Mennonite Weekly Review

On my desk is In Harm’s Way: A History of Christian Peacemaker Teams, by Kathleen Kern, published by Cascade Books, 2009, 604 pages, $49.

Waltner Goossen

Many readers of Mennonite Weekly Review are familiar with the work of Kathleen Kern, whose columns over the years have featured Christian Peacemaker Teams. In 1986, Mennonite, Brethren in Christ and Church of the Brethren members began this organization, envisioning a new peace and justice ministry focused on public witness and nonviolent direct action.

Kern herself has been a participant in CPT since 1993, with assignments in the Caribbean, North and South America, the Middle East and Africa. For six years she has been writing this book — clearly a labor of love — to document the varied projects that CPT has undertaken. Kern’s dual purpose is to help this growing, ecumenical organization with Anabaptist origins reflect on lessons learned over the past 20 years, and to offer useful information to others about CPTers’ use of nonviolence as a guiding principle in challenging unjust systems.

Perhaps CPT’s best-known initiative is its long-term presence in the Hebron community in Palestine’s West Bank. CPTers arrived there in 1995, and team members remain today to assist villagers’ efforts to reclaim their lands. Over the years, CPT members have built close relationships with both Israelis and Palestinians in attempts to deter violence in the region, protesting house demolitions, responding to invasions of soldiers into Palestinian schools, witnessing against the destruction of thousands of olive trees and other crops made casualty to Israel’s “Separation Barrier,” and hosting tours for international visitors to the conflicted region.

Kern’s descriptions of Hebron and other West Bank projects are extensive, reflecting her own commitments and experience in the region. Of all the accounts in this book, the continued violence in the West Bank seems the most intractable. Kern reports that in recent years most of the positive advances in Hebron over the past decade have disappeared. The long struggle in the West Bank helps to explain why, as a matter of policy, CPT “does not claim to be neutral in any conflict with which it is involved… . Rather than neutrality, the CPT model is more like ‘guests in the house of the disenfranchised,’ ” in which CPTers are prepared to lay down their lives.

In Harm’s Way contains 12 chapters devoted to regions of conflict where CPT has been active, either by sending delegations for short-term work or maintaining multiyear witness. These include, in addition to the Middle East, Haiti, Mexico, Colombia, urban projects in Washington and elsewhere, and indigenous communities in Canada and the United States. For each chapter, Kern provides detailed histories of CPT’s presence, and then offers analysis and critique.

For example, in the West Bank projects, she argues that CPTers have had to struggle with the culpability of the United States in Middle Eastern conflict: “When Arabs see U.S.-built Apache and Blackhawk helicopters killing Palestinian civilians and U.S.-built Caterpillar bulldozers demolishing Palestinian homes, U.S. advocacy for ‘peace’ rings hollow.” And in Colombia, where in 2000 CPT began exploring ways to mitigate violence, Kern argues that eventual inclusion of Colombian nationals profoundly impacted the organization: “For the first time, instead of being consultants and coworkers, citizens of a non-North American country in which CPT worked took on leadership roles.”

During the past 20 years, the organization has grown to include offices in Chicago and Toronto that direct nearly 50 trained full-time workers and three times as many reservists willing to engage in short-term assignments. They are supported by an annual budget of more than $1 million, funded in large part by individuals from Anabaptist-related and Quaker faith communities.

Sometimes the cost of discipleship for team members has been traumatic, as in the 2005-06 international crisis when CPT workers in Iraq were taken hostage and one of them, Tom Fox, was killed execution-style before the others were released. (This book is dedicated to the memory of Fox and fellow CPTer George Weber, who died in 2003 in a vehicle accident.)

In Harm’s Way, which runs to more than 600 pages, may appeal more to scholars and activists than to general readers. It is heavy on primary source material and documentation, and lacks careful editing. Surprisingly, it contains neither an index nor photos. Nevertheless, In Harm’s Way is inspiring and thought-provoking, for as Kern concludes, members of these visionary teams have caused many Christians and non-Christians around the world to “take another look at the teachings of Jesus that have inspired CPT’s work.”