Our final episode of Season 4! This week, we travel to Hawaii with a whole troop of good people to visit some remarkable refugia spaces near Kaneohe Bay on Oahu. This episode, produced by Colin Hoogerwerf and Jim Stump, first aired on the Language of God podcast in April of 2025.

To learn more about the Language of God podcast, visit their website here. Language of God is produced by Biologos, an organization that promotes greater understanding and appreciation of science for people of faith.

In this episode, we visit First Presbyterian Church of Honolulu, the Hoʻokuaʻāina kalo farm, and the Waikalua Loco fish pond.

Christina Bagaglio Slentz is Associate Director for Creation Care for the Catholic Diocese of San Diego. Learn about how her diocese prioritizes climate action here.

In this episode, we often refer to Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato si’ and the ways that faith communities are living out its stated goals. We also discuss the theme “seeds of peace and hope,” the official theme for the 2025 ecumenical Season of Creation.

Many thanks to Christina for sharing her wisdom in this conversation!

Christina Slentz

TRANSCRIPT

Christina Slentz I think this really can help us understand the way that the cry of the Earth, these environmental climate extremes, or the variability that we’re experiencing, leads to greater exposure—but how one community can face that exposure and adapt or bounce back fairly quickly and another may not really have that capacity.

Debra Rienstra Welcome to the Refugia Podcast. I’m your host, Professor Debra Rienstra. Refugia are habitats in nature where life endures in times of crisis. We’re exploring the concept of refugia as a metaphor, discovering how people of faith can become people of refugia: nurturing life-giving spaces in the earth, in our human cultural systems, and in our spiritual communities, even in this time of severe disturbance. This season, we’re paying special attention to churches and Christian communities who have figured out how to address the climate crisis together as an essential aspect of their discipleship.

Today, I’m talking with Dr. Christina Bagaglio Slentz, Associate Director for Creation Care at the Catholic Diocese of San Diego. Christina has a background in sociology, with a PhD in international studies and global affairs. She’s also a Navy veteran. Today, she serves a diocese of 97 parishes, helping to guide and empower people in their creation care work. The Diocese of San Diego is a microcosm of diverse biomes and diverse people, and it’s a fascinating example of refugia, because as a diocese, they are doing all the things. Christina and I talk about Laudato si’, solar energy, economics, eco spirituality, environmental justice advocacy, the centrality of the Eucharist, and the mutuality between caring for neighbor and caring for the Earth. Let’s get to it.

Debra Rienstra Christina, thank you so much for being with me today. I really appreciate talking to you.

Christina Slentz Thank you, Debra, for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

Debra Rienstra So I am eager to hear more about the Diocese of San Diego, because it seems that you have been very intentional and thoughtful and ambitious about your creation care agenda, and we’re going to get into the details of that in just a minute, but I want to start with you. So tell us your hero origin story. How did you get into faith-based environmental work and into your current position?

Christina Slentz Well, to be honest, I never saw it coming in many ways. I was working in the global affairs area, looking at sources of conflict and cooperation and how political economy intersects with those dynamics, and that was my academic area of focus. And at the same time, I’ve always been a catechist in the Catholic church since the 90s, and my church life was pretty comfortable, I would say, and active. But I didn’t really see those two things coming together until Laudato si’, the encyclical written by Pope Francis on the care of our common home, was released in 2015, and this really started to bring more overlap between these two areas in my life. And I would say, increasingly, then there was a lot of interplay between those focus areas for me. And eventually this position became available in the Diocese of San Diego, and a friend mentioned it to me, and I thought that is actually the perfect vocation for me. And I really feel like I understood it to be a vocation, not just a job.

Debra Rienstra Yeah, I think I can relate to everything you just said. I think we came to this work from different areas of specialty, but yeah, like you, I feel like we’ve had these mid-career shifts where suddenly our area of specialty—in my case, literature and creative writing—has become energized by—in your case, Laudato si’, in my case, other documents as well as Laudato si’,—and we’ve sort of taken this fascinating and yeah, I would agree, vocational, turn. So let’s talk a little bit more about Laudato si’. I imagine our listeners know at least a little bit about it. It’s been so enormously influential. It’s such an amazing landmark document. Could you talk a little bit about how you’ve seen Laudato si’ diffuse through the Catholic Church, especially the American Catholic Church?

Christina Slentz Yes, I think, to be honest, it has had a complicated journey with the Catholic community here in the United States. Very much like the issue of climate change in the global community, the United States has struggled with these dynamics—I think the way that they involve our economics and some of our very strong ideology about economic freedom and what that means to people. And so I think it’s fair to say that while Laudato si’ was very warmly received around the world, it has struggled in the United States as a whole, and that includes the American Catholic community. That said, there have been—like your description of refugia suggests——there have been these pockets, though, where I think that particular dynamics existed, and there was fertile ground for seeds to be planted. And the Diocese of San Diego is one of them. The Diocese of—the Archdiocese of Atlanta was another. There are a couple around the country, and I do think some footholds were created. In addition, one of the things that is particularly interesting about the encyclical Laudato si’—and an encyclical is just a document that a pope writes and then circulates, right, this is where the word encyclical comes from—circulates around until everyone’s had a chance to read it. We can imagine in medieval times, you know, how this must have been a challenge. And I think that, you know, this challenge exists, but Father Emmett Farrell is the founder of this ministry in my diocese, and Father Emmett just celebrated his 60th anniversary of his ordination, and Father Emmett will say he has never seen an encyclical translate to action the way that Laudato si’ has. And in particular, there is a Vatican online platform called the Laudato si’ Action Platform, where Catholics—either parishes, schools, orders of sisters or religious—can get on this platform and learn about the dynamics that we face. They can see how our values are distilled into seven goals, and then they can reflect on their behavior, using this tool to sort of measure where they are, and then write a plan of action and upload it and share it with each other. And Father Emmett really celebrates how amazing it is that, you know, that we’re going to lean into technology and use it for the good.

Debra Rienstra Oh, awesome. There’s so many things I want to follow up on in that answer. And I want to begin by just thanking you for being honest about pushback to Laudato si’ in the US. And I want to go back to that in just a second, if it’s okay. And then I want to thank you for the way you’ve thought about, you know, some of these dioceses like the mighty San Diego and the mighty Atlanta as sort of refugia spaces. And we’ll come back to that again too, I really hope, and I want to hear some more details about your particular diocese. Why do you think there has been pushback in the American Catholic Church? You mentioned economic reasons, and you know, Pope Francis and Pope Leo now have both been very pointed in their critique of climate denial, of greed, of exploitation, injustice, war, economic systems that many Americans have sort of held as almost sacrosanct. So what are you noticing in Catholic conversations about that critique? Why are people resisting the critique and why are people saying, “No, that’s right”—what are the motivations behind each of those responses?

Christina Slentz So, you know, we could probably talk about this all day.

Debra Rienstra Probably, yeah.

Christina Slentz Because economic peace, I think, is really difficult to think about. You know, if we take the United Kingdom, for example, it’s a country very much like the United States. So many of our you know, American culture and tradition and customs come out of that early launching that we experienced from, you know, Great Britain. And yet, as the topic of climate change came forward, Margaret Thatcher, who was, you know, a real compatriot of President Ronald Reagan at the time, she really took the scientific approach in thinking about climate change, and this set them on a path that’s really different from the path that we experienced. And certainly, oil is a big factor in our economy. And I think it can be a real challenge for people to weigh the goods, you know, because we have to be honest, there are goods in both sides of these dynamics. When we understand the gravity, though, of climate change, if we’re allowed to really get into those dynamics without the noise that has been kind of confronting that potential, then I think we can see that the good outweighs, you know, those alternative goods associated with continuing in the fossil fuel realm. But this is why we talk about a just transition, right? I think that many people who are hearing this noise, right, they don’t understand that Pope Francis and others, you know, is really arguing for a just transition, and that would seek to care for the people that are going to be affected by whatever change in economic policy might make.

Debra Rienstra Yeah, and more and more, those economic changes are actually positive in favor of transition in ways that they weren’t even 5-10 years ago.

Christina Slentz Yeah, I think it’s amazing. We actually had some good momentum going until recently.

Debra Rienstra Yeah, you know, I would love to get us all talking about a just and joyful transition, because it’s more and more possible. And maybe we’ll come back to that a little bit later too, when we talk about ecological spirituality. But let’s go back to these places within the American Catholic Church, even, that are saying, “Oh yes, Laudato si’, yes, let’s go.” And San Diego diocese is one of those places. You had an action plan already in 2019. I think it’s impressive that a diocese could get a plan together in four years. So good job. Knowing how long everything takes in church settings. So just give us a list of your accomplishments. What have you been up to since 2019? What are the kinds of things you’ve dipped your toes into?

Christina Slentz Sure, and to be fair, I want to give some good credit to some others. You know, the Archdiocese of Atlanta had created their creation care action plan. This gave us some really good kind of framework to think about when we created ours. And there was a team that preceded me. They were all volunteers, very multidisciplinary in their backgrounds, everything from theologians to medical doctors who had worked with indigenous communities, you know, theologians, missionaries, energy engineers, and they really pulled this together early on. And this plan I now recognize as what climate action planners might refer to as an aspirational plan. It’s all the things you could do in our area, and it serves as a really good resource for our parishes and schools as they think about what they might do in their Laudato si’ action platform plans, and those are yearly plans that are really targeted on what we’re going to do. So, you know, one of the things that they did early on was really push to solarize. And you know, we do have the great fortune of, one: climate here in San Diego, right? You know, we’re sort of famous for that. And then you know, two: the other thing is that, you know, it was very normative to be shifting to solar, and continues to be an economic choice that is not really as politicized here as much as it might be elsewhere. And then the third thing was this is, you know, the magic number three is to have a bishop that is supportive. And so Cardinal McElroy—now Cardinal McElroy, then Bishop McElroy—really promoted this solarization. And at this point we have about 54% of our parishes solarized. And when I think now, you know, the Paris Climate Agreement says we want to have about half of our carbon emissions reduced by 2030 then you know, we’re sitting at about half. Our building where I’m located is called our pastoral center. Some Catholic communities call it their chancery. And our solar array here provides over 80% of our electricity to the building. Our local utility is about half renewable energy, a little bit more. So with that in mind, you know, our electricity here to our building is a little over 90% coming from renewable energy, and this lets us have seven electric vehicle charging stations in the parking lot so I can go to work and charge my car at the same time.

