry in the Asian “Las Vegas” of Macau?The answer is God’s shalom.
The noun shalom occurs some 235 times in the Old Testament and more than 100 times in its Greek translation, eirene, in the New Testament. There is no single word in English that captures its full meaning. Perry Yoder highlights the term’s complexity in the very title he chose for his 1987 book, Shalom: The Bible’s Word for Salvation, Justice and Peace.
Salvation, justice and peace. That is already about as much as we can handle. But there is more. In other biblical passages, shalom is translated as health, righteousness, well-being, security, wholeness, integrity, abundance, intactness, honesty, prosperity, right relationships, protection, life-giving-ness, harmony, straightforwardness, reconciliation, blamelessness, rightness, and good accord.
What the biblical witness does make abundantly clear is that God has a cosmic shalom project to reconcile all things to himself in Jesus Christ, and that the church is being invited to participate in this initiative as a model and messenger of the project.
In a new Mennonite Mission Network resource featured in the following pages, we reaffirm our commitment to “hold together evangelism, witness and personal transformation with peace, justice and social transformation—believing that each of these values has an important place with the kingdom of God.” Will you join us in accepting God’s invitation to be ambassadors of God’s shalom in our broken world?
James R. Krabill, senior executive of Global Ministries for Mennonite Mission Network