Which is why aspiring from other Christian denominations often make their way to 91����Ƶ.

It’s why Jay Wittmeyer, now executive director of global mission and service for the Church of the Brethren, completed an MA at in 2004.

At that time Wittmeyer was fresh from running a hospital in Nepal during its civil war, when that country’s version of revolutionary Maoists said they were struggling for justice and equity for those living impoverished in the countryside.

Interviewed at a gathering of  practitioners, Wittmeyer said the current situation in Nigeria reminds him of the dynamics of Nepal when he was there, off and on, from 2000 to 2004. Wittmeyer had recently returned to the United States after paying a supportive visit in April to Nigerian Brethren church leaders.

He said Boko Haram, a self-described Islamic group that is using violence and fear to try to turn Nigeria into its version of an Islamic state, is tapping the same grievances as the Maoists did in Nepal – meaning that Boko Haram feels that the oil money from Nigeria’s South is mainly going into the pockets of the Christian-dominated governing group.

The school in the far northeast of Nigeria from which Boko Haram kidnapped hundreds of girls on April 15 was founded by Brethren missionaries decades ago, but is now run by the government for girls of any faith, said Wittmeyer. Residents of the area in which the school is located, however, have been largely affiliated with the Church of the Brethren. He elaborated:

[Brethren] communities have been attacked and burned out. A lot of church members are staying with family members, cousins . . . we’re not seeing tent cities yet. Families are hosting others – they’ve built extensions on houses so they can house more. Some need to drill for more water, there’s so many more people.

But people can’t farm their lands – this is the time to plant. Hunger builds up through the months as you go. People get attacked at night and they just run. They literally have nothing. Do you migrate south? Do you try to stay? We are in conversation with Church World Service about help for refugees. A lot of Brethren families that have moved into Cameroon.

The recurring question is, ‘How can we help keep the Brethren Church to maintain its peace position in situations where members feel as though they are being led like sheep to the slaughter?

Wittmeyer feels the Nigerian Brethren are “teaching us about discipleship and taking seriously the words of Jesus. They are living them out in ways that we don’t typically have to do.” Notably, the theme of last year’s annual Brethren conference in Nigeria was, “They can kill the body but not the soul.”

While Wittmeyer necessarily stretches his attention to other responsibilities in Asia, Africa and all of the Americas, within Nigeria full-time is another 2004 master’s graduate from CJP, Toma Ragnjiya. He is the “peace officer” at the headquarters of the Church of the Brethren in Nigeria (known as EYN).

Ragnjiya has spearheaded the Christian and Muslim Peace Initiative and runs the peace-training part of the pastor training program. He is featured in an inspiring 18-minute documentary posed on YouTube with the title

Much of Ragnjiya’s efforts go into building mutual support between Muslims and Christians, so together they can douse any sparks of violence between the groups and make space for moderates. In 2010-11 when a Muslim school was burned by Christian youths (who said they were retaliating for Muslim violence), Brethren leaders stepped forward, saying, “We recognize that Christians burning your school is wrong, and we want to make amends for that.”

They ended up providing a well to supply water to the rebuilt Islamic school. “That opened up doors for dialogue,” said Wittmeyer. “Out of that developed an interfaith peace program that is looking at micro-finance, with no interest owed. We’ve also been funding individuals to get trained across religious lines – we probably have 20 now, male and female. Maybe a Muslim does an internship or apprenticeship with a Christian welder, who could help them get started in their own business. We could do this with tailor shops.”

Wittmeyer sits on the board of Heifer International, which he would like to see add STAR-type trauma sensitivity training to its development work.

[Editor’s note: Another alumnus, Nigerian , MA ’01, worked with support from Mennonite Central Committee for a dozen years in Nigeria, and reducing the terrain for violence, .]

Article originally appeared in the spring/summer 2014 issue of Peacebuilder magazine

Tapkida, who earned a master’s in from 91����Ƶ (91����Ƶ) in 2001, has seen Nigeria move from having virtually no leading citizens committed to peacebuilding to having a network of Muslim and Christian peace practitioners who monitor their neighborhoods and faith communities for signs of budding violence and who intervene to head it off.

Emergency responders nip budding violence

Called the Emergency Preparedness and Response Team (EPRT), the system is supported by 10 organizations, encompassing Muslims, Catholics, Evangelicals, women’s groups, the , and others committed to promoting nonviolence and . The monitors, typically EPRT members, use text messages to confer with each other about possible threats and rumors of attacks.

