Of the 12 peacebuilding training centers around the world developed by alumni of 91¶ÌÊÓƔ’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI), only one focuses exclusively on conflict within a religious tradition.

And that is Bridge Builders, headquartered in London. It focuses on conflicts within churches throughout the United Kingdom.

“For churches to provide space for healing, we must intentionally prepare faith-based leadership to engage conflict constructively,” says John Paul Lederach on the Bridge Builders website.

Alastair McKay, the founding director of Bridge Builders, points out that “very few people in the world are doing this work” – that is, addressing how the church deals with its own issues, such as congregational disenchantment with members of the clergy, usage of limited church space, modern versus traditional styles of worship, extent of outreach to outsiders, and priorities for the church budget.

“We have to effect conflict transformation within the church itself for it to spill out,” says McKay. “Then the church will be a more dynamic witness to the world.”

Officially founded in 1996 at the London Mennonite Centre but operating independently since 2011, Bridge Builders also happens to be the oldest training center connected to SPI and its parent organization, the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP).

Inspiration for Bridge Builders can be traced to a three-day mediation course taught by Ron Kraybill in London in February 1994, says McKay.

Bridge Builders’ ties to Mennonite-style Christianity are extensive. Alan and Eleanor Kreider, Mennonites now living in Elkhart, Indiana, developed the London Mennonite Centre into a resource for British churches from 1976 to 1990.

Successors to the Kreiders included Nelson Kraybill, a Mennonite church leader in the United States (who is also Ron Kraybill’s brother) and Mark and Mary Thiessen Nation, who co-directed the London center from 1997 to 2002 and who are now faculty members at 91¶ÌÊÓƔ’s seminary.

McKay, raised nominally Anglican, became a member of a small Mennonite church associated with the London Mennonite Centre, and grew to play a leadership role in many of the Mennonite-initiated projects in that city.

One of those projects in 1995 was a voluntary community mediation service in one borough of London. Within a few months, it was clear that well-meaning individuals couldn’t maintain the service in their spare hours. This was an early lesson in the need to secure a financial base for conflict transformation work, so that staffers could be hired.

Preparing to lead

In the fall of 1997, McKay, his wife Sue and two children moved to Virginia so that McKay could pursue a master’s in conflict transformation and thus be better equipped to follow his calling. “There were various conflict resolution MA programs in the UK,” says McKay, “but their focus was largely international” and none offered him the opportunity to concurrently take seminary classes for credit, as 91¶ÌÊÓÆ” did.

After studying with Ron Kraybill, John Paul Lederach and Howard Zehr, among others at CJP, McKay felt he had gained a “wider perspective, thinking not just about mediation, but systemically about conflict.” He next did a seven-month internship at the Lombard Mennonite Peace Center outside Chicago. By the time he and his family returned to London in 1999, he felt he had “brilliant preparation for launching a pioneering service [Bridge Builders] on a full-time basis.”

Lederach became a member of Bridge Builder’s “council of reference” from the start and has remained so. Current CJP faculty member David Brubaker and McKay maintain regular collaboration on both sides of the Atlantic – McKay will be co-teaching “Leading Congregational Change” with Brubaker at 91¶ÌÊÓƔ’s seminary in a summer 2015 session (he also co-taught a seminary course with Brubaker in 2006).

Stronger churches handling conflict better

The Mennonite congregation in London never grew beyond a few dozen people, and currently has less than 15 active participants, probably because it never viewed its mission as gaining recruits or church planting, says McKay, but rather as introducing the Anabaptist-Mennonite approach to Christianity – especially pertaining to war, violence and peacemaking, as well as living out one’s beliefs. Along the way, the Mennonites realized they also could help British churches to function more healthily.

McKay became the first full-time director of Bridge Builders and remained so for nearly 16 years, while adding a doctorate of ministry from the University of Wales and embarking on a path toward being an Anglican clergyman. At Bridge Builders, he was assisted by a succession of young Mennonite volunteers from North America, including Sharon Kniss ’06, who majored in justice, peace and conflict studies, and Sam Moyer, a 2014 nursing graduate. In March 2015, in anticipation of being ordained in the Church of England and assuming a half-time curacy, McKay handed his executive director responsibilities to Colin Moulds, a Bridge Builders’ associate who had been running his own mediation and training company.

Is McKay still a pacifist, as he was as a Mennonite? “Absolutely,” he says, “I see this as integral to faithful Christian discipleship.”

