Foreword
The Pax Story

"Christ taught love and that is what his children must do." These words of Pax volunteer Daniel Gerber, who served and disappeared in Vietnam in the early 1960s, summarize the motivation for the story contained in these pages. This volume is being released on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Pax program. Over two decades Pax sent more than a thousand volunteers to over thirty countries to alleviate human need and build bridges of understanding and peace.

How does one evaluate the work of a program such as Pax? Does one measure the work accomplished through the number of houses, other structures, and highways constructed? The number of refugees fed and resettled? The amount of relief and agricultural rehabilitation completed? The quantity of peace camps conducted? Does one try to measure the impact on the individuals and organizations assisted?

Certainly the impact on the Mennonite Central Committee has been profound. The Pax program led the way for people to become the most important part of MCC service. The word Pax became the symbol for service and peace for a whole generation. The linkage of relief, reconstruction, rehabilitation with peace predated and shaped the later concepts of development and accompaniment. Indeed, Pax was part of the glue that helped form a sense of the global church community.

Not least, however, was the impact on the volunteers themselves. One need but listen to their stories, note the glistening eyes, or hear the catch in their voices to understand that their assignments were indeed the most significant experiences in their lives. Those years away from home led to life-long relationships and new educational, vocational, and avocational directions on their return. New global worldviews were forged. Service “in the name of Christ” became at once a most fruitful bond and motivation.

A recent book on the Mennonite contribution to international peacebuilding suggests that it is the quiet, gentle, respectful, and noncompetitive manner of being with those struggling with life’s deepest challenges and darkest tragedies that allows people to discover a constructive and courageous way forward. Surely the participants of the Pax program helped to shape that understanding of service.
—Ronald J. R. Mathies, Executive Director, Mennonite Central Committee

The Pax Story orders:

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• Credit card orders through The Pax Story page, MennoLink Online Bookstore