Seventy Times Seven - A Conversation with Chad Ford

Faith Matters

This week, we’re so glad to be sharing a conversation with our friend Chad Ford.

Chad is a conflict mediator, peace educator, and associate professor of religious studies at Utah State University. He’s spent decades working in some of the most entrenched conflict zones in the world—from the Middle East to South Africa to Northern Ireland. He’s also the author of a new book called Seventy Times Seven: Jesus’s Path to Conflict Transformation, published by Deseret Book. The book explores a question that feels more urgent than ever: how do we follow Jesus as peacemakers in a world so often shaped by fear, division, and violence?

Our conversation with Chad moved from the personal to the global—from tensions in families and faith communities to the devastating conflicts we see on the world stage. And through all of it, Chad points back to Jesus as a radical model for how to live, engage, and help transform the world around us.

Chad reminds us that Jesus’s path is anything but passive. It doesn’t mean disengaging or avoiding hard conversations. It means choosing to engage with both courage and compassion. It means refusing to meet harm with more harm, and instead walking a path that invites healing, reconciliation, and transformation.

That kind of peace doesn’t come quickly—or easily—but it’s the kind of peace that can change lives and communities. Chad offers a vision of Christianity rooted in Jesus’ ministry of reconciliation—not in dominance or defensiveness, but in the slow, often difficult work of restoring wholeness.

He helped us see that the peace Jesus offers isn’t always the peace we want—but it’s the peace we need. And when the way forward feels impossible, he reminds us that part of discipleship is learning to make a way out of no way.

And with that, here’s our conversation with Chad

Seventy Time Seven