Tapkida cited this example from 2009: Upon learning that Muslim youths were planning an attack on Christians (because the Muslims felt they needed to strike preemptively), a Muslim member contacted her EPRT Christian counterparts, who quickly surveyed their youth groups and found no movement towards a first attack. Reassured, the Muslim member of EPRT was able to calm the Muslim youths.

“Over the years there has been individual transformation and institutional transformation in Nigeria,” Tapkida said during a summer 2013 visit to 91����Ƶ, where he hopes his middle daughter, Anni, will transfer in as an undergraduate in 2014-15. (Anni is now at two-year Hesston College in Kansas.) When he first began doing peace work in Nigeria, “it was a lonely position. I didn’t know how deep the ocean was, I didn’t even know how to swim.”

Gaining partners after swimming alone at first

Yet, despite the growing commitment of Nigeria’s mainstream religious leaders to peacebuilding, the violence has continued. Tapkida’s home city of Jos is situated in the middle of the country in a region where the largely Muslim population of the north (Muslims constitute 50 percent of Nigeria’s population) bumps against the south, largely inhabited by Christians (40 percent of the population).

As a result, Jos tends to be a flashpoint city. In November 2008, at least 200 people were killed during clashes between Muslims and Christians there, according to the BBC. Violence struck again in January 2010, when at least 149 people were killed during two days of violence between Muslims and Christians, followed by 120 more people killed the following March. At the end of 2010, the Boko Haram Islamist sect took credit for a Christmas Eve bomb attack near Jos that killed at least 80 people.

In May 2013, Nigeria’s government declared a state of emergency in the three northern states of Yobe, Borno and Adamawa and sent in troops to combat the Boko Haram Islamist militants. That fight continues to be waged.

Average Nigerian wants end to cycles of violence

Among average Nigerians, however, Tapkida sees a desire to distance themselves from the violence of Boko Haram, which seems to be a fringe effort to fuel cycles of bloodshed between Muslims and Christians that otherwise would be waning.

“Nigerians are beginning to recognize the way religious identity is used for political manipulation,” he said. Two Christian seminaries in Nigeria that rejected Tapkida’s first efforts to encourage peace initiatives are now among his greatest collaborators.

Amid the ashes of the worst violence of 2008 in Jos, when leaders of EPRT (both Muslims and Christians) brought anger, suspicion and grief to a conference table with Tapkida, they ended up sorrowfully agreeing that the only option was for all to work harder at peace.

To heighten awareness and to impart conflict-transformation skills, EPRT has started forming peace clubs in high schools, trying to reach Nigerians who are in the majority – the under 25-year-olds.

Returning to Harrisonburg to regenerate

Despite his successes, “you can get empty working in the field,” said Tapkida, a former evangelical pastor who has worked in various capacities for in Africa for more than 20 years.

“You need to gas up somewhere. Being in Harrisonburg is like being at a filling station. We feel like this is home.” The youngest of Tapkida’s three daughters, Melody, was born in Harrisonburg while he was enrolled in the graduate program at between 1999 and 2001. Tapkida said he extensively uses the teachings from his graduate studies, “contextualizing” them for Africans.

Tapkida – accompanied by Monica, Anni and Melody (their oldest daughter, Nen, was in Kenya doing university study) – came to Harrisonburg in July 2013 during a two-month period of respite before he transitions from his role as MCC regional peace advisor for West and Central Africa to jointly serving with his wife Monica, a former teacher, as MCC country representatives for Zimbabwe.

Tapkida sought the job change to give the West Africans he has mentored room to grow. He was also ready to accept a new challenge; he will be concurrently working on a doctorate in transformative leadership at in Nairobi, Kenya.

Gaining the president’s ear in Chad

As part of his MCC responsibilities in West Africa, Tapkida traveled frequently to Chad during 2008-12. Chad is a landlocked country to the northeast of Nigeria, where in 2008 “Christians felt oppressed and weakened by the political leadership,” he said.

By Tapkida’s second year of work in Chad, “the interfaith vision” of Catholic, Evangelical and Muslim leaders in that country – leaders whom Tapkida had identified and introduced to principles and skills – had reached the president of Chad, Idriss Déby.

As a gesture of goodwill, this Muslim president donated two Jeeps to Christian groups and declared Nov. 30, 2011, to be an interfaith day of prayer. The following year, he appointed one Christian and one Muslim – both drawn from the group trained in conflict transformation – to be his advisors on religious matters.

