Just Ward Theory

This excerpt is adapted from a chapter in Proclaim Peace: The Restoration’s Answer to an Age of Conflict (Maxwell Institute and Deseret Book, 2021). See the online version of the excerpt for citations.

It’s tempting to think of peacemaking—or peacebuilding, as it is often called—as something done by diplomats and heads of state participating in elaborate ceremonies to sign treaties that end major conflicts. Although those formalities are important, they represent only the very tip of a peacebuilding pyramid. Sometimes peace comes from the top down, but more often than not it emerges from the bottom up. Latter-day Saint apostle John A. Widtsoe taught this principle in 1943 amid the ravages of the Second World War, when peace truly had been taken from the earth. He instructed the Church, “Each individual . . . holds in his own hands the peace of the world. That makes me responsible for the peace of the world, and makes you individually responsible for the peace of the world. The responsibility cannot be shifted to someone else. It cannot be placed upon the shoulders of Congress or Parliament, or any other organization of men with governing authority.” Peace can’t simply be something that other people pursue on our behalf.

So what does this mean for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? It means you are part of a potentially powerful but often overlooked resource for community-based peacebuilding. As a covenant follower of Jesus, what might you do to follow His lead and become more “blessed” as you work as a peacemaker? This essay offers illustrations and insights that we hope may inspire you to contemplate what you might do within your own context. For many centuries, Christians have used a set of principles called “just war theory” to determine if and when it is right to go to war. Somewhat playfully, we refer to the following peacebuilding principles as “just ward theory,” because the peacebuilding potential of the Restoration is most fully realized when our local congregations—from branches and wards to stakes and missions—are mobilized to bring about greater peace for individuals and communities. 

Peacebuilding Potential

We live in a world of conflict. One of the first principles of effective peacebuilding is to see conflict as an opportunity for transformation and growth. Especially where there is unnecessary suffering or harm done to other human beings that violates their dignity and divine worth, there are opportunities for peacebuilding.

Latter-day Saints already engage in a number of peacebuilding activities, even if we and others do not recognize them as such. A couple seeking therapy to change the conflict dynamics in their marriage. Parents teaching their children basic everyday conflict resolution skills. Ward members extending forgiveness and reconciliation to those who have offended or transgressed against them.  All of these are quiet examples of Christlike peacemaking that already occur every day throughout the Church.

In addition, as President Dallin H. Oaks has taught, there are many individual Church members who actively work to “reduce human suffering” or to “promote understanding among different peoples.” Latter-day Saints around the world are engaged in interreligious dialogue, refugee resettlement, various forms of diplomacy, and sustainable development initiatives. Acting from their deepest religious convictions, Latter-day Saints are seeking to prevent or end human trafficking, persecution of religious minorities, and gender-based violence. All of these actions, rooted in “basic goodness” and a desire to love one’s neighbor, are powerful avenues of peacebuilding. 

Latter-day Saints do not need to wait for the Church to create a Peacemaking Department in Salt Lake City. We already have a clear commandment to “proclaim peace.” As covenant followers of the Prince of Peace, it is our privilege and responsibility to “be anxiously engaged in a good cause, and do many things of [our] own free will, and bring to pass much righteousness.” The best place to start is where we are. With creativity and inspiration we can mobilize existing Church structures and resources at the local level to become more intentional peacebuilders in our communities. Consider the following possibilities.

Inspired by the thought that his stake could do more to serve the community, several years ago Tom Griffith, the president of a Brigham Young University student stake, asked each ward to form a partnership with a social service provider in the county. As the stake president made his rounds at sacrament meetings in each ward, he delivered a talk designed to awaken the members from their slumber (figuratively and literally):

Brothers and sisters, I bear you my testimony that were the Lord Jesus Christ to be physically present in Provo today, He would not attend a single meeting of the BYU Ninth Stake. Why not? . . . The Lord I know would be at the state mental hospital, the battered women’s shelter, the prison, and in south Provo with a recently arrived family from Central America. . . . If those are the places our Lord would be, then that is where we need to be.

Under the stake president’s direction, bishops called some of the spiritually strongest women and men in the ward to lead a “pure religion committee,” which coordinated each ward’s work with its selected social service provider. These initiatives were not designed as one-off projects, but rather as sustained relationship-building endeavors with vulnerable populations in the community. The stake presidency told bishops that the work of each pure religion committee was the principal work of the ward outside Sunday meetings, replacing dances and other social activities that students could readily find elsewhere on campus. They kicked off the school year with a stake fireside featuring talks using Matthew 25—Jesus’s injunction to serve “the least of these”—as their main text. These Saints made a positive difference in their community and had a transformative spiritual experience along the way. 