One of the ongoing challenges of Bridge Builders has been financial solvency. Bridge Builders got off the ground initially and added staff in the middle 2000s with core money funneled through various Mennonite church agencies. But it has needed to be self-supporting since 2011 through a combination of fees collected for services and fundraising. And that has not been easy.

McKay, Moulds and the other trainers charge for their services, of course, and their carefully planned and timed trainings receive rave reviews. But UK churches have slim or no budget lines for educating and equipping their staff and lay leaders. “Eventually, I hope it will be embedded in churches’ DNA that they need to allocate funding to obtain support for transforming conflict and functioning healthily,” McKay said.

Bridge Builders courses range from one-day sessions with a limited agenda – such as “facilitating difficult meetings” and “leading well under pressure” – for a cost of 60 British pounds (about $90 U.S.) to five-day residential workshops for an average of 745 British pounds (about $1,124 U.S.), including training, materials, room and board.

Careful resourcing

The advanced residential sessions – where people who have been through foundational courses are then empowered to themselves be trainers – are offered in comfortable, but not plush, retreat or college settings, with a maximum enrollment of 20.

Participants receive print and PDF versions of material copyrighted by Bridge Builders. Some of the material would be familiar to people at other Mennonite-inspired peacebuilding training seminars, such as an adaption of the MCS version of Ron Kraybill’s Personal Conflict Style Inventory (which is a combination of the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument and the Gilmore-Fraleigh “style profile.”)

If participants want to use the Bridge Builders materials to lead their own trainings, they are asked to pay fees. For each 50-page training manual reproduced in full, for example, the charge would be 5 pounds (about $7.50 U.S). “We want to know how our material is being used,” explains McKay, “and the fees charged for using our materials provide us with a small additional revenue stream.”

Five thousand trained

McKay estimates that Bridge Builders has reached 3,800 people through its shorter workshops and 1,300 church leaders through the five-day foundational courses.

As McKay was wrapping up his work with Bridge Builders, he sought feedback from the network of people he had trained over the years. In the last Bridge Builders newsletter prepared by his hand, he wrote:

The overall impression that these responses have left me with is that Bridge Builders’ training courses have achieved much of what we set out to do; that they have had a lasting – and sometimes life-changing – impact for people who have participated in them; and that we have made a real contribution to our wider goal of transforming the culture in British churches of how leaders lead and the way they handle conflict. This helps me to finish my work with Bridge Builders with the sense that we have served the Church well, and contributed to her life and her service of the world in fulfilment of God’s loving purposes. That’s a good note to be leaving on.

All Bridge Builders’ trainings are tightly programmed, down to 15- and 30-minute segments of time. Want to know what you might get from a training? Just peruse the Bridge Builders website, where (as an example) you’ll find these outcomes for the five-day foundational Transforming Church Conflict training. By the end of the course, said the website, participants can expect to have:

• Developed greater awareness about their communication style and its impact on others.
• Reflected on Biblical resources related to conflict.
• Enhanced their skills for communicating effectively in times of conflict.
• Experienced and practiced skills for facilitating meetings.
• Learned ways of building consensus and working with resistance in groups.
• Developed their ability to analyze conflict and to identify what intervention may be most appropriate, such as mediation.
• Considered ways to nurture a culture of creative engagement with conflict.
• Reflected on the type of leadership needed in times of anxiety and tension.
• Discovered ways that conflict can offer opportunities for growth.

A key takeaway from Bridge Builders: This group has honed a series of smoothly flowing workshops – where no important points get squeezed out of the agenda and all necessary reference materials are efficiently supplied. Within a British cultural context, Bridge Builders is a model of quality organization and delivery, perhaps because it does not try to be all things to all people. It limits its focus to improving one particular aspect of the United Kingdom – its churches.

When the Church of England installed its first woman bishop, 48-year-old Libby Lane, on March 8, 2015 – on International Women’s Day – it represented the culmination of years of debate, lobbying, anguish and finally respectful conversation to arrive at what one senior leader called this “new chapter
in the Church of England.”*

It’s the “respectful conversation” part that interests us here. Bridge Builders contributed to making this conversation possible and thus, arguably, to making it possible for the Church of England to arrive at this new chapter of ordaining women as bishops, without breaking up over it.

