Richard Blackburn

Adjunct Instructor

Ordained Mennonite Minister

Richard serves as Executive Director of the Lombard Mennonite Peace Center (LMPC) in Chicago.  He is also an ordained minister in the Mennonite church.  He has twenty-five years of experience as a trainer, mediator and consultant working primarily with conflicted churches and their leaders. The congregational intervention model he developed represents a transformational model of mediation placed within the context of Bowen family systems theory. 

Richard’s training in family systems theory was initiated by attending Dr. Edwin Friedman’s Post Graduate Clergy Seminar in Family Emotional Process in Bethesda, MD for several years.  After Dr. Friedman’s death he studied for four years with Dr. Michael Kerr and the other faculty at the Georgetown Family Center, in Washington D.C., in the Postgraduate Program in Bowen Family Systems Theory and Its Applications that had been founded by Dr. Murray Bowen.

Begun in 1983 under Richard’s leadership, LMPC is a not-for-profit ministry that shares educational resources in Christian peacemaking and conflict transformation with churches of all denominations and other groups throughout North America and beyond.  Since 1999 and 2000 respectively, LMPC has also been offering its Clergy Clinic and Advanced Clergy Clinic in Family Emotional Process, seen by judicatory leaders of multiple denominations as a premier training program for clergy and other church leaders in family systems theory.  In recent years he has also led an annual seminar in London and the Netherlands on Church Leadership and Family Systems.

Richard is a member of the Association for Conflict Resolution and a variety of other professional organizations in the field of alternative dispute resolution.