An enormous and already existing resource for Latter-day Saint peacebuilding is the Church’s unparalleled missionary program. Using the example of Ammon as its paradigm, the sincere love and selfless service of missionaries can be remarkable vehicles for peacebuilding that touch hearts and even transform communities—whether or not people get baptized. This is already the case with thousands of worldwide humanitarian missionaries who do wonders every day relieving the poor, healing the brokenhearted, ministering to the mentally ill, helping the blind recover their sight, feeding the hungry, giving clean water to the thirsty, clothing the naked, visiting the imprisoned, providing medical care, assisting refugees, saving vulnerable newborns, and providing wheelchairs to the immobilized. All of this is peacemaking..

It’s not just humanitarian missionaries who can be—and already are—peacebuilders. Every missionary on a full-time proselytizing mission is expected to “learn to be a disciple of Jesus Christ by serving as He did,” and doing so “with a sincere desire to help others without any expected outcomes.” Many of these young disciples, with just a little more intentionality, might choose to direct their regular service hours toward a wide range of peacebuilding-related activities, including but not limited to offering conflict resolution workshops for children, juveniles, and adults; visiting and helping to reintegrate former prisoners; assisting refugee resettlement efforts; or providing support for people to participate in the Church’s self-reliance and addiction recovery programs. Of course, most eighteen- to twenty-one-year-olds don’t have any particular expertise in these areas—but neither are they theologians or linguists before receiving their mission call. They can learn quickly, perhaps by partnering with and being trained by existing community-based organizations (many of which are faith-based) that are already doing this kind of work but often suffer from a labor shortage. 

Latter-day Saint missionaries already come home with remarkable life skills that make them attractive to a wide range of employers. What organization wouldn’t want to hire someone with a strong work ethic, discipline, the ability to work on teams, resilience, empathy, language skills, and multicultural competencies? These attributes are not just valuable for the corporate sector – they are also essential tools for effective peacebuilding. If missions are the training ground for a lifetime of consecrated discipleship, they are also an ideal site to cultivate the attributes and skills of a peacemaker.

On an individual and ward level, Latter-day Saints can become even more anxiously engaged in partnering with community service providers that work on issues related to homelessness, restorative justice, conflict resolution, violence prevention, adult literacy, after-school programs, gender-based violence and domestic abuse, addiction recovery, and food insecurity. Don’t know where to start? Read your local newspaper, talk to social workers or local politicians. Find out where people are suffering or struggling in your community. Sometimes Christ had problems come to him, but he also went to the places where he would find the poor, the marginalized, and the victimized. Peacebuilding is proactive. 

With inspired vision, appropriate training, and the signature Latter-day Saint qualities of love-based commitment and voluntarism, our wards, stakes, and missions can do this type of work with nothing more than an imaginative rearrangement of existing resources. We can be peacebuilders not in addition to being members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but rather because we are Latter-day Saints who belong to the Church of Jesus Christ.

A Community of Peacebuilders

One of our superpowers as Latter-day Saints has been our ability to build strong communities characterized by trust, cohesion, organization, and genuine affection and solidarity. In addition to the Church’s mission to save souls, we are also tasked with building Zion communities – not just for our people, but for all of God’s people. God gifted us this Church not to be merely a club for members, but as a means of structuring and scaling up Christ’s injunction to “love one another.”

In recent years Church leaders have summoned our collective history of receiving and fleeing persecution to inspire contemporary efforts to support, resettle, and integrate refugees from war-torn countries. The “I Was a Stranger” refugee assistance program—initiated by the First Presidency and Relief Society General Presidency in 2016—mobilized the resources of the Church’s worldwide humanitarian program as well as local wards and members. Comparing current refugees’ harrowing predicaments to the plight of the early Latter-day Saints, repeatedly driven from their homes and forced to settle in a strange land, Elder Patrick Kearon noted, “Their story is our story, not that many years ago.” Inspired by these shared histories of sorrow, local wards have opened their arms and hearts to these vulnerable populations who have suffered so much harm.

