Mennonite Weekly Review

In 1963, Gene Stoltzfus was a volunteer aid worker in Vietnam.

John Longhurst is director of marketing and sales for Mennonite Publishing Network and a member of River East Mennonite Brethren Church.

One day he happened upon a number of military helicopters landing at a nearby field.

“The helicopters were disgorging Vietnamese soldiers who were killed and wounded in a battle about 25 kilometers away,” he recalled. “This was my introduction to war, and this was the beginning of a journey for me to understand being a person of peace in the midst of war.”

The experience set him on his life’s course as a Christian peace activist — a career that ended March 10 when he died in Fort Frances, Ont. He was 70.

Gene’s crowning achievement was the creation of Christian Peacemaker Teams, which he helped found in 1988 and directed until 2004.

The central idea behind CPT, he said, “was that disciplined and trained teams of people could be put together into highly charged, critical situations and they could make a difference.”

Such work, he knew, was not without its dangers. In 2005, the worst came true when four CPTers were taken hostage in Iraq. One of the group, Tom Fox, was killed by his captors before the rest were rescued.

For Gene, these kinds of risks were part of what it meant to be a peacemaker. He believed that just as soldiers are willing to give their lives in war, peacemakers should also be willing to put their lives on the line.

Gene himself spent time in dangerous places with CPT, including time in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. He was arrested a number of times for participating in nonviolent protests. The last one occurred last fall, near Las Vegas, when he and six others tried to gain entry to Creech Air Force Base to talk to its commander about the morality of using drones to kill people in Iraq and Afghanistan.

After his arrest, he spent a night and day in a local jail. “I was pushed into a 10-foot by 20-foot holding cell where 18 other people were already making some kind of peace, or silently plotting revenge at police who had shouted or insulted them on their road to detention,” he wrote on his blog, Peace Probe.