Peacemaker Honor

The Peacemaker honor has only three requirements, and the short list is deceiving. It asks you to read four Bible passages with an investigator's eye, recognize how you react when someone steps on your toes, and act out a fight you lived through yourself. This guide explains the knowledge behind each requirement without handing out ready-made answers. The official text of each item is in the full Peacemaker honor requirements in our catalog.

🕊️What is the Pathfinder Peacemaker honor?

The Peacemaker honor carries the code AM-027 in the Desbravai catalog and belongs to the Missionary and Community Activities area. It is a level 1 honor with no prerequisite. It was born in 2009 in the North American Division of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, an origin recorded on the official requirement sheet from AdventSource, the church's resource center in North America. Its official English name is Peace Maker, written as two words, and the honors wiki of the North American Division's Youth and Young Adult Ministries confirms level 1 and the year 2009 and lists the General Conference as the approval authority.

The name comes from the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew 5:9, in the New King James Version (NKJV), Jesus says: "Blessed are the peacemakers, For they shall be called sons of God." The Greek word translated peacemakers, eirēnopoiós, joins eirēnē (peace) and poieō (to make) and appears only once in the New Testament. The full study of that sermon is in our guide to the Beatitudes.

The honor suits any Pathfinder aged 10 to 15 and works very well for a unit that has just been through a fight. It also prepares anyone who hopes to be a counselor one day: before helping others, you learn to see your own conflict.

📋What are the Peacemaker honor requirements?

There are three requirements, and none of them calls for materials or money. The table sums up what each one asks and suggests how to come prepared.

The passages in requirement 1 are a "starting point", so you can look for other stories. Requirement 2 tells you to discuss the topic with your counselor or your unit, which turns the honor into a group activity.

The English version from the North American Division is longer. It has four requirements: the first asks you to define conflict and tell good conflict from bad, and the first reading listed is Acts 15 instead of Galatians 2. Follow the version on the card your club uses.

If you came here looking for Peacemaker honor answers, keep in mind that requirements 2 and 3 depend on your personal story. The guide on honor answer keys shows the right way to study without copying.

Source: Desbravai honor catalog (AM-027), summarized. Check the full text in the catalog and on your club's card.

📖What are the causes of conflict in the Bible?

The first requirement turns you into a text detective. Read each passage with the whole chapter around it, ideally in two versions, and write down what each side wanted and what was at stake.

James is the most direct of the four texts. In the NKJV, James 4:1 asks: "Where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members?" Notice who the letter is for: James writes to Christians, and the Bible does not hide that fights among church people are nothing new.

Write each cause in one word and then in a sentence of your own. Then test the list against a real fight from the last campout: if the cause explains that fight, you understood the text.

Scenes summarized from the NKJV. The answers stay with you and your instructor.

🛝Denial, attack and conciliation: where does the slippery slope of conflict come from?

The three words in requirement 2 have a known origin. They sum up the "slippery slope" of conflict, a model presented in the book The Peacemaker (1991) by Ken Sande, founder of Peacemaker Ministries, trained as an engineer, lawyer and mediator. The English version of the honor asks Pathfinders to identify each part of that slope.

The picture is a hill covered in ice: on one side are the escape responses (the denial of our catalog's version), on the other the attack responses, and at the top the responses that make peace. Whoever moves away from the top slips, and one bad reaction tends to drag along another, worse one.

Sande offers a useful key for the discussion: whoever escapes thinks of self (me), whoever attacks blames the other (you), and whoever conciliates looks at both (us). He calls escape peace-faking and notes that it is common in the church, where the appearance of peace often worries people more than real peace.

Stepping away is not always the wrong kind of escape: Sande himself allows for withdrawing for a while to calm down and pray, and in the face of a threat or abuse, walking away is legitimate. If your "fight" is really a group that always mocks the same person, the path is different: see how to deal with bullying when people make fun of you.