Tapkida said there is a high demand for peace workers in Chad, which hosts hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing wars in neighboring countries, plus internally displaced persons from conflicts with rebel groups.

“We need to train more trainers of trainers,” said Tapkida. But he feels confident that the peace devotees remaining in that region – such as Sani Suleiman, a Muslim mentored by Tapkida, who took classes at in 2011 – will continue the work he is relinquishing in West Africa with his upcoming move to southern Africa.

on Gopar Tapkida’s earlier peacebuilding work in Nigeria, originally published in , Summer/Fall 2005.

Instead they found themselves cowering with 10 other friends and relatives in two small rooms, with no food and little water, as bloody inter-religious riots swirled outside their hiding place.

When the rampage subsided, 3,000 in his city were dead. Relatives and friends had lost their property. Some had lost their lives. “Every knowledge I had about peace disappeared completely,” recalls Tapkida. “You don’t know where to begin.”

Tapkida’s journey from the depths of numb shock to breaking the cycle of violence is recounted in an earlier issue of .

As a sequel, here is a report from a recent observer of Tapkida’s work: “While at 91����Ƶ in 2003, I did my practicum under the in Jos, Nigeria, where Gopar Tapkida was heading the peace program,” writes Priscilla A. Adoyo, a 2003 masters in conflict transformation graduate. “It seemed to me that Gopar was faced with a daunting task, and I really wondered how long it would take before we saw the fruit of his labor.

“Well, I had the privilege of going back there for my doctoral research last summer [2006], and I was truly amazed at how effective and widespread the trainings in had been. There was a remarkable difference in just three years. There is plenty of hope for peacebuilders.”

Tapkida, MA ’01, and his wife Monica are West Africa regional peace coordinators for Mennonite Central Committee, based in their home country of Nigeria.

Adoyo, a Nigerian who is a PhD candidate at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., adds: “I am eager now to get my studies over and done with, so I can go out there where the real learning takes place!”

Tapkida will be teaching the course “Identity and Transformation” with professor at the 2008.

Article originally published in magazine, Winter 2008.

International protests against cartoons of the prophet Muhammad inflamed tensions between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria, sparking deadly riots in late February that claimed at least 138 lives in several cities.

There was widespread fear that riots would break out in many other parts of the country, including Jos, a central Nigerian city with a recent history of interreligious violence.

But local Muslim and Christian peacemakers worked together to reduce tensions in Jos through face-to-face meetings and cell phone text messaging. These efforts, as well as government security measures, prevented a violent confrontation in Jos, according to Gopar Tapkida, a (MCC) peace worker in the city.

Tapkida earned a master’s degree in from 91����Ƶ in 2001. He began his current assignment as an MCC peace worker in Jos weeks before interreligious riots engulfed the city on Sept. 7, 2001.

Teaching Peacemakers

Ever since interreligious riots erupted in Jos in 2001 and killed about 900 people, Tapkida and others have worked to teach peacemaking skills to Christians and Muslims in the region. He helped form groups of Christian and Muslim peacemakers in Jos and in the surrounding Plateau state.

On Feb. 23, during a week of heavy rioting in other cities, Tapkida met with 10 leading Muslim and Christian peacemakers in Jos to find ways to diffuse rising tensions.

“We agreed at this meeting that each one of us will serve as evangelists for peace,” Tapkida says.

Members of the group met with their friends and neighbors and spoke about how Christians and Muslims should resist calls for violence against each other.

Situation Defused

Tensions escalated in Jos as rumors spread that Muslims were preparing to attack Christians on Feb. 25 and that Christians were planning a reprisal attack. However, two Muslim peacemakers investigated the situation and found that Muslim teenagers were simply planning a demonstration against the cartoons of Muhammad.

The Muslim peacemakers sent text messages to inform Tapkida and other Christian peacemakers and eventually persuaded the teenagers to cancel their demonstration.

Tapkida says that the recent violence in Nigeria is a reflection of longstanding political divisions between Christians and Muslims. Nigeria’s population is divided about equally between the two religions.

Then, Tapkida says, he felt like a lone swimmer in an ocean of violence. But after the recent successes of peacemakers in Jos, he knows he is not alone.

“Today, as I look at the situation, the ocean is still there, but I don’t see myself swimming alone,” Tapkida says. “There are people that are swimming alongside.”

