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Women of the ELCA celebrates it’s first-ever Bold Women’s Day on Sunday, February 25. When I think about how this organization has helped women make bold strides in the church and the world, I’m reminded of courageous women I’ve met through my job.

Working for the Lutheran Office for World Community at the United Nations, I have the privilege of seeing the impact that women from around the world are making in the areas of HIV/AIDS, domestic violence, and peacebuilding. Let me tell you about a few of the bold peacemaking women that I have met.


	Photo courtesy of World YWCA

I met Sophie from Zimbabwe, at the 2006 International AIDS Conference in Toronto. She was there in her capacity as the HIV/AIDS coordinator for the international headquarters of the YWCA in Geneva. Like so many young women I’ve met, Sophie is energetic, courageous, and cheerful. She is also a person living with HIV.

Sophie is one of two White women that she knows of in Zimbabwe who has gone public with her status. Frustrated by the lack of information about HIV/AIDS in the schools in her country, she started an HIV prevention program for youth called Choose Life.

“When I was 15, a health care worker came to our school and showed us a book with photos of people dying of AIDS,” Sophie said. “Their photos showed their body parts rotting. This was just not a message I could relate to. Like most of us, I believed that couldn’t happen to me.” But it did.


	Learn the ways Women of the ELCA has made a bold impact on supporting women in the church and the world.

The goal of Choose Life is to make HIV/AIDS real to high school students and to stress the importance of prevention of the sexually transmitted disease. Sophie discovered that she could break through to young people because she is someone living with HIV. She is also proof that the disease is real but not necessarily a death sentence. As a result of Sophie’s program, an active group of 16–25 year olds is now trained to teach others about the disease.

When she wanted to train other young people to continue her work at Choose Life, she met with Zimbabwe Ministry of Education representatives to talk about the strategy.

Sophie said, “I was told that it is against policy for anyone who does not work directly for the government to talk to young children in schools, let alone, show them how to use a condom.”

To be allowed into the schools, she agreed to take full responsibility if anyone made trouble.

Sophie is also key organizer of the Positive Women’s Forum, a one-day meeting for women who are HIV-positive, to be held in July in Nairobi, Kenya. Sponsored by the YWCA and other international organizations, the forum launches the International Women’s Summit that will focus on women’s leadership roles in preventing HIV/AIDS.

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Visit the study page for ideas for discussion and further reflection.

We are, each one of us, called to be peacemakers in our neighborhoods, our cities, our countries, and our world.

We are descendants of bold, peacemaking women. May we carry their stories with us, and may their teachings be written on our hearts.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!’
Luke 2:13–14

In Sunday School, when I was a little girl, we would read this passage from Luke from our children’s Bibles. There were more pictures than words, but the message was clear: God’s peace can even turn natural enemies into friends. There were wonderful images of the baby Jesus lying in the midst of lions, wolves, and lambs. What an amazing vision of reconciliation and redemption!

This vision came to mind whenever my mother told me to go “make peace” after a squabble with my brother. But the Sunday School pictures never showed how the transformation happened — my brother and I were on our own.

Peacemaking is hard work. It takes compromise, truth-telling, and truth-listening, forgiveness, trust, and mercy. These qualities are hard to learn in childhood; they are difficult to practice in adulthood as well.

The struggles are apparent throughout our lives. Some of us live with constant anxiety, and guilt; we struggle to be at peace within ourselves. Some of us live in communities of strangers and enemies; we struggle to be at peace with one another. The vision of reconciliation and peace announced by our incarnational God and revealed in Jesus Christ empowers us to continue the struggle to learn how to live as a peacemaking people.

This struggle is not only hard work, it can also be dangerous work. Peacemaking often exacerbates violence. In fact, the peacemaking that Jesus models could also be described as trouble-making. Consider his words in the gospel of Luke:

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