Staff Spotlight: Welcome Mandy Park

We welcome Mandy Park as the newest addition to On Earth Peace's permanent staff. We wish her the very best in her new role as Director of Development. We are very happy to have her on board!

Mandy Park, Director of Development 

Mandy Park lives in Western Maryland with her husband, two children, and two cats, and is a member of Brownsville Church of the Brethren, where her husband is pastor. She holds two Masters degrees in Old Testament and Biblical Languages and has an ongoing passion for theology, Biblical studies, peacemaking, and Jesus-centered discipleship. In addition to her professional experience ranging from teaching Middle School Latin to local economic development, Mandy had a key volunteer role in launching and organizing the OEP Church of the Brethren Gun Violence Prevention Action Team and is a Certified Level 1 Kingian Nonviolence Reconciliation trainer. Mandy loves to dabble, learn, and experiment; she’s also an author, fantasy fan, and has a keen interest in the role of spiritual and emotional health in building Beloved Community.

1. Please briefly tell us about your role and what you are most looking forward to in this position.

I am delighted to join On Earth Peace as Director of Development, a new staff position. I’ll be collaboratively working to design and implement a comprehensive, strategic fundraising plan that builds on the fantastic work On Earth Peace is already doing but allows us to expand our capacity to meet the critical needs of the present moment and be prepared to meet whatever challenges the future may hold. I’m especially looking forward to meeting with our donors and partner congregations (past, present, and future!) to learn more about you, your passions and needs, and how we can work together to ensure the work of On Earth Peace is sustainable and scalable.

2. Are there any specific goals you would like to achieve in this new role?

My overall goal is for On Earth Peace to be ready and able to develop and walk with as many leaders and communities who are working for justice and peace as need and want our support. Practically speaking, this means expanding capacity in terms of both staffing and program, which means increasing our budget–which isn’t funded by magic! And as we all know, the need for this capacity is now. I’ll be evaluating streams of revenue that we haven’t previously had the capacity to explore, building on fundraising efforts that have gone well, and also trying some new things. I want On Earth Peace program staff to feel free to pour into you–leaders and communities working for justice and peace–when the need arises.

I think sometimes we can feel as though fundraising is a necessary evil–as if it isn’t spiritual enough for the work we’re doing. Yet, Jesus doesn’t shy away from talking about money! Our relationship to our money and our generosity in comparison to what we have ourselves been given is a deeply spiritual matter. My goal isn’t to wring whatever I can get out of anyone who passes by; it’s to connect with donors, past, present, and future, who believe in On Earth Peace’s mission and whom the Spirit is calling to partner with us in expanding that work by giving in proportion to what they have received.

3. You’ve been with OEP in different capacities for a while now. Can you share your journey with us, from KNV facilitator to OEP volunteer to Director of Development?

I first became involved with On Earth Peace after attending an equipping session led by Matt Guynn at the 2022 Annual Conference. The topic was “Aggression-Conciliation,” a tool in the Kingian Nonviolence toolbox for learning how to appropriately manage and direct the dual capacity we all have for both deep concern and fierce opposition. These seemingly at-odds concepts were already on my mind, but I hadn’t yet been able to map them in a way that both made sense and grew naturally out of my faith. The unexpected clarity I found in this simple tool propelled me toward jumping headfirst into becoming a Level 1 Kingian Nonviolence trainer myself.

And I had no idea what I was getting myself into! A gun violence prevention initiative begun by an OEP intern led to a number of Church of the Brethren folk, myself included, coalescing around the issue, and in 2023 the Church of the Brethren Gun Violence Prevention Action Team was born, with–to my own surprise!–myself as a co-convener of the group. Three years of volunteering with that team and continual engagement with Kingian Nonviolence convinced me that the mission of On Earth Peace is not only a “good cause,” it’s foundational to all good causes–and necessary for people and communities of faith seeking to follow Jesus.

We like to believe that we can plot in advance the trajectory of our lives, but the truth is that it’s often only in retrospect that we realize where each small step–like the decision to go to an interesting-sounding equipping session–has led us. If there is a theme to my journey thus far, it’s learning to expect (and accept!) the unexpected. More and more, I try to look for where God is already breaking in, rather than trying to chart my own path and drag God along with me. I’m thrilled to be in this role now because I’ve been personally impacted by OEP’s work and I want to see that work both continue and multiply as we take one more unexpected step at a time together on this journey with the Prince of Peace.

4. What originally drew you to the mission of On Earth Peace, and how has your understanding of that mission deepened over the years?

I didn’t grow up Church of the Brethren. I moved around a lot because my dad was in the Air Force, and we went to whatever church my parents felt was both friendly and preached the Bible. There are tens of thousands of Christian denominations worldwide, so I certainly haven’t tried them all, but between my childhood and adulthood, I’ve tried a few! By the time my husband (who also didn’t grow up COB) and I were charting our path together, both of us felt restless with our respective religious backgrounds. Something didn’t quite fit–and it wasn’t until we (unexpectedly…?) landed in a Church of the Brethren congregation that we finally felt like we’d found our theological home.

That may seem like a strange preface to answering this question; but my draw toward the mission of On Earth Peace is linked to the fact that the idea of a “peace church” was a bit foreign to me a decade and a half ago–and when I first heard of it, I sorted it into the “pacifist” box, which was not a serious tenant of my own theological upbringing. However, as always, beliefs and values aren’t shaped in a vacuum. My parents taught me to love the Bible and be kind to people, my undergraduate Old Testament professor taught me about justice through the words of the prophets, and by the time I graduated from seminary, I had an understanding that biblical peace–shalom–was far more than just pacifism and a commitment to being not violent. Fast forward to my first Annual Conference in 2016, where I also heard about On Earth Peace for the first time. It made perfect sense to me (the “outsider”) that the Church of the Brethren, a peace church, ought to have a peace agency to train its leaders and communities in how to do peacemaking.

What drew me to OEP is what drew me to the Church of the Brethren: a deep, settle-in-the-bones belief in the words of the Sermon on the Mount as I heard them from a new-to-me theological tradition. But we can be a lot of things on paper, and none of us is perfect. I wasn’t surprised to learn that we haven’t always been successful in living into our rich heritage. The more I engaged with On Earth Peace and the work of peace, the more convinced I became that OEP is perfectly and uniquely situated to call us to and back to our heritage in fresh ways.