On September 7, 2001, Tapkida, his wife Monica, and three daughters (then ages 9, 5 and 3 months) heard gunfire outside of the guest house where they had planned to stay for a night before heading to their own home. They were quickly joined by 10 other friends and relatives. All 15 of them hid in two small rooms for six days with no food and little water as Christians and Muslims rampaged outside killing each other.

By the time the Nigerian government sent in troops to stop the killing, at least 3,000 people were dead, including three cousins of Tapkida’s wife, Monica, and the man who had printed the wedding invitations for the Tapkidas.

My daughters had no food to eat for six days. They begged me, ‘Let’s go back to America,'” said Tapkida.

“When the dust settled, Monica and I drove out and we were shocked at the destruction. In the first mile, we counted more tan 10 cars burned. There were six roadblocks. We could see smoke from houses. We couldn’t stop weeping. We were stunned.”

The more they learned about the rampage, the worse. The Christian-Muslim conflict had started in Jos, but it had spread through the whole central plateau of Nigeria and to some of the other 35 states in Nigeria. Tens of thousands had been hurt, and millions of people were at risk.

“That is the bad thing about religious conflict,” says Tapkida, who has a divinity degree from a Nigerian seminary. “It is highly contagious – it spreads like wildfire. Even when George Bush attacks Iraq, it has effects on Christian-Muslim relations in Nigeria.”

Tapkida says he had no idea what to do in the face of such widespread hatred and devastation. He had a job, being the “peace coordinator” for the Mennonite Central Committee in Nigeria. But where does one begin as the sole professional peacebuilder in a country 14 times larger than Virginia, with a population that is 18 times greater?

“I thought I would come from Virginia and hit the ground running,” said Tapkida in a recent interview while visiting friends at 91����Ƶ. “Jos was where I planned to plant the seed of peace I had learned here. But every knowledge I had about peace disappeared completely. When a conflict is life threatening to you and to people you know – to your entire family – you don’t know where to begin.”

It took Tapkida four or five months to deal with the trauma of the conflict and to figure out a strategy. Christians and Muslims each number about 40 percent of the population in Nigeria, but both groups have access to enough arms and supporters to inflict major damage on the other.

The military, he said, were brought in and stopped the killings and then the government issued statements saying, “Normalcy has returned and everybody should go about their lives.” But as soon as the troops began to withdraw, revenge killings started again. “They (the government) were able to freeze the conflict with troops, but they weren’t able to deal with the feelings that started it in the first place,” he said.

Tapkida realized that he had to do what the government perhaps couldn’t do.

“We started with people who know us best – the Christian constituency,” he said. When Tapkida speaks, he usually says “we,” meaning himself and the relief organization that supports him. But when pressed to explain “we,” he will admit that for many months he was working entirely alone, until he was able to train volunteer helpers.

Tapkida started with visits to the seminary where he had earned his degree, the churches where he was known, and the school his daughters attend. His first task was to listen, as he had been taught at 91����Ƶ.

“They were talking about self-defense. Some said these are signs of the end times. Some said ‘God is punishing us.’ Many said they were praying for their people and organizing food and shelter for those who had none.”

After listening and affirming the positive steps being taken by church and school leaders, Tapkida carefully suggested: “Have you made any effort to bring together these people? I would suggest that the psychological effects need to be addressed – they last for years – and are almost as intense as the physical ones.”

Indeed, the leaders of the Christian community had not thought about the psychological effects – Tapkida had been taught that unhealed trauma can lead to cycles of violence – and they proved receptive to his offer to lead interactive workshops on the subject.

Within a year, Tapkida was receiving more requests for workshops than he could handle. He started training the leaders of religious and service organizations, who in turn trained their followers.

Muslims began to attend five-day workshops with Christians. By the fourth day, most were extending forgiveness to those from the other religious group, despite having lost family members and livelihoods in the conflict.

Today, Tapkida teaches conflict transformation and peace theology in two seminaries, reaching about 85 future church leaders each semester. He has also formed a warm personal relationship with “a good number of Muslim leaders.” He continues to be in hot demand as an inter-faith mediator and trainer in peacebuilding for both government and non-government organizations.

“There is no longer a cycle of violence,” said Tapkida. “But the tension is still there. Our job is to continue to build trust and lay the foundations to sustain peace.”

Article originally published in magazine, Summer/Fall 2005.