Debra Rienstra Lovely.

Christina Slentz So that was one big thing. I would say our other really big kind of landmark action that also was largely driven by Cardinal McElroy, was to divest of fossil fuels. And, you know, this is a real challenging thing to accomplish. We set a goal of no more than 5% of, you know, the earnings of both direct and indirect investment to be coming from fossil fuel. And after a year, we evaluated how we were doing, and we were actually hitting—not we, you know, the financial folks doing this—were hitting less than 3%. So, you know, we said, “Okay, I think we can say that this was successful, and we’re still here.” So that was really exciting, and we didn’t do it to be virtue signaling. Just, you know, for some of your listeners may not know, but the USCCB, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, has a document that directs socially responsible investment for all areas. And so this is just one more area of socially responsible investment that the Diocese of San Diego has embraced.

Debra Rienstra Yeah, yeah. So we’ve got money, we’ve got energy. How many parishes would you say are on board with this, doing yearly goals, selecting from the menu of fun ideas—what percentage of your parishes would you say are involved?

Christina Slentz So I gotta, Debra, that’s a little bit of a good question. I think, you know, we did just describe two very top-down approaches. And one of the things that our group, you know, when I came on board in 2022, we decided is, you know, we really wanted to push that grassroots. And so we see parishes demonstrating a range of behaviors, and I was initially surprised, but they actually behave a lot like countries around the world. And so, you know, you think, oh, that’s going to be different. But, you know, you can also have three children, and they all behave differently, and you know, sometimes that’s surprising as well, when they have the same parents. And so one of the things that I have really tried to do was offer more events that are here at the diocesan level. We have 97 parishes, and then we have—so sometimes we’ll see individuals that are really on board, and they come from a parish where, at the parish level, not a lot is happening. Sometimes we have individuals that are participating, and they are doing a ton at their parish and succeeding. And then we have parishes where the pastor is leading the charge. And then on top of that, I would say there are parishes where they have solar and they have drought-resistant landscaping, and they have LEED silver certified buildings that, you know, are very environmentally friendly. And yet, you know, at the parishioner level, you know, not as much activity happening. So it is an array of activities. I would say probably half have had some kind of interaction with us, or have had parishioners or students participate in our programs. But you know, we reflect the American Catholic community, which reflects the broader American society as well. So there are places where we struggle, and then there are places where we see a lot of action and shining.

Debra Rienstra Yeah, sure. And I really appreciate that. And I think listeners can relate to that range of involvement too. Maybe they are in any one of those categories or some other category themselves. And you know, as you say, it’s the modeling of— even if it’s a minority, it’s the modeling and the enthusiasm and the even implicit sort of educating of others that can make this work spread too. So I want to list the seven goals of the Laudato si’ action platform, because I think they’re really, really great and helpful to people who are not in the Catholic Church, but in other aspects of the church, you might find these goals useful too. So here are the goals: response to the cry of the Earth, response to the cry of the poor, ecological economics, adoption of sustainable lifestyles, ecological education, ecological spirituality, community resilience and empowerment. So I want to start with the first three. We’ve talked a little bit about economics and how dicey that can be, but I wonder if you could describe how you see the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor as basically the same cry, as Pope Francis said in Laudato si’. How do you see that, especially in your region?

Christina Slentz Yeah, so thank you. I think these two are kind of the crown jewels, right? And they sum up what we see happening very well. I think that the other goals are valuable because they sort of pull out the dynamics that we really understand as informing those two big—response to the cry of the Earth and cry of the poor. So as someone who was looking at this through the lens of being a social scientist, I found these two goals to really sum it up well, because it is not just the exposure to the environment that causes our concern for these dynamics. It’s the exposure as well as the sensitivity of that population. And then this helps us understand also, maybe some vulnerability that that population might have. So for example, we had significant flooding about a year and a half ago in January, the month of January, and the same rain fell on a parish in the southern part of the Diocese, close to our Mexican border, in an area that is, you know, less wealthy, probably demonstrates some socio economic features that we would associate with marginalized communities. And then it also fell on a parish in Coronado, California. And some people might recognize the Hotel Del Coronado as an iconic location. It’s a beautiful community. There’s a lot of wealth. There’s a lot of human capital as well. You know, very highly educated group, and so the buildings at two of two parishes in each of these locations were completely flooded. But, you know, the parish in Coronado was up on its feet within a week. And of course, they had repairs that had to be done, but they were able to get a hold of those folks, get them in, pay the bills, get it all done. And the parish on the south side had catastrophic flooding to its school, and the school was a total loss.

Debra Rienstra Oh, wow.

Christina Slentz So I think this really can help us understand the way that the cry of the Earth, these environmental climate extremes, or the variability that we’re experiencing, leads to greater exposure, but how one community can face that exposure and adapt or bounce back fairly quickly, and another may not really have that capacity. And so you can’t really pull them apart, because just measuring precipitation doesn’t always give you the whole story.

Debra Rienstra That’s a very, very helpful answer to that. And I sometimes hear in religious circles, you know, “Well, we have to worry about other people, why should we worry about owls or whatever?” And the answer is: well, because what happens in nature affects people. So this is about loving your neighbor. Even if you’re not convinced by the idea that we love the Earth for its own sake because it’s beloved of God, we still have to love our neighbor. And this is a neighbor issue as well. So thank you. That was very helpful as an explanation.

Christina Slentz One of my favorite kind of messages is, you know, having been a student of globalization, you know, I think that we live in a globalized world. You can’t put that toothpaste back in the tube, right? Maybe there are some things we can do and that can be helpful, but the bottom line is, our actions have ripple effects, and so no matter what we do, we are going to have these impacts on people far beyond those we know and love on a day to day basis. And when we care for the Earth, we mitigate those effects on people all around the world, and so our caring for creation really is just love of neighbor at global scale.

Debra Rienstra Ah, lovely. Yeah, so it works both ways. If you love neighbor, you love the Earth. If you love the Earth, you love your neighbor.

Christina Slentz That’s right.

Debra Rienstra

Hi, it’s me, Debra. If you are enjoying this podcast episode, go ahead and subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. If you have a minute, leave a review. Good reviews help more listeners discover this podcast. To keep up with all the Refugia news, I invite you to subscribe to the Refugia newsletter on Substack. This is my fortnightly newsletter for people of faith who care about the climate crisis and want to go deeper. Every two weeks, I feature climate news, deeper dives, refugia sightings and much more. Join our community at refugianewsletter.substack.com. For even more goodies, including transcripts and show notes for this podcast, check out my website at debrarienstra.com. D-E-B-R-A-R-I-E-N-S-T-R-A dot com. Thanks so much for listening. We’re glad you’re part of this community. And now back to the interview.

Debra Rienstra Let’s think about some of those more personal goals. I don’t know, maybe they’re not just personal, because everything is systemic too. But I want to talk about that sustainable lifestyle goal, adoption of sustainable lifestyle. So what does that mean, and how are people doing that in San Diego?

Christina Slentz So I have a really amazing parish, St. Thomas More, and they have created a community garden that not only functions as a place for their parish to gather and work together, it also is open to the public, so it has an evangelical capacity as well. And they also collect recyclable cans and bottles and then take those to a facility where they can be paid for that recycling work, and then they take the money, and then they put it into this garden that allows them to gather and have a mission and have evangelical outreach. So I think of this as such a wonderful circular kind of example that is, you know, feeding them in many ways. You know, they have this sense of community. They have this sense of common, shared mission. They have a good relationship with the neighborhood around them, people that may be of different faiths or of no faith at all. And then they’re also in good relationship with Mother Earth, and doing what they can to, you know, practice this sort of sustainability, or also a little bit like circular economics, I guess I would say as well. And I think one of the things that the Catholic Church is emphasizing is synodality, and our synodality really calls us to be community, to have a shared mission and really inviting participatory action. So in my building here, where we sort of have the headquarters, you know, we also have gone to compostables for all of our events, and we try to minimize any kind of single use plastics. But, you know, there’s that dreaded moment at the end where everybody has to go to the three, you know, receptacles. Everyone panics, especially if I’m near them, and I feel terribly, you know, like, should I step away? Should I give them a moment to give them help? Is that overreach? And so, you know, but we all fumble through together, and that’s where I’ve kind of said, like, “Look, it’s not easy for me either. Like, God forbid I put the wrong thing in the wrong can, right?” So I think that there’s this way where we all are coming together to sort of take on this work. And, you know, we’re not going to be perfect, but, you know, I think that it does foster community when we take this on, and then also recognizing how, you know, now we are living with greater simplicity, and we are impacting the Earth, you know, to a lesser extent.

Debra Rienstra Yeah, nothing bonds people like pulling weeds together, or standing over the recycle bins going, “Hmm.” It’s okay. We don’t have to indulge in recycling guilt, you know, just do your best. So I want to move on to ecological spirituality. I love that phrase. It’s not one you hear everywhere. And I wanted to remind listeners that San Diego Diocese is the most biodiverse diocese in the US. Maybe we wouldn’t have expected that, but you’ve kind of got everything there. So I want to talk about ecological spirituality in the context of that actual place. I love the sentiment you quoted from Laudato si’ in an article you wrote recently. It was an idea from Pope Francis that in the beauties and wonders of the Earth, we experience God’s friendship with us. And so I wanted to ask you how you’re helping people in your parishes reconnect to the Earth where you are, and thus, and this is how you put it, “revive something of our true selves.”