Conciliation holds different paths: overlooking a small offense, talking it through and forgiving when the offense hurt (the step-by-step from Matthew 18 is in forgiveness and reconciliation), or asking someone from outside for help, which is the subject of the advanced honor.

Adapted from Ken Sande, The Peacemaker (3rd edition), chapter 1. WhatsApp examples written by Desbravai.

🎭How do you do the conflict role-play the honor asks for?

Requirement 3 asks you to act out a conflict that happened to you, analyze your behavior and look for the options for conciliation. In the English version, the matching requirement asks for a reverse role-play, with the roles swapped: you play the other person in the fight, and a friend plays you.

Choose a small conflict that has cooled down and is your own, like the argument over who would wash the pots at camp. Change names and details, never stage a friend's fight, and keep physical aggression, abuse or serious humiliation off the stage: those cases call for a talk with a trusted adult.

A simple script: tell the story in three sentences, act it out as it happened, freeze the scene at the moment someone slipped, repeat it with the roles reversed, and act it again while testing a way toward conciliation.

To involve the whole unit, borrow the logic of Forum Theatre, a technique created by Brazil's Augusto Boal: after the performance, the audience comes on stage, steps into the scene and proposes alternatives. The facilitator, called the Joker (Curinga, in Portuguese), can be the counselor.

Analysis script suggested by Desbravai for requirement 3.

🗣️What conflict mediation tools do schools and courts use in Brazil?

In Brazil, a culture of peace at school is backed by law. Law No. 13,663 of May 14, 2018, added two duties for schools to Article 12 of the National Education Guidelines and Framework Law (Law No. 9,394/1996): to promote awareness, prevention and the fight against all types of violence, especially systematic intimidation (bullying), and to "establish actions aimed at promoting a culture of peace in schools" (our translation).

Resolution No. 125 of Brazil's National Council of Justice (CNJ), dated November 29, 2010, set up the National Judicial Policy for the appropriate handling of conflicts of interest and calls conciliation and mediation "effective instruments of social pacification" (our translation). Brazil's Code of Civil Procedure (Law No. 13,105/2015), in Article 165, § 2, allows the conciliator to suggest solutions but forbids any coercion or intimidation to get the parties to settle. If not even a court conciliator can pressure someone into a settlement, the unit counselor cannot either.

For everyday life, the most practical tool is Nonviolent Communication (NVC), organized by psychologist Marshall Rosenberg into four components, according to a guide from the Public Prosecutor's Office of Minas Gerais, in Brazil: observations, feelings, needs and requests. In a group chat, it sounds like this: "When you posted a screenshot of my private message in the group, I felt embarrassed, because I need to trust that what I say only to you stays between us. Can you delete it and, next time, come to me directly?"

For the counselor who is about to sit down with two Pathfinders who fell out, the listening and agreement script is in how to resolve conflicts in the unit.

🧭How do you earn the Peacemaker honor without the common mistakes?

For the club, split the unit into four groups, one per passage in requirement 1. Build a slope thermometer: a line on the floor, with escape at one end, attack at the other and conciliation in the middle; read short situations aloud and everyone stands where they usually react. Close with a WhatsApp group agreement written by the Pathfinders, such as "screenshots of private chats do not get passed around".

The most common mistakes: copying a ready-made list of causes, confusing peace with silence (denial dressed up as virtue), staging a friend's fight, turning the analysis into a trial about who was right, and treating bullying as an ordinary fight.

Sande puts gossip among the forms of attack, and it easily passes for innocent conversation; see the guide on the tongue and gossip.

Once you have earned it, the next step is the Peacemaker Advanced honor (AM-028), level 3 in our catalog, which requires you to be at least 15 years old and to have finished the basic honor. It covers mediation, arbitration, litigation and conciliation, and its practical options include attending a conciliation hearing and an evidentiary and judgment hearing, or serving as a volunteer conciliator at a Brazilian small claims court (Juizado Especial) for at least six months.

Before you start, go item by item through the full Peacemaker honor requirements in the catalog and agree with your instructor on how each part will be assessed.