The respectful conversation was proposed by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s first “director for reconciliation,” David Porter. Porter proposed that a full day of the General Synod’s “business time” in July 2013 be devoted to facilitated dialogue in small groups. Alastair McKay, MA ’99, then executive director of Bridge Builders, contributed to the design of the day and referred a dozen people trained by Bridge Builders to be facilitators of these small-group conversations.

“Such dialogue is about seeking a way to grow in understanding of one another,” wrote McKay at the time. “It opens up the possibility of exploring how each participant has arrived at a particular position, and why some things are important to him or her. It gives participants a chance to engage with one another’s story. And it offers the prospect of real and deeper listening to one another.”

Moving away from the debate mode marked by entrenched positions, the conversation mode requires time and a “skilled facilitator who can maintain a calm presence in the face of others’ anxiety,” said McKay. The facilitator needs to establish “safe space” by establishing a clear process and securing a commitment to the process.

The aim in July 2013 was to encourage participants to understand each other’s positions and to grow in mutual respect as they did so, McKay said. “The two key fruits of any effective dialogue process are that of journeying together and of building relationships.”

When the members of the Synod later moved to a formal decision-making context, they were more moderate in their language than they had been previously. They appeared to treat those with different views more respectfully, rather than as stereotypes.

“As Christian disciples, we need to expect that we will disagree with one another,” wrote McKay of that era before the Church of England shifted its historical stance and permitted women to be bishops. “What becomes critical is how we disagree, whether we can stay in one another’s company on the journey, and whether we can deepen our relationships with one another in the way that Jesus longed and prayed for, for his disciples.”

Facilitated dialogue helps on a much smaller scale, as well. In a local parish recently, a church leader trained by Bridge Builders was wrestling with this contentious issue in his congregation: the use of a digital projector and screen to display the words of the worship service.

“Having learned a thing or two at Bridge Builders’ residential and one-day courses,” wrote James (not his real name), “I started with a Bible study on the handling of conflict in Acts 6, then asked everyone in the room for their opinions
. ‘What makes you think that? What is your underlying concern?’

“There was some vigorous disagreement. Some quite difficult things were said
We asked for ideas to meet one or more underlying concerns – we got several, and then looked at them to see which might be effective at meeting those concerns. It became clear that there was a good consensus on two or three principles – that we wanted to keep using the projector, but that the screen was in the wrong place and the words weren’t always easy to see.” Everyone agreed to set up a task force to recommend practical solutions.

“It felt as if we’d had a grown-up conversation in a Christian spirit,” said James. “It had taken us from some anger to a sense of moving forward together.”

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* The legislation permitting women to be bishops in the Church of England was adopted in November 2014.

London, England

Alastair McKay juggles three big responsibilities: directing an organization called Bridge Builders in transforming church conflict, pursuing a doctorate of ministry, and raising children with his wife Sue.

Between 1997 and 1999, the McKays settled their family of four – their daughter was then age two and their son three months – in Harrisonburg to enable Alastair to earn his master’s in conflict transformation. As foreign nationals on student permits, neither Alastair nor Sue was permitted to work in the United States. They had to rely on their savings and support garnered from other sources. Yet, Alastair says, “we never, never regretted it [the financial sacrifice].”

At the time, Sue and Alastair were members of the Wood Green Mennonite Church in London. This was closely linked to the London Mennonite Centre, where Alastair co-founded Bridge Builders in 1996, becoming its full-time director in 1999.

As the children entered their teen years, the family circled back to Alastair’s Anglican roots. In fact, Alastair is now exploring whether it is God’s call for him to be an Anglican priest, “forever influenced by my years in the Mennonite Church.”

Bridge Builders’ focus is on training church leaders from diverse British denominations in order to improve their handling of conflict. In 2009 alone: 90 leaders attended four week-long foundation courses; 57 leaders attended four follow-up courses on topics such as family systems and interpersonal mediation; 161 leaders attended nine customized workshops arranged upon request; and 81 people came to nine “network days” run for “graduates” of its courses. In addition, Bridge Builders led four group consultancy processes and two interpersonal mediations.

Bridge Builders struggles, however, with attracting the funds necessary for its work. “British churches are not used to paying for outside help, and they tend to have much smaller budgets that those in the US,” says Alastair.

Alastair supplemented his CTP courses with coursework at 91¶ÌÊÓƔ’s seminary. CJP professor Dave Brubaker has done trainings with Alastair in the UK, and Alastair returned to 91¶ÌÊÓÆ” in 2007 to co-teach a seminary course on congregational conflict with Brubaker.