Christina Slentz Yeah, one of my favorite pieces in Laudato si’: Pope Francis alludes to having a place in childhood where we felt a sense of awe and wonder. And I think that that awe and wonder allows us to get back to childhood in some ways, before there was a lot of noise before there was all the different distractions. And I think that that true self is also a little freer to connect to God. I think sometimes about little children and baby Jesus, you know, and that sort of immediate connection that’s not really complicated, you know, it’s just comfortable. Or feeling the love of God like being a child sitting on the lap of your mom or your dad. And so encouraging people, or providing opportunities for this return to that place of awe and wonder, I think is really important. I think that at the heart of our inability to care for creation is this estrangement from our Creator. So we won’t care for something if we don’t love it. And in this way, ecological spirituality may be step one in all of this, right? So I think we are really lucky, being here. As I mentioned, our climate is beautiful. It is a beautiful place. We have everything from the ocean to mountains to desert, and many people who live here do really connect with the geography and the beauty of where we are, and so inviting them to take a moment to just pause and think about those places. Think about their senses as they move through the memory of that space, I think is really important before we start any of the other conversations. And so I try to do that, and then we share about it. And I have yet to find somebody that says, “Oh, I just didn’t have a place.” Everybody has a place. And many people will say, “I really struggled, because I love this place, and I love that place,” you know. And so it is really great to hear. And I think people really come out of an exercise like that with this new sense of common ground as well. And I think that is so important, right? Because if you ask people like, “Raise your hand, who hates trees?” No one’s gonna do it, right? Don’t even think anyone does. Or “Raise your hand if you like to litter.” No one’s going to say, like, “Oh yeah, I really love throwing things out my window.” And so there is a lot more common ground. And I think that eco spirituality invites us to find out how much we have in common, and actually how much we all yearn for that place of connectedness.

Debra Rienstra Oh, yeah. I’ve noticed, you know, people have so many different feelings that motivate what they might do in a faith and climate space, and there’s anger, there’s fear, a lot of anxiety. But the trick, I think, is to get to the center, which is love. And the quickest way to do that, maybe, is to find that early love, or a love that’s developed over many, even generations, in a particular place, if you’re lucky, and you’re rooted in some way. I feel like we also, as people of faith, haven’t made enough of a case that being closer to the creation is, in fact, a pathway to God. And I see that in a lot of the writings that you have too. It’s a way of understanding God better. It’s a way of allowing God to speak to us that we sometimes underestimate, I think. There’s other ways, of course, but it’s one that we tend to underestimate. It is a way to deeper spirituality. So getting people to be in touch with that, it sounds like you’ve you’ve worked on that a little bit.

Christina Slentz We’re very lucky. The Franciscan tradition is pretty rich and present here. The Franciscan School of Theology is located here at the University of San Diego.

Debra Rienstra There we go.

Christina Slentz I have several secular Franciscans on my team, and a few Franciscan friars. And you know, that’s very much at the heart of St. Francis and St. Claire’s tradition. St. Bonaventure, who is a Franciscan, actually calls nature, or the environment, the created world, like another book. It’s another gospel that tells us something about God’s plan.

Debra Rienstra Yeah, yeah. So I wanted to quote from Pope Leo’s message for the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, which was September one. And I found his message so encouraging, and especially this particular paragraph, it’s along the line of seeds here. He writes, “In Christ, we too are seeds, and indeed seeds of peace and hope. The prophet Isaiah tells us that the Spirit of God can make an arid and parched desert into a garden, a place of rest and serenity. In his words, a spirit from on high will be poured out on us, and the wilderness will become a fruitful field, and the fruitful field a forest. Then justice will dwell in the wilderness and righteousness abide in the fruitful field. The work of righteousness will be peace, and the work of righteousness quietness and trust forever. My people will abide in a peaceful habitation, in secure dwellings and in quiet resting places.” So we have this beautiful vision and the sense of vocation of who we are and who our communities are as seeds of peace and hope. So it seems like you experience that in the San Diego Diocese. Are there some particular examples that have been really meaningful and important to you, where you see that “seeds of hope” metaphor being played out?

Christina Slentz Yeah, I would point to two areas that I would offer up as good examples. One is a parish that is located in what’s called Barrio Logan. It is an ecologically marginalized community. The highways literally forced the school to be moved when they put the highway in right down the middle of the community. And that’s the I-5. So it runs all the way from Canada to Mexico. Big highway. In addition, the Coronado Bridge connects to the highway right there. The Navy base is there, and the Port of San Diego all intersects there. So their air quality is really degraded, and it’s a socio-economically poor area. It is also a predominantly Hispanic community there. But the Jesuit pastor there, Father Scott Santa Rosa, is a very good community organizer. He led the parish when they were confronted by another warehouse that was going to be added at the port. And the proposal by the company violated the Port Authority’s standards, but they were seeking a waiver, and Father Scott brought in the Environmental Health Coalition. He brought in a theologian from University of San Diego. He invited the youth to present on Laudato si’ to the adults and really empowered the community, which is that seventh goal of Laudato si’, it’s very connected to environmental justice. And then they learned, they grew, they came to an understanding that this was not acceptable, and that they wanted to be a voice for their community. They—we traveled. I was very fortunate to kind of engage with them in this process.

And we traveled to the Port Authority building the night before the Port Authority was going to make their decision on this, whether or not to grant this waiver. And we said a rosary, which consists of five sets of 10 Hail Marys, roughly. And between each set, somebody spoke and gave their witness. And one of the women stood up and said, “I never thought I would speak publicly in my whole life. I can’t believe I’m here. I can’t believe I’m speaking, but I found my voice because of this issue.” And I thought, even if we lose, that’s such an amazing win that people felt connected to their environment. They understood that they have a voice. They understood their own dignity and the dignity of their community, and felt that it was worth standing up for. And the next day we went, there was demonstration and public witnessing and praying, and then they went in and spoke at the actual hearing. And the first thing that the chairman of the board said, in response to everyone’s comments was, “Well, I’m a Catholic, and we have three priests that were here today.” And you know, how many times does a public official make a statement of faith? You know, I thought, “Okay, win number two!” And you know, I’ll just go ahead and cut to the chase. And they turned down the company that wanted to put the warehouse in and said, “You know, we just don’t think that you’ve convinced the local community that the benefits of this would be worth it.” And it was amazing.

And so that place, they continue to also tend to the care of migrants. They have begun the work of accompanying migrants that are going for their court appointed hearings for their asylum process. And you know, those are not outcomes that are generally favorable, but they are just going and being present with them and, you know, we are on the border. We understand how some of these environmental impacts do entangle with human mobility. And so, you know, there’s a lot that this community, that is really one of our poorest communities in San Diego, has brought to the wider San Diego Diocese as more parishes and local Catholics are now mimicking what they have done and joining in this mission, and so they’ve been an incredible source—this tiny little parish in a poor part of the Diocese with terrible environmental impacts, has actually been a place where things have blossomed and grown, and they actually do have an amazing garden as well.

Debra Rienstra Wow, that’s an incredible story, and exactly a story of empowerment and resilience, as you suggested, and a story of how low-resource people are not necessarily low-resource people. They have other kinds of resources that may not be visible to the outside, but that can be very powerful, and especially when one of those is faith. It was such a great example of people motivated not only by their, you know, sort of survival, but their faith to do this work. Yeah, wonderful.

Christina Slentz I think they understand the impact, right? So if you can shut your windows and turn on your air conditioning, maybe you don’t get it.

Debra Rienstra Yeah, right. So what would you say are your biggest obstacles and your biggest joys in your work right now?

Christina Slentz I think the biggest obstacle is coming up against Catholics and/or Christians, or really any person of faith. But I think this may be especially true to Catholics and Christians who think that our social actions have to be an “either/or” choice, and they resist a “yes/and” mentality, and so they put different issues in competition with each other, right? And, you know, sometimes they think about Cain and Abel, right? This sort of jealousy or comparison can be a real problem. Instead of saying, “Okay, maybe we don’t fit in a neat box, but as Catholics, you know, we have to do all the things.” And that kind of privileging one issue or another issue makes us vulnerable to those who would seek division and competition. And I think that when we look at God, you know, God loves all of it, right? God is love, and so there isn’t that discrimination in the example of our Creator, and I would, of course, we aren’t perfect, you know, but we should aspire to that same kind of comprehensive love.

Debra Rienstra Yeah, and we do it together. We don’t all have to do every last one of the things. We do it together. What about joys? What are your greatest joys right now in your work?

Christina Slentz I think that coming together is really a joy. When I first started this work, I felt like a unicorn. I could either be the only person of faith in an environmental group, or I could be the only environmentalist in a faith group. And so it just was a feeling of being awkward all the time. And I do think that just in the three years that I’ve been in this position, I am seeing momentum build. I think ecumenicalism is super helpful in this regard. And I think that increasingly people are finding each other, and they are starting to get a little bit of a wake up call. I think it is unfortunate that people in the United States have had to experience some significant catastrophes and human loss and impact before they start to awaken to the issue of climate change or environmental degradation. I think plastics are really a pretty significant issue as well, but I think that more and more, people seem to be coming around to it, and whenever we celebrate together, that gives me joy.

Debra Rienstra Yeah, I agree. I’m seeing it happening too, and it keeps me going. It keeps me going to connect with people like you, and every door I open, there’s more people of faith doing amazing work, and we are building that mycelial network. And it’s pretty great. So what is your favorite gift of the Catholic Church, a gift of wisdom on creation care that you wish everyone would receive?

Christina Slentz I am not sure I would say that this is my favorite. But maybe I think that it is very important, is that, you know, in the Catholic community, communion, Eucharist, is really, you know, the summit for Catholics, that each week, at a minimum, we are going to celebrate this liturgy. We break open the Word, and then we celebrate the Eucharist. And one of the things I, you know, find very compelling is the fact that Jesus celebrates at the Last Supper with bread and wine. Jesus didn’t get grapes and, you know, a piece of meat, to celebrate that these were both chosen items that were not just created by God, but they involved, as we say, in our celebration, the work of human hands. And so this really represents this call to co-creation, I think. And if that is something that you know, is really at the heart of Catholicism, this, you know, summit of our faith to celebrate the Eucharist—in that, we are called to co-create. And so this tells us something about how we are meant to exist in relationship with the Creator. You know, God reveals God’s self to us in the beauty of this creation or in the gift of the Eucharist, and then, in turn, we are called to respond to that love. Otherwise the revelation isn’t complete, so our response is to care for creation or to receive the Eucharist, and then go and serve as God has called us to serve. So maybe, maybe this is something that we can offer up.

Debra Rienstra So beautifully said, and the intimacy of eating, you know, taking the material, the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands, into ourselves, responding by the Spirit, that intimacy, that physicality, there’s a reason that that is the central ritual.

