What's going on

2025 Peace Intern Chrys, Ella, and Ruthie having lunch with DHM President Chris Dorsey and Children’s Worship, Wonder, and Welcome Director (and former Peace Intern!) Laura Phillips

~Picket lines and picket signs,
Don't punish me with brutality
Talk to me~

Hi. My name is Chrys. I’m a Peace and justice intern for 2025, and I have written and rewritten that line for several days. I’m a writer at heart, a poet originally, so you would think catchy open lines were natural to me, but they aren’t. I tend to write the body of poems first, the punches, as one of my poetry slam friends calls them, “I’m not the descendant of the witches you couldn't burn, I'm the answered prayers of the ones you did.” or “what is black in America if not the constant fight to be seen, to laugh, to dance”. To write for me is to explain the beautiful tension of being black in America. And that often needs more words to encompass the epic that is tragic, beautiful, sorrowful, hopeful, joyous, and so on and so on. But during training week we learned spiritual practices to take with us as we embark on this long journey. One of them was writing haikus. It was introduced to us as, “The beautiful thing about haikus is that you have to strip back everything to just the core of what you have to say. And sometimes that means people won’t get it all” So that was a long introduction to say this. 

Hi, my name is Chrys. I’m a peace and justice intern for 2025. My workshop is about reconciliation. It's called “How to plan a block party.”  Reconciliation ministry to me is just a double score word for inviting the people we have excluded back to the table. Here are some Haiku prayers I wrote for and from the block.

Peace be still go far 
Through night,restless storm 
Peace be still go far 

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I’m sorry your first swim 
Was with death,and freedom floats 
Swim in still waters 

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Divine lives outside 
Where breathe is green, bodies morph 
Divinity Shines 

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Live gently on the earth
With loving mother,father
Love their earth gently 

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From fallen bodies 
Grounds be sanctified for peace 
Walk humbly through 

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More than human world 
Mother tree breathe on us for
those more  than human

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Introductions and Training Week Reflections from Ella Johnson

2025 DPF Peace Interns (Ella, Chrys, and Ruthie) with Peace Intern Chaplain Rev. Sarah Zuniga and DPF Mission Director Rev. Brian Frederick-Gray

Hello beloved Disciples Peace Fellowship community! What an amazing and incredible week it has been doing all things Peace Intern training in Indianapolis. Throughout all of my waiting, dreaming, and preparing to be a Peace Intern, I still was not fully ready for the truly transformative nature of this program.

I cannot begin to tell you all what a blessing and honor it is to participate in this program, and how thankful I am to be entrusted to carry out the 50 year legacy of DPF. I was so excited when I got the phone call from Brian congratulating me on being accepted as one of the 2025 Peace Interns. I knew that this was a ministry God was waiting and ready for me to be a part of. Before I get into the amazing-ness that was training week, I want to tell you all about my journey to becoming a Peace Intern.

I went to camp every summer I could growing up. My family joined Heart of the Rockies Christian Church in Fort Collins and the larger Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) denomination when I was in elementary school, and I built up the courage to start attending camp in 7th grade. From that first summer camp onwards, I would count down the days until I could be at camp again. Camp was the place in my life where I felt most deeply connected to my faith. It was the place where I felt safest to be myself and show my full self to the world. It was the space where I was challenged to dig deeper in my faith and truly explore my relationship with God. It was my favorite week of the summer. It was sacred community; holy ground.

When I was in high school, Daniel Lyvers, a former Peace Intern and overall AMAZING human being, was my youth minister. Before meeting Daniel, I had no idea what the Peace Intern program was. I had an irreplaceable relationship with camp, but didn’t know about the ways DPF was creating opportunities to explore and create peace and justice in camps through the Peace Interns. Daniel introduced me to the Peace Intern program by sharing his own story and experiences, and from that moment forward, I quite literally counted down the summers until I was old enough to apply and participate in the program. This is an opportunity I have been called to for a long time, and one I knew God had in store for me.

My junior year of high school, my summer camp had our first Peace Intern, Courtney Sells. Interacting and building relationships with Courtney over the course of the week once again reminded me of the beautiful ways we work to bring God’s Kindom to the here and now through lives of peace and justice. I remember so vividly the workshop Courtney led with my camp that summer. She was educating us about the LGBTQIA+ community by leading an LGBTQ 101 workshop. That workshop was the first concrete time I had heard queerness and queer identity discussed in such an open and positive way in a church setting, and was foundational and life-giving for me as a young queer Christian trying to figure out the relationship between my faith and queerness. Seeing Courtney so fearlessly talk about inclusion and love of the LGBTQIA+ community, and how we are called to frame this inclusion and love through our Christian faith and following of Christ exemplified for the first time that my Christian and queer identities could not only co-exist, but also grow in and through each other. I have been a passionate advocate for LGBTQIA+ inclusion  for a long time and I frame this advocacy through my faith, and Courtney’s workshop was a much needed personal introduction into the peace and justice work of queer inclusion.

My experiences at camp growing up, with Courtney, with Daniel, and with so many other mentors and faith, peace, and justice in my young adult life led me to this summer, this moment, being able to do THE work as a Peace Intern!

I found the spirit working in and around me in so many ways this past week through our training. During training week, I built foundations for deep, vulnerable, goofy, loving relationships with my fellow Peace Interns Chrys and Ruthie. We shared sacred time laughing until there was literally no more breath left in our lungs, challenging each other to ask hard questions of ourselves and our presenters, sitting around the kitchen table sharing meals, singing together while cleaning up our dinners, and every other moment in between. I know that the camps, groups, and churches Ruthie and Chrys serve are incredibly lucky to have the 2 of them, and I am blessed to have 2 more partners in ministry with whom I can be my full self, ask my hard questions, and grow in my faith.

I did not realize how disconnected I felt from the national church before training week, and am so grateful for the chance to be reconnected with the larger bodies of my denomination through this work.  All of the partners we had the privilege of sharing time with gave me so much hope and excitement for the future of our denomination and gave me a sense of connection to the larger church I didn’t fully realize I was missing. So thank you to each and every one of our presenters and partners for making this summer so incredible after only 1 week in!

Training reminded me of my need to be immersed so deeply again in the deep rooted justice work my faith and following of Jesus calls me to. Hearing from all our presenters, engaging in deep conversations with Brian and my fellow Peace Interns, and just being challenged to explore my own faith identity and convictions on a deeper level help me once again see that the social justice work Jesus fought for in his ministry and the Kindom of peace and justice God seeks to bring to this world is an integral part of my work on this earth. I cannot be a Christian in the way God calls me to be without engaging in this life giving work, and I am so thankful to the training week experience for reminding me of the pertinence of that conviction.

I cannot WAIT to check in with you all again as I begin my summer ministry of sharing this good news with camps, groups, and congregations! My first stop is the Retreat at Silver Springs, a DOC camp in the Florida Region, where I will be doing my Peace Intern thing at their CYF camp and conference.

Blessings,
Ella Johnson

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