President Joseph F. Smith once prophetically observed that “peace comes only by preparing for peace.” One crucial component of “preparing for peace” is peace education, which is now being pursued at the Church’s three main universities. The vanguard for these efforts has been Brigham Young University–Hawaii, where the David O. McKay Center for Intercultural Understanding sponsors both a certificate program and an undergraduate major in intercultural peacebuilding. The program builds on the prophetic mandate that President McKay gave when establishing the university over a half century ago, saying, “From this school . . . will go men and women whose influence will be felt for good towards the establishment of peace internationally.” Students learn theories of conflict resolution, conflict transformation, and intercultural understanding, then they put those theories to work through applied training in mediation.

Similar efforts are also underway at Brigham Young University–Idaho, which recently introduced an undergraduate minor in peace and conflict transformation. Students receive training in areas such as mediation, group facilitation, and community-based peacebuilding, preparing them for a wide variety of careers in government, the private sector, and nonprofit organizations. At the flagship campus in Provo, the new president of BYU, Shane Reese, labeled peacemaking as an area of “natural strength” that the campus can and should cultivate. 

Beyond the BYU’s, peacebuilding initiatives are also taking place at public universities with large numbers of Latter-day Saint students, notably the Heravi Peace Institute at Utah State University and a Peace and Justice Studies program at Utah Valley University. President Russell M. Nelson prophetically pled for more peacebuilders, and these universities are rising to the challenge.

It doesn’t take a college degree to be a peacebuilder. But students who go through these programs will become important catalysts for helping the broader Latter-day Saint community fulfill our mission as a peacebuilding people. Think about the impact such graduates, numbering at first in the dozens but now in the hundreds and eventually in the thousands, will also have in their families, wards, and communities. 

Leavening Society

It is true that in most places Latter-day Saints do not have sufficient numbers, even acting collectively as congregations, to singlehandedly bring peace to our communities. This needn’t deter us. When it comes to peacebuilding, numbers do not always matter. In a conversation one day with Somalis about how local communities could address the violent power of the warlords, someone suggested to the famed international mediator John Paul Lederach that they needed “a critical mass of opposition,” perhaps even an outside military force that could intervene. In a moment of inspiration, Lederach responded, “It seems to me that the key to changing this thing is getting a small set of the right people involved at the right places. What’s missing is not the critical mass. The missing ingredient is the critical yeast.” 

This metaphor, emerging from Jesus’s teachings about Christians being the leaven (or yeast) in society, shifts the conversation from being about critical mass to thinking creatively about what Lederach calls “the strategic who”: “Who, though not like-minded or like-situated in this context of conflict, would have a capacity, if they were mixed and held together, to make other things grow exponentially, beyond their numbers?” Latter-day Saints have proved that even as a small percentage of the general population they can have a disproportionate political impact when they unite and mobilize around a specific goal and work alongside like-minded allies. Especially outside Utah, wards, stakes, and missions may not provide sufficient critical mass for local peacebuilding efforts, but they can be the critical yeast. But there’s a caveat: for yeast to do its work, it has to be fully kneaded into the social mixture. 

Peacebuilding requires patience and humility. The city of Enoch took centuries to build. When Jesus calls us to be salt and yeast, we should remember not only the disproportionate influence of those substances but also their smallness. The leaven never actually becomes the loaf—it is merely an activating agent. Latter-day Saints will always be a minority in the world, and in some places a negligible presence.

In the early decades of the Church, the Saints were called to gather to a central Zion. Now we are called to gather where we are scattered, to spread our influence wherever we are found. Perhaps there is an advantage to this kind of scattering. More Zions–however small and seemingly insignificant (kind of like yeast or a pinch of salt)–means the influence of Zion can be spread wider around the globe. 

At a time when many people are questioning the role of religion in modern society, the moment may be ripe for Latter-day Saints—individually and collectively, locally and on the world stage—to apply more fully our inherent and already remarkable peacebuilding potential. In our personal lives and our congregations, we can become the peacemakers that Jesus calls us to be. And when we apply that leavening influence to make more peace in the communities we find ourselves in, it just might be that our sisters and brothers look at this ragtag group of Jesus followers and call us the “children of God.”

Patrick Mason teaches religious studies and history at Utah State University, focusing on Latter-day Saint history, culture, and theology.

David Pulsipher is a professor of history at BYU–Idaho, where he also leads its program in peace and conflict transformation, and is a certified professional mediator.

Art by Justin Wheatley.