Christina Slentz And you know, if I could give you one last image connected to that—because then we become the tabernacle, right? And we think about Noah and the ark, right? And how, you know, creation is destroyed, but the ark holds this refugia right and until it’s time for this moment of reconciliation and forgiveness and then renewed flourishing. And you may or may not have heard this story, but when the LA fires raged in Pacific Palisades in January of 2025 the fires swept across the parish and school called Corpus Christi Parish, and it is the home parish of brother James Lockman, one of my dear, dear volunteers. And there was a firefighter who went back to look at the ruins that evening, and he was Catholic, and he came across the tabernacle from the church, and it was the only thing that survived. And when they opened it up, it was pristine on the inside and undamaged. And that Sunday, they took it to St. Monica’s Parish, which is one of the very animated creation care parishes in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, and they celebrated Mass there because Corpus Christi did not have a parish right to celebrate in that weekend. And I think about that tabernacle as being, you know—it’s to reflect that Ark of the Covenant, right, Ark of Noah, the Ark of the Covenant. And then we have the tabernacle now, and that space of refuge that was preserved, you know. And then, of course, when we take the Eucharist into ourselves, we become that tabernacle. We’re walking tabernacles, right? So we are also, then, places of refuge and where we know that God is with us and we can go and serve.

Debra Rienstra Christina, it has been such a joy to talk to you. Thank you for your wisdom, for your inspiration, for the way that you deploy your expertise in such compassionate and far reaching ways. It’s just been a pleasure. Thank you.

Christina Slentz Oh, thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed talking today with you, Debra.

Debra Rienstra Thanks for joining us. For show notes and full transcripts, please visit debrarienstra.com and click on the Refugia Podcast tab. This season of the Refugia Podcast is produced with generous funding from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. Colin Hoogerwerf is our awesome audio producer. Thanks to Ron Rienstra for content consultation as well as technical and travel support. Till next time, be well.

As a lay leader of Traverse City Presbyterian Church, Linda Racine and a team of enthusiastic congregants prompted her church to start on a journey toward effective climate action. You can read about their commitment to creation care and learn about their 3 bright ideas for reducing carbon emissions in this congregation-led video. Traverse City Presbyterian took advantage of tools like the Interfaith Power and Light Carbon Assessment to understand their own energy use.

Learn more about how Linda’s denomination, the PCUSA, has committed to climate solutions in their Earth Pledge.

Linda is also part of the Michigan Citizens Climate Lobby, which has local chapters all over the country.

Many thanks to Linda and all the other terrific people who graciously hosted us when we visited Traverse City!

Linda Racine

TRANSCRIPT

Linda Racine In 2022, there were multiple policies or overtures passed focused on creation care, and it really put out an alarm, saying “It’s serious, folks, the Earth is really in trouble. So we need to take strong action.” And they were encouraging all churches to reduce their carbon emissions by at least 25% in the next four years and get it down to net zero or net positive by 2030.

Debra Rienstra

Wow. That’s ambitious.

Linda RacineVery ambitious. But a group of interested folks at church looked at that and said, “Let’s do it. Let’s go for it.”

Debra Rienstra Welcome to the Refugia Podcast. I’m your host, Professor Debra Rienstra. Refugia are habitats in nature where life endures in times of crisis. We’re exploring the concept of refugia as a metaphor, discovering how people of faith can become people of refugia: nurturing life-giving spaces in the earth, in our human cultural systems, and in our spiritual communities, even in this time of severe disturbance. This season, we’re paying special attention to churches and Christian communities who have figured out how to address the climate crisis together as an essential aspect of their discipleship. Today, I’m talking with Linda Racine from the Presbyterian Church in Traverse City, Michigan. Linda happens to be Michigan co-coordinator for Citizen Climate Lobby, a role she adopted after a long career in academia. But I’m talking with Linda today in her role as a lay leader at the church. Traverse City Presbyterian, in many ways, is an ordinary congregation, but they are doing extraordinary work, integrating climate action into every aspect of church life. They have heat pumps, solar panels, native plantings, a pocket forest, educational programs and more. Their story demonstrates the importance of active pastoral and lay leadership, broad community buy-in, and denominational commitments. Linda will tell us their story. Let’s get started.

Debra RienstraLinda, thank you for talking with me today.

Linda Racine

Oh, glad to be here.

Debra Rienstra

It’s great to be here in your beautiful home, here in Traverse City. Thank you for your hospitality today, and I’m really excited to talk about the work of Traverse City Presbyterian Church. So I know you’ve been involved in the church for a long time. Maybe tell us a little bit about your personal background and how long you’ve been involved in the church.

Linda Racine Oh, I think I joined about 25 years ago. We used we had been members at the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church just down the street here, and it was actually our oldest son who was in high school at the time, going through confirmation class, and a lot of his friends were going to the Presbyterian Church, and he really wanted to go, and for a variety of reasons, we said, “Let’s check it out.” And we’ve been members since. That was 25 years ago.

Debra Rienstra Yeah, so you have been around for all of the adventures that your church has had in their creation care work. Yes, so let’s start with that spark point. We’re really interested in finding how these things begin with a church. So can you think back to the moment when something happened at the church that people began to work in earnest to respond to climate change as a community. What was that spark point for Traverse City Presbyterian?

Linda Racine The thing that really kicked it off was Laura Jacobson, who manages/schedules things for our Wednesday night adult education, came to me because she knew I was really involved in Citizens Climate Lobby, which is a non-partisan volunteer organization. And, “Would you do a session on climate?” I wanted to, but I was also a little hesitant, just because, sadly, climate has become so politicized, and our church has had a long history—we’re a purple church, check your politics at the door, and I was concerned about how people might receive it. So, I put together a presentation very thoughtfully about “How do I make this as non-political as possible?” But the heading for it was “Caring for God’s Creation: a faith based approach to climate change.” I wasn’t sure how it would go over. And at that time, we were getting maybe 20 people coming on Wednesday nights. 65 people came. The room was packed. So clearly there was a lot of interest.

Debra Rienstra What year was this?

Linda Racine It was like January of 2020, right before Covid hit.

Debra Rienstra Goodness.

Linda Racine So anyway, the evening went really well. Kind of started with a very broad based, here’s what Scripture says. Here’s what—oh, we did the Katharine Hayhoe video, which—she takes such a broad view of every faith tradition has something important to say about our responsibility to care for creation and for one another. So Katharine Hayhoe, then the Pope, and you know, went through some different traditions and how they’re responding. And then did some information about what PCUSA was doing, which was new to me. I didn’t really know what all our denomination—because it had never been talked about in our church. So went through that and offered the idea that our denomination has a certification process for creation care teams. And by the end, people were saying, “Let’s do this!” There was an impromptu—somebody grabbed a piece of paper and pen, and “Who wants to be a part of the team?” And we got, I don’t know, eight or 10 names on that list. Quickly got together and said, “Well, what do we want to do? Let’s pitch it to our session.” So February’s meeting, we had a proposal, and they all said, “Absolutely, let’s go for it.” So that’s what started it.

Debra Rienstra What do you think prepared people to be that enthusiastic after one session? What was going on in the church? What are the congregation members like that makes you look back on that and say, “Yeah, we were somehow primed or prompted or ready for that moment.”

Linda Racine I think that’s hard to say. Our church has always—I guess what drew me to the church initially is it was really clear this was a community that really walked the talk. It wasn’t coming on Sunday to check a box, but really genuinely living their faith. And people of faith were called to care for creation. And so I think that was a strong ethic that people had anyway. And clearly, by 2020, we’re seeing, “Oh my gosh, this earth is in trouble.” That was pretty clear. And so, just to have a topic on—let’s gather on Wednesday night and talk about it. I think people were ready.

Debra Rienstra Fascinating, yeah. And I wonder if, because up north here in Michigan, this beautiful area of Michigan, people are very aware of the outdoors. So many people care a lot about the natural world around here and enjoy it. Summer up here is so beautiful. So I wonder if it was just a little bit of a more natural leap there.

Linda Racine I think you’ve got a point there. People are drawn to this area because of its natural amazingness. And so there is a strong environmental ethic here. I mean, look at the land conservancy: all the explosion since that launched back in the 90s, I believe. The number of just natural areas that have been preserved, the whole Sleeping Bear sand dunes could have been development, but that has been preserved. There is a strong environmental ethic here. No question.

Debra Rienstra Yeah, yeah. So what happened next? How did you go about inviting the whole congregation into a process that—you didn’t know what was going to happen next. You have this spark moment. But then what happened?

Linda Racine I think the structure of the certification process really drove that. It’s so solid. When a church decides to do that, you’re committing to really look at how you manage your facilities, how your worship embraces this, how your education programs, and advocacy—that’s always been the toughest one. But those four areas. First you assess, where are we now? And then, what are your church’s goals? And so that involved, in order to do that and to get all the committees in the church involved: what are you doing currently, and what would you like to do? What would you like to see happen in the next year? So every committee was involved in setting goals. The pastor support was critical. Oh my gosh, without that, this wouldn’t have gone anywhere. Pastors have been, right from the beginning, very supportive. One Sunday, the whole church read the pledge.

Debra Rienstra The Earth Care Pledge from the Presbyterian Church, okay.

Linda Racine Yeah, yeah. So people were aware that that was going on. And then people have different interests. “I’m really excited about this piece of it or that piece of it.” So always open to anyone who wants to jump in and get involved to do that. But I think it’s the discipline, the structure and the discipline, of that certification process that keeps us on track.

Debra Rienstra Okay, yeah, and it sounds like you were able to get that certification pretty quickly, because you’ve had it since 2020, so pretty quickly you got the certification.

Linda Racine Yeah, I think that first year, we filled out all the forms and sent goals, and then you submit that and get the certification, they review it at the denominational level,

Debra Rienstra Yeah. So it seems, from all the conversations I’ve had with church folks this weekend that the physical plant aspects became a big part of it, first, as well as the landscaping and grounds aspects. So talk a little bit about the processes of those things happening.

Linda Racine Well, one of the first projects that first year was converting pieces of ground. We had a bed out front that was dying. Some of the bushes were dying. And a couple of our church members, Gary Richardson and Cheryl Gross, were aware of a National Wildlife Federation grant opportunity. And so Gary was a member of Building and Grounds and took the idea to that committee, and they were all supportive of it. So we submitted the grant. We got $1,500 to get us started. And so work crews showed up. We ripped out the old plants. Then that also connected to the education piece. That’s one of one of those other four areas. Our children’s education person was absolutely passionate. So the Vacation Bible School that summer focused on pollinators. So we did a whole education piece on the role of pollinators and their importance, and then the kids helped plant the new pollinator garden.

Debra Rienstra Yeah, awesome.

Linda Racine Yeah. It was fabulous.

Debra Rienstra So it sounds like what we need is enthusiasm across the leadership. Yeah. And the leadership working together.

Linda Racine Absolutely.

Debra Rienstra And I think you folks at this church have so many—not only enthusiastic, but really skilled leaders. You have organization experience. You have Cheryl, who does native plants as a passion. I had a wonderful tour today with Randy, who was excited about boilers and transferring those to heat pumps, which was so delightful to hear about. And at some point, the church made this wonderful video, which we’ll link in the show notes, explaining the goals—the three bright ideas, goals. So talk about how that happened.

Linda Racine That was triggered by our denomination’s policy, where, as a denomination, delegates meet every two years to look at policy for the church. And in 2022, there were multiple policies or overtures passed focused on creation care, and it really put out an alarm, saying, “It’s serious, folks. The earth is really in trouble, so we need to take strong action.” And they were encouraging all churches to reduce their carbon emissions by at least 25% in the next four years and get it down to net zero or net positive by 2030.

Debra Rienstra Wow, that’s ambitious.

Linda Racine Very ambitious. But a group of interested folks at church looked at that and said, “Let’s do it. Let’s go for it.” So you need to start—understand where you are first before you can reduce something. So we use the Interfaith Power and Light carbon assessment. And Chris Wendland, who you met, really drove that train, and she and Randy both worked with staff to gather all the—here’s our electric bills and our gas bills and all the stuff needed to submit that. And so then we got this feedback about, “Here’s where you are.” And then it was, “Okay, now what do we do?” And so another church member said, “Let’s talk with Tim Pulliam,” who was—he’s the owner, executive, I don’t know what his title, but he runs Keen Technical Solutions who, for I don’t know, 25 years have been really focused on clean energy transformation.

Debra Rienstra This is also a member of the church?

Linda Racine Tim Pulliam is not, but it was a church member who recommended him. So Tim brought a team of folks in and looked at all this stuff, and they said, “Well, the thing you could—that would make the biggest impact the quickest would be changing all your lighting to LED.” So that seemed like a no brainer. We also had this ancient boiler that was ready to die any minute, and people were starting to panic about that. And so, okay, we got to do something there. And then there were a lot of people in the church saying, “Can we put solar panels up?” Because there’s so many great things about the solar. Not only is it good for the clean energy, but it’s also a public statement. It really is a public witness, and it helps normalize, because there’s still so many people out there who think, “Oh, this is Northern Michigan. You can’t— solar is worthless here.” Well, actually, it’s not.

Debra Rienstra Actually, it’s not, especially because we have such very long summer days.

Linda Racine Yes, yeah. And so anyway, there was a lot of enthusiasm around that. So kind of gathered after Sunday, after church on Sunday, anybody who wanted to come and talked about, “Well, here’s what the report said, and what do we think?” And so there was interest in all three of those ideas. So we created task forces. People said, “Yeah, I’ll work on this.” And everybody, the groups, had about three months to do their homework, come back with, “Here’s what we think the options are and what it’s going to cost.” And that in about April of that year, we heard what people had to say, and people wanted to do all three.

Debra Rienstra Yeah, that’s just amazing. Was there resistance at all? Were there people who were resistant?

Linda Racine I’m not remembering that. Maybe they weren’t showing up at the meetings. Are they quiet? I don’t know. I don’t remember. I mean, there’s always questions about, “Well, will solar really work?” There were questions about, “Well, can we afford it?” And that was maybe the biggest concern. But people had done quite a bit of research on that, and between the very low interest loans that our denomination offers—that was huge, the potential for grants. And we did end up getting an $80,000 grant from our local utility. And then at that time there were IRA dollars available. That’s a question mark right now, but the combination of that, and then when you look at the energy savings, it’s like, “Okay, what we’re going to save in electric bills is probably going to be pretty darn close to covering our monthly loan payment.” So when people saw that, it was like, collective, “Okay, sure, this is doable.”

Debra Rienstra So at that point was the video made at that point?

Linda Racine Yes, because the next step was, “Okay. So we’ve got maybe 50 people in the room. We’ve got 600 people in the church. How do we get everybody involved?” So putting together a strategy for really getting everyone enthused about it. And so the idea for the video came up. And Ray Starkenberg and her dad are professional videographers.

Debra Rienstra Once again, talent in the congregation.

Linda Racine

Oh my gosh. And so they took that project on. And you’ve seen the video, it’s just amazing. The storytelling is so well done.

Debra Rienstra It’s playful, it’s persuasive, it’s full of facts. And I love the theme, you know, “the time is now” is the theme of the video, and the involvement of kids in the video saying their piece, saying, “This is about me and my future. Please help.” It’s just—and that combined with the playfulness, it’s just brilliant.

Linda Racine It’s a good balance, isn’t it? Yeah. And a couple things about that. One member of the church, after seeing the video, said, “If this was just about buying a new boiler, I wouldn’t be that enthused. But this is about the future. There was so much enthusiasm in the church after really hearing the whole story and the possibilities there. I do want to mention, that theme, “the time is now,” that’s right out of the overture that was passed by our general assembly.

Debra Rienstra Yeah. Once again, that denominational leadership is so important.

Linda Racine Yeah, that was in that very first overture in 2022 talking about how serious this moment in time is and the time is now to act.

Debra Rienstra Hi, it’s me, Debra. If you are enjoying this podcast episode, go ahead and subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. If you have a minute, leave a review. Good reviews help more listeners discover this podcast. To keep up with all the Refugia news, I invite you to subscribe to the Refugia newsletter on Substack. This is my fortnightly newsletter for people of faith who care about the climate crisis and want to go deeper. Every two weeks, I feature climate news, deeper dives, refugia sightings and much more. Join our community at refugianewsletter.substack.com. For even more goodies, including transcripts and show notes for this podcast, check out my website at debrarienstra.com. D-E-B-R-A-R-I-E-N-S-T-R-A dot com. Thanks so much for listening. We’re glad you’re part of this community. And now back to the interview.

Debra RienstraSo how was the video used and disseminated?

Linda Racine We started doing some meetings, just in homes, small groups, eight or 10 people. Showing the video, and then having a discussion. And that was the first step, and getting people’s questions answered, and then Sunday morning it was in the service. And, wow.

Debra Rienstra So it worked, so to speak, yeah.

Linda Racine And then it’s been on our website ever since. The thing is that video has gone—I wouldn’t say viral, but it has been broadly, broadly disseminated.

Debra Rienstra Oh, I can see why. I think every church should imitate it as best they can. Yeah, I mean the statistics—the numbers are specific to you folks.

Linda Racine Yeah, the storytelling though, the power of that, are things that other churches can use, yes.

Debra Rienstra And it stars many people from your church. So the stars of the show are your fellow congregants.

Linda Racine And they’re all people who have really stepped up and wanted to be and are a key part of this.

Debra Rienstra So at this point you have—the heat pump system is well underway. Solar panels are sitting on the roof waiting for installation when the snow melts. You have education programs going. Maybe we’ll come back to that. Quite a lot of landscaping work, quite a lot of native planting done, really neat native gardens. You have a pocket forest going. So as far as the four things, the four elements of earth care congregation: it’s the building, the landscaping...

Linda Racine Well, those are kind of together, so how you manage your facilities.

Debra Rienstra Okay, what are the other three again?

Linda Racine Worship. And pastors lead that, and they do that beautifully. That first year that we received certification, we had a kickoff celebration in the prayer garden that was just lovely. And so that theme gets worked into the worship by the pastors.

Debra Rienstra Yeah, give some examples of how that happens in worship. Are there sermons? Is it in the litanies, in the music?

Linda Racine Hmm, probably all of the above.

Debra Rienstra Yeah. Okay, and you have two worship services. So this has to be done in two different ways, so it requires a little creativity.

Linda Racine Yeah, although often in the spring, especially around earth— there can be combined services. We do a combined service once a month anyway, and so there have been a couple earth care themed services, that way it was one service.

Debra Rienstra Yeah. And then do you have anything special for Earth Day or Season of Creation?

Linda Racine Usually, yes, on like Wednesday, well, that would be more the education piece, but usually on the Wednesday nights, we’ve done something big related to earth care. This year, we’re telling our story. We’ve got a thing planned for that Wednesday of Earth Week. We’re inviting every church in the region to come and hear the story. Our contractor will be there to answer questions, and resource people, the Light and Power folks will be there. So if they have questions about, “Well, what programs do you have?” And there are other churches in the area also that are doing similar things. So it’ll be a good chance to share stories also and learn from one another. So we’re doing— that’s the plan for this during Earth Care Week.

Debra Rienstra So just to make the refugia connection there, as Traverse City Presbyterian is operating as a refugia place, a refugia space, doing their work, modeling that work, with this idea of getting other churches together, you’re creating those corridors and creating that whole network to let these life giving capacities spread and grow. That’s brilliant. Really great idea.

Linda Racine Another thing that we’ve done, we’ve got a racial justice task force that has, over the last several years, made a very focused effort to build relationship with the local tribe. And so the last, I think, three Lent seasons that we’ve had a Lenten series where inviting tribal leadership into talk about the—to educate us about the history of the tribe and practices and beliefs, and whereas much of that is focused on caring for the earth, caring for Mother Earth, it’s central, yeah. So we’ve learned a lot and helped make a connection with that.

Debra Rienstra I noticed in your bulletin, there’s a land acknowledgement. And also I noticed you have a garden specifically co-cared for with the indigenous folk around.

Linda Racine Not yet.

Debra Rienstra Okay, that’s in the plans.

Linda Racine Yes, it’s on the plans to—because in one of the sessions where a tribal leader was talking about...it was right after the land acknowledgement had been created. And the talking through that, someone at the end asked, “So, what’s next?” You know, we really, our heart is in this land acknowledgement, what’s next? And her response was, “When you care for the earth, you care for the Anishinaabek and what we believe in.” So that sparked this thing in my head of, “Oh my, here’s a beautiful opportunity.” And we followed up, thinking, if we could learn from tribal leadership on how to create a healing garden, we’d love to do that. And so we have had one of the tribal leaders come and help educate us about a healing garden, what all it involves. And we’ve created a space. It’s all smothered and ready to go. And the first thing that we would like to plant there is a plum tree. Because what we learned from her, I had no idea, but apparently, the plum tree is a has a very special place in the Anishinaabek story, where—my understanding is that plum trees were very prevalent in the Grand Rapids area, and when the Dutch came and settled that area, the plum trees were taken out. And so, in fact, it was hard when she came to meet with us, she had brought a plum tree as a gift, and we didn’t have a place to put it. Broke my heart. But we so would love that to be the center of this healing garden. So we’ve got, you know, ground is all ready. We weren’t even sure where it ought to go. And so anyway, so we’ve got a spot, because she helped us find a place for the healing garden. So as soon as we can reconnect, and they have the time, though, we’re going to get that garden launched.

Debra Rienstra Wow, that’s beautiful. And will it be medicinal plants?

Linda Racine That’s the thought, yes.

Debra Rienstra So healing plants, but also healing a relationship.

Linda Racine Both, yes, all three, yeah, all three things.

Debra Rienstra Beautiful. So a lot of churches struggle with—I’ve been sort of calling it the “boutique issue” problem, which is to say, you have, you know, your creation care folk, and they have a green team or something, and they kind of do their little thing off to the side, and other people have other issues that they’re dealing with, and it’s really hard to get that creation care work to infuse through, to diffuse through the whole congregation’s life. And it sounds like that happened fairly organically. So what advice would you have for other churches that struggle with that boutique issue problem?

Linda Racine Well, I think the strength of the PCUSA certification process is what allowed that to happen or fostered that. Because when you’ve got—you’re required or expected to set goals in very comprehensive list of how the church functions, it really requires everybody to be involved. And so right from the beginning, pretty much every committee was asked to look at, what are we doing related to creation care, and what do we want to do? And every year that gets repeated. So there’s a clear—we’ve got a pace of it. It’s built into the planning structure. Every fall, the committees are looking at their goals around everything but creation care is on the list, and they’re looking at their budgets to submit for the final reports and what happens next year. So it’s really built into the fabric and structure of how we operate. So if it weren’t for that, it would be a committee off to the side doing whatever it does. But really, everyone in all committees are involved.

Debra Rienstra So it sounds like that answers my next question too, which has to do with the problem of “fade.” So by that, I mean everybody gets excited. You replace the boiler, you replace the LED lights, or replace lights with LED, and then...yeah, this enthusiasm sort of fades. But it sounds like that annual goal-setting process with an indefinite horizon, like there’s no end point to that, right? So that annual goal-setting process also helps with that fade problem.

Linda Racine I think it’s key.

Debra Rienstra One last question, what has been most challenging and most joyful about the transformation that Traverse City Presbyterian has gone through in a mere five years?

Linda Racine I don’t know that anything has been particularly hard, but oh my gosh, the joy. Ah. Just so many examples. When we decided that there was this huge section of lawn that was totally unusable as lawn, let’s turn it into a pocket forest. And we were able to get a local tree trimmer to donate the wood chips to smother it. And we have this huge group of people with two truckloads or three, I don’t know how many truckloads of stuff. We’re out with the wheelbarrows spreading stuff. We’re having so much fun. Jordan is sliding down it like it’s a ski slope. We’re just having a great time, and I’m looking around and thinking, “I absolutely love this community.” They’re so committed to being the best stewards of creation and one another. Yeah, it’s not hard, it’s just wonderful.

Debra Rienstra Linda, it’s been such a pleasure to talk to you. There’s been joy in this conversation, too. Thank you for your time. Thank you for all that you do and blessings on Traverse City Presbyterian.

Debra Rienstra Thanks for joining us for show notes and full transcripts, please visit debrarienstra.com and click on the Refugia Podcast tab. This season of the Refugia Podcast is produced with generous funding from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. Colin Hoogerwerf is our awesome audio producer. Thanks to Ron Rienstra for content consultation as well as technical and travel support. Till next time, be well.

Elaine Heath is the abbess of Spring Forest, a new monastic community in Hillsborough, North Carolina. Spring Forest centers around communal prayer and meals, a vibrant farm, refugee support, and other ministries you can read about here. You can learn more about Elaine’s work as an author and speaker on her website, or in articles like this one from the Center for Action and Contemplation.

Many thanks to Elaine and her husband Randall for welcoming Ron and I and our audio producer, Colin, to the farm last June. Besides relishing the good company of our hosts, we enjoyed harvesting cabbage, feasting and praying with the Sunday evening group, walking through the woods, and petting some good-natured goats.

Dr. Elaine Heath

On the farm.

Someone had to help harvest the cabbage, so Ron and Colin and I pitched in.

Elaine, husband Randall, and I in their lovely home.

TRANSCRIPT

Elaine Heath If you are nurtured by traditional church—or let’s say, conventional church—keep doing it, but also realize that for other people that’s not nurturing. It feels dry and lifeless, and it’s clear the Spirit is doing something new. So instead of insisting everybody stop doing the new thing, and everybody has to come and do the conventional thing, you can be conventional in your worship and bless and make space for others so that we have a plethora of experiments going on.

Debra Rienstra Welcome to the Refugia Podcast. I’m your host, Professor Debra Rienstra. Refugia are habitats in nature where life endures in times of crisis. We’re exploring the concept of refugia as a metaphor, discovering how people of faith can become people of refugia: nurturing life-giving spaces in the earth, in our human cultural systems, and in our spiritual communities, even in this time of severe disturbance. This season, we’re paying special attention to churches and Christian communities who have figured out how to address the climate crisis together as an essential aspect of their discipleship.

Today, I’m excited to introduce you to Dr. Elaine Heath. Elaine is founder and abbess of Spring Forest, a new monastic community centered on a 23-acre forest and farm property near Hillsboro, North Carolina. The farm supplies a CSA and supports food security for refugees and serves as the setting for outdoor programs for kids, cooking classes, potlucks, forest walks and more. But the Spring Forest community is a dispersed network of people who move in and out of the farm space in a variety of ways. They live on the farm for a time, they visit often to volunteer, or they simply join the community online for daily prayer. We got to visit the farm last spring, and I can tell you that Elaine’s long experience with new monasticism, trauma-informed care, and contemplative practice make her an ideal curator of refugia space. The vibe on the farm is peaceful, orderly, and full of life. It’s a place of holy experimentation in new ways to form Christian community and reconnect with the land. Let’s get to it.

Debra Rienstra Elaine, thank you for talking with me today. It’s really great to be with you.

Elaine Heath Yeah, I’m glad to be with you too.

Debra Rienstra So you served in traditional parish ministry and in religious academia for many years, and then in 2018 you retired from that work to found Spring Forest. Why a farm and a new monastic community? What inspired and influenced this particular expression of faith?

Elaine Heath I’ve always loved farms and forests. But actually, my dream to do this started about 25 years ago, and my husband and I bought a 23 acre property in North Central Ohio, right when I was right out of my PhD program and I got my first academic job at my alma mater, which is Ashland Theological Seminary. So I went there to direct the Doctor of Ministry program, and we bought this beautiful property. It had a little house that looked like the ranger station, and it had a stream and a big labyrinth cut in the field, and it had beautiful soil to grow, you know, for market gardening. And what we planned to do was gradually develop retreat ministries there. My husband was going to build some hermitages up in the woods, because I did a lot of spiritual direction with pastors who were burned out and traumatized, and we felt like that, you know, as I got older and phased out of academia, that would be something we could do together.

So we were there for a couple years, and then I was recruited to go to Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. And we were very sad to leave our property behind, but we were clear that we were being called to Texas. So we bought a home in the city in a sort of mixed income, racially diverse neighborhood in Garland, and it was a big house with a nice yard, and soon after starting to teach evangelism—which, I kind of created my own path for how to teach evangelism, because I don’t believe in selling Jesus or any of those kinds of colonizing things. So I was teaching about living a contemplative life and practicing social and environmental justice and being good news in the world, and being good neighbors to all our neighbors, and thinking of our neighbors as us and not them. And I had them reading Shane Claiborne and the people writing with the emerging church movement at the time, and pretty soon, I had students in my class coming to my office every week. It was a different student, but the same tears and the same kind of narrative: “Dr. Heath, I think I’m going to have to leave the church to answer my call. Tell me what I should do.” And it was because they were being called to do innovative, new monastic ministry, missional, new monastic kinds of things. But our denomination in particular didn’t quite get it, even though early Methodism was very much like that.

So I realized fairly quickly that this was God calling me through these students to focus my research and writing and my teaching in the area of emergence. Emergence theory, what’s happening in the world. How do these currents of emergence intersect with what’s happening politically and environmentally, and what’s happening, you know, in the economy and with the church. So pretty soon, I don’t know, it wasn’t very long, I felt God was calling me to gather students and start some experiments outside, out in the city. And so I had a prayer partner, and we were praying for a house to come available, so that we could start a new monastic house. And she came to me one day and she said, “I saw the house coming. It’ll be here soon.” And I said, “Okay.” I had no money for a house. You know, kind of a lowly professor, didn’t make that much. And within two weeks, one of our neighbors came to me, who didn’t really know me well at all, and said, “Hey, my mom has a rental property. It’s been in our family for a long time, and we wondered if you might have some students that would like to live there. We won’t even charge rent, just pay their utilities and not have drug parties or whatnot.” And I said, “No, that’s unlikely,” you know. So I said, you know, I could throw the phone down and ran down to get in her car and go over to this house with her. And we were driving over, and she says, “You know, it’s not the best neighborhood.” I said, “Perfect!” But we got there, and it was a really great little three bedroom house in a predominantly Latina neighborhood, and that was our first new monastic house. So I asked three of the students who’d been crying in my office, “Would you be willing to break your leases wherever you live and come and live here for a year?” And I can assign a spiritual director to work with you, and I can write a curriculum for an independent study on the theory and practice of new monasticism. And we can develop a Rule of Life based on our United Methodist membership vows. And they all immediately said yes, and so that’s how we got started with our first house.

Elaine Heath And then right around the same time, I started a missional house church that was quickly relocated into the neighborhood where most of the refugees are resettled in Dallas, because one of my students brought six Congolese men to our little house church worship, and that that was the beginning of realizing we were called to work with refugees.

Debra Rienstra Oh, I see.

Elaine Heath So that all got started around 2008. And by 2009, there was a student who came to Perkins who had been a commercial real estate banker on Wall Street. And he came to Perkins as a student. He was an older man. And we were going on my very first pilgrimage to Iona, Northumbria, and Lindisfarne, and Michael Hahn was with us too. He and I team-taught this class, so it was my first one. But it turned out that Larry Duggins, the student, had come to seminary because he really wanted to be equipped to help young adults who were feeling disillusioned with the church but wanted to be out in the world doing good work. And he started describing what he was called to, and I’m like, “Well, that’s what I’m doing with these students.” So we joined forces and created a nonprofit called Missional Wisdom Foundation, and within three years, we had a network of eight new monastic communities across the metroplex. They were all anchored at local churches. Some of them were parsonages that weren’t being used. And we wove into the expectations and sort of the lifestyle of those houses, urban agriculture.

Debra Rienstra Oh, I was waiting for the farm to come back into it. Yeah, because I’m seeing these threads of experimentation and monasticism and place. We’re sitting here today on your current farm land. So it’s really interesting to hear all these threads being developed early on in an urban context.

Elaine Heath Yes, it was quite something. These houses were all in different social contexts. There was one house, the Bonhoeffer house, that was in East Dallas, in a neighborhood that was not only mixed income and racially diverse, but also used to be where the mayor lived. And now there are people who are unhoused living there, and there are also people with nice houses living there. So it was a very interesting neighborhood. So that house, we learned quickly that you needed to take a year to get to know the neighborhood before you try to figure out how you’re going to support whatever justice work needs to happen in the neighborhood. But that house got really close with the unhoused community and did a lot of good ministry with the guys and a few women. Then there was one for undocumented workers, the Romero House, and just different social contexts. But all of them had a backyard garden or, you know, some type of growing food kind of thing. And I used to take students to this farm that was an urban farm in DeSoto, which is just south of Dallas, where it was quite small, but these were former missionaries, the type that have crusades and show the Jesus film and everything in sort of poor countries. And then they had an awakening that happened, and they realized they were being called to help people in orphanages learn how to grow their own food in a sustainable way and raise the living standard for the whole village. So they had this little farm, and I would take students there every semester to experience the conversion of thought that this couple had over what mission is, and to experience the beauty and joy of tilapia that provide food for the lettuce, that provide for the bees, you know. So this closed system. So that also affected my imagination about what I really wanted to do in the future.

And so gradually, the years—we were there for 11 years, and we lived in community the whole time that we were there. By the time we came here for me to work at Duke, we had a very clear picture of what we wanted to do here. And so we looked for the property back when we had to sell that first farm, when we were so sad about selling it, I had an experience in prayer where I sensed God was saying to me, “Don’t give up on this dream. It’s sacred, and it will happen in the future on a better piece of property, at a better time in your life for this.” And so when it was time to move here, I said to Randall, “This is the time. Let’s look for that property.” So that’s how we landed here.

Friendly, very contented dairy goats, hanging out in the afternoon.

Debra Rienstra Yeah. When talking about your students, you mentioned yesterday that you like to “ruin them for fake church.” So what do you mean by fake church, and how exactly do you ruin them for it?

Elaine Heath Well, you know, church is really the people and not the building. You all know that. It’s the people and we’re called to be a very different kind of people who are a healing community, that neighbor well, that give ourselves away, that regard our neighbors—human and non human—as part of us, whether they think they’re part of us or not. We have this sort of posture in life. And when I think of how Jesus formed the church, Jesus had this little ragtag group of friends, and they traveled around and did stuff and talked about it, and they got mad at each other and had power struggles and drama and, you know, and then Jesus would process the drama with them. And he would do these outrageous things, you know, breaking sort of cultural taboo to demonstrate: this is what love really looks like. And so we don’t get to do much of any of that, sitting in a pew on Sunday morning, facing forward while the people up in the front do things. And so many churches—maybe you’ve never experienced this, but I certainly have. The pastor’s sort of the proxy disciple while people kind of watch and make judgments and decide whether or not they want to keep listening to those sermons.

Debra Rienstra Oh yes.

Elaine Heath So when you experience Christian life in a community where it’s both natural, it’s just the way you live in the world, and it’s also liturgically rich, and the life is a contemplative life, and it’s also a life of deep missional engagement with the world— that other version of church, it’s like oatmeal with no flavoring in it. It makes you, I mean, it’s about the life together. It’s how we live in this world. It’s not about sitting somewhere for an hour once a week and staring forward.

Debra Rienstra Right. Yeah, so I would, you know, of course, I would describe what you’re describing as refugia, being the people of refugia. You know? Not that I’m—we’ll come back to traditional worship and traditional forms of faith and religion. But it seems like what you’re doing is living into something you say on your website that we are in the midst of a new reformation in the church, and I certainly sense that too. I think the evidence is all around us, and the research bears out that we’ve reached this inflection point, and it’s a painful inflection point that a lot of people think of as decline, because living through it feels confusing and bewildering and dark and full of loss. So what is your sense of when we are, in this point in history, in particular, for those of us who’ve been part of church communities, where are we finding ourselves? Why is it so confusing?

Elaine Heath I really believe we’re in a dark night of the soul as the church in the West and perhaps places in the East too. I know we’ve exported a capitalist version of church all over the world, sadly. But I believe we’re in a dark night of the soul, you know, classically understood, where it’s spirit-breathed. It’s not that the devil is doing something to us. It’s spirit-breathed to detach us from our sort of corporate ego that thinks we get to show up and boss the world around and act like we own the joint.

Debra Rienstra We call that church of empire.

Elaine Heath Yeah. And so I think that’s what’s happening. And when, you know, if you study the literature, if you work in spiritual direction, and you’re looking at what happens with the dark night of the soul. That’s a real dark night, not a clinical depression or something like that, but an actual dark night. You have to go through it. You can’t bypass it. You can’t work your way out of it. You can’t talk your way out of it. And what happens is you find yourself increasingly hungry for simplicity, for a simple but clear experience of God, because it’s like God’s disappeared. There’s a deep loneliness, even a sort of cold hell, to being in a dark night of the soul. And so there’s a restlessness, there’s a longing for actual experience of God. There’s a feeling of futility. Things that used to work don’t work anymore. So you know the threefold path? The purgation, illumination and union is one way that we’ve learned to think about what happens. The purgation part is— we’re there.

Debra Rienstra We’re being purgated.

Elaine Heath We’re being purgated, yeah. And at the same time that we’re having these flashes of intuitive knowing, this sort of illumination is coming. “Oh, let’s pay attention to the saints and mystics who lived through things like this. What gave them life? What helped them to keep showing up and being faithful?” And we’re having moments of union too, when we feel like, “Oh, discipleship means I make sure that the trees are cared for and not just people. Oh, all living things are interconnected. Quantum physics is teaching us a spiritual truth we should have known already.” So the three parts of that contemplative path are happening simultaneously. But I think what feels most forward to a lot of people is the purgation piece where you’re like, “Oh, things are just dropping away. Numbers are dropping. Things that used to work don’t work. What’s going to happen now?” Sort of a sense of chaos, confusion. Tohu va bohu, yeah.

Debra Rienstra Yeah, do you want me to explain what that is?

Elaine Heath Yeah, chaos and confusion. From the beginning of time.

Debra Rienstra It’s the realm out of which creation is formed. So the idea that the spirit is drawing us into this dark night is actually really reassuring. We are where we’re supposed to be. And even though it feels confusing and painful, there are these moments of wisdom—that’s so reassuring. In fact, one of the things you write: the new reformation is all about the emergence. So this emergence is happening of a generous, hospitable, equitable form of Christianity that heals the wounds of the world. What is your vision about what the church needs to release and hold and create right now?

Elaine Heath We need to release everything that even slightly has a hint of empire, that we have thought of as what it means to be the church, because that completely reverts what church is supposed to be about. So giving up empire, we need to take up the great kenotic hymn of Philippians two and actually live it.

Debra Rienstra The self emptying hymn.

Elaine Heath The self emptying. And it’s not—I know that that can be problematic when we’re thinking of women or, you know, groups that have been forced to empty themselves in an exploited way. But that’s not really what that’s all about. It’s about showing up to God, paying attention, seeing what God’s invitation is, then cooperating with that and just releasing the outcome. That’s what that’s about, and really finding out, what am I in this world for? What are we in this world for? And being about that and not about something else.

Debra Rienstra Yeah, it’s hard to release the ways that we have done things. Well, you have a congregation, you have a pastor, you have a sanctuary, you have programs, you want the kids to come, you need tithes, all of those systems. And actually, what you’re doing here at Spring Forest—let’s talk about that. What you’re doing here at Spring Forest doesn’t have any of that. Sunday services. There’s no church building. You have barn buildings, you have farm buildings. No Sunday school, no adult ed, no choirs, organs, praise bands, any of that stuff, right? Do you think of Spring Forest as a new model for church? Perhaps one among many?

Elaine Heath It’s one among many. We’re definitely shaped by traditional monasticism. We’re shaped by early Methodism. We’re influenced by the Catholic Worker Movement, and definitely Bonhoeffer’s work and a number of others: the Clarence Jordan and Koinonia farms. And so we’re influenced by all of those. We do have music sometimes at Forest Feast, if we have someone that can lead it, and, you know, do a good job. But the backbone of our worship life is morning and evening prayer. And that is so wonderful. You were here last night for Forest Feast, and we use the same structure we use for morning and evening prayer, and we have a group of about six people who are writing the liturgies for us, who have been writing for a year and a half now.

Debra Rienstra Who are those people?

Elaine Heath Well, there’s Steve Taylor is our lay leader, and his wife, Cheryl, and then there’s Donna Patterson, who’s—none of them were here last night. They all had to go somewhere. But some of them are lay people. Some of them are clergy.

Debra Rienstra And they don’t live here?

Elaine Heath No, they live— well, some of the people that write live far away, and they’re in our digital community. But, yeah, Steve and Cheryl live in Lumberton, which is, you know, almost two hours away. But they’re beautiful. I mean, if you go online and look at some of the last month, look at the prayers and see the—they’re just truly beautiful, and they reflect our spirituality of our community.

Debra Rienstra Yeah. So the community, it seems to me, you have had people living on the farm itself, but your community, like the Iona community, is both located here on this land, but also dispersed. And so you have that interaction, that conversation between this residential life. So let’s try to describe for listeners: there’s the farm. You live here with your husband. You have interns from Duke. You have a farm. What do you call Larry?

Elaine Heath He’s our farm coach.

Debra Rienstra Coach, yes, I love that. They have the farm coach who has the farming knowledge that you all sort of follow. You have chefs. They don’t live here either, but they come in. So you have a lot of people coming in and out on this farm. And you do regenerative farming. You have programs for kids, you have refugee support, and you can talk about that, trauma informed rest for spiritual leaders. And then a number of other things. The farm produces vegetables and those go to a CSA, and also a lot of it is donated. Why this particular assembly of activities? How does it all fit together? And what are the theological principles beneath each of these endeavors?

Elaine Heath The overarching principle is that the Holy Spirit gives gifts to every believer and to every person, let’s just be honest. And the job of the pastor, the pastor teacher, is to fan those gifts into flame, to help them have the support they need to use their gifts and that the ministries should be shaped by the gifts of the people, which means you can’t use a cookie cutter. And we have numerically a small community, but incredibly high capacity of people. So we have these gifts that they have, and then the ministries are emerging out of those gifts. And it might seem like, why do you have refugee support? And you know, just name anything else we’re doing. How does this fit together? The organizing principle—okay, so you have the foundation. These are gifts given by the Spirit. Our ministries are emerging from our gifts. And the organizing sort of a cohesive piece is our rule of life that ties everything together. And so our rule of life is prayer, work, table, neighbor and rest. And that rule of life came about after we lived here for a year, when we first started Spring Forest with—there was another pastor that co-founded it with me, Francis Kinyua, who’s from Kenya, and he was my student in Dallas, and did all those other things with me. So we invited him to come. We had to work with three different bishops to kind of make it work. But it worked, you know. Anyway, we just waited for a year to see. We had lots of work to do with getting the farm ready to go and Francis and I went to Church World Service right away to say, “Hey, we have a lot of experience supporting refugees, and we would like to do that here as well.” So we got started with that, but we waited a year and then just articulated, what are the practices that we do that are keeping us grounded here and keeping us right side up. And it was those things, so we named it.

Debra Rienstra Okay, you were just doing it, and then you named those things.

Elaine Heath Instead of creating sort of an aspirational rule and tried to live into it, we named what was actually working, what was actually grounding us and felt life giving.

Debra Rienstra Hi, it’s me, Debra. If you are enjoying this podcast episode, go ahead and subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. If you have a minute, leave a review. Good reviews help more listeners discover this podcast. To keep up with all the Refugia news, I invite you to subscribe to the Refugia newsletter on Substack. This is my fortnightly newsletter for people of faith who care about the climate crisis and want to go deeper. Every two weeks, I feature climate news, deeper dives, refugia sightings and much more. Join our community at refugianewsletter.substack.com. For even more goodies, including transcripts and show notes for this podcast, check out my website at debrarienstra.com. D-E-B-R-A-R-I-E-N-S-T-R-A dot com. Thanks so much for listening. We’re glad you’re part of this community. And now back to the interview.

Debra Rienstra You do partner a lot with, you know, “regular church folk.” It’s that sort of in-and-out permeable membrane. How do you think about the relationship of what you’re doing here, with Spring Forest, with the work of sort of standard congregations, is there like a mutuality? How do you think about that?

Elaine Heath It’s just like traditional monasticism. You’ve got a community that have this rule of life they follow. People who are not living in the community can become Oblates to the rule of life and have a special relationship. And usually those people go to church somewhere else. Part of our ethic here is we want to resist competition between churches, so we don’t meet on Sundays to do things like programmatically. We usually just rest on Sundays and watch a movie and eat popcorn, you know.

Debra Rienstra That’s a spiritual practice.

Elaine Heath But also, so there’s that sort of historic piece, and people from churches come here for retreats. Lead teams come for retreats. People come—pastors, we have a lot of pastors who come here for a retreat. But also we are a mission community, so we’re very active with supporting refugees. We’re very active with the food programs that we have, and that gives people from a church—lots of churches don’t have things like that going on. They don’t have the resources for it, or they haven’t figured it out. But that way, we can partner with churches and people can come here and they can actually get their hands in the soil, and they can teach somebody to read, and they can see little children learning where food comes from. They can help the chef with her kitchen things, you know. So it’s a wonderful way to provide spiritual formation and missional formation to congregations that don’t have those resources. And we can do these things together.

Debra Rienstra Yeah. And that’s that’s premised on this being a place, an embodied place, a refugia space that people can come to. Yeah. I think that’s a wonderful model. Do you yourself ever feel a sense of loss for “the old ways?” And I’m just thinking of this because at the beginning of your book, God Unbound, which is about Galatians, you write about how Paul challenges the Galatians to let go of their tight grip on the past, and you write about how you, reading that, felt yourself like a little bit of a traditionalist, you know, sort of defending, “But what about the past? What about the old ways?” Which you have loved too, right? So, how would you counsel people who have loved traditional church despite everything, and really do feel this sense of loss and wonder anxiously about what’s next?

Elaine Heath Yeah, I feel empathy. You know, something was going on in the Middle East at the time. I can’t remember exactly the situation. There’s always something going on, but it had to do with people’s culture being wiped out and being told that what they believed didn’t count and wasn’t right and everything. And I was feeling such grief for them, and then all of a sudden, you know, I’m in Galatians, and think, “Well, that’s how those people felt.” And even myself, there are things in my own daily practice that are—they’re precious to me. My way of praying in the morning, the facing into the forest, you know, and things like that, that are rituals for me. And thinking, you know, if somebody told me “that doesn’t matter,” how hard that would be. So I think in the spiritual journey, we come to the place, if we keep maturing, where we realize, in Merton’s words, that so often we think it’s the finger pointing to the moon, we think the finger is the moon. And it’s that way about rituals and all sorts of things that we do, and we get to a place where we realize that intellectually and even spiritually, in an emotional way. But you can’t force people to get to that point. This is something that happens as we grow and mature as life goes by. So what I have said to many people is, “If you are nurtured by traditional church, or, let’s say, conventional church,”—because which traditional church are we talking about? One, right here, middle class, white, are we talking about Brazil? —”So if that nurtures you, keep doing it. But also realize that for other people, that’s not nurturing. It feels dry and lifeless, and it’s clear the Spirit is doing something new.” So instead of insisting everybody stop doing the new thing, and everybody has to come and do the conventional thing, you can be conventional in your worship and bless and make space for others so that we have a plethora of experiments going on. Because we’re in a time of great emergence, as Phyllis Tickle wrote, and we need lots of experiments.

Debra Rienstra Yeah. I appreciated what you wrote about trial and error. It’s a time of trial and error, and it’s okay to try things and have them not work. And that fits the refugia model too, really, really well. I mean, refugia don’t always work. They just sometimes fail. Let’s talk about a couple of key metaphors that I’ve noticed in your writings and in the website for Spring Forest too. One is that metaphor of the mycelial network, so the underground fungus that connects the creatures, the beings, the plants, the trees of the forest. I think is a wonderful metaphor too, for the way that faith and climate people, people who are worried about the climate crisis, and also people of faith—it’s a great metaphor for how they’re finding each other and connecting and building this sort of cultural and spiritual soil where the seeds of the future can grow. How is that metaphor meaningful for you here at Spring Forest?

Elaine Heath Well, it means a lot in terms of the first of all, the diversity of expressions of ministry that are even here on the property, but also, especially in our dispersed community, through following the rule of life together, which—we are a practice-based community, rather than a dogma-based community. So as people are practicing those practices where they live and work and play, then they are forming community in a very specific, contextual way where they are. I think of Steve and Cheryl again, the friends I mentioned earlier. He’s our lay leader. They live in a, I think a working class neighborhood in Lumberton, which is the land of the Lumbee here in North Carolina. And they have developed a wonderful, just neighborhood ministry there with—and they’ve been able, through potluck dinners and front yard barbecues and remembering people’s birthdays and things like this, they’ve developed this friendship network in the neighborhood with people that are on complete opposite sides, politically, racially, and this is in the South, where you’ve got all sorts of issues. And they’ve taken the sort of ethic of Spring Forest here, but it’s caused a mushroom to bloom there that looks really different from here. They don’t have a farm, they don’t have a forest, they’ve got this neighborhood. But the neighboring, the praying, the tabling, resting, all of those things are part of how they live there. And so it’s fruiting there. And it’s the same in other places in the world where we have people that live there.

Debra Rienstra It’s a good example, too, of how eating together is sacramental, both here and in these other networks that are connected to you. The Garden of Eden and the vision of the New Earth in Revelation are both important to you, that that whole long scriptural arc begin in a garden, end in a garden city, and then the Tree of Life is also your symbol, your logo. So how would you situate our work today as people of faith in that long arc of history, from the garden to the Garden City, and how does the Tree of Life fit into that for you?

Elaine Heath There’s a way in which the whole story is happening simultaneously. Does that make sense?

Debra Rienstra Yeah.

Elaine Heath It’s all happening beyond time, sort of simultaneously. So sometimes we’re living in the garden and we’ve been deceived, and now we have to figure out what to do, and sometimes we’re rebuilding the wall, and sometimes we’re on our way to Bethlehem, and sometimes we’re in the garden of the new creation. And we can see it, and we’re living that truth even while there’s still the wall being built. There’s a simultaneity to it all. But for me, I think especially of the theology of Julian of Norwich. That’s why we have her icon here. There’s this vision of love making all things new, that God, Christ, the risen Christ, says in Revelation 21:5, “Behold, I make all things new.” All things, not just a handful of people who get the right doctrine, not just—no, all things: horses and amoeba and all things are being made new in mysterious ways that we can’t completely know.

Debra Rienstra And that’s Colossians one and Romans eight as well.

Elaine Heath It’s this thread that comes through scripture, and we get to participate in that, even while we don’t see all the things completely made new, we get to be part of that. And to me, that’s what it means to follow Christ. That’s what it means to be a disciple. And to be the love of God enfleshed in this world is to keep participating in the making of all things new. This is why healing has such a central role in my theological vision and my practice, is it’s making all things new.

Debra Rienstra Healing land, healing people, healing communities.

Elaine Heath Yeah, yeah. Healing theology. Theology has been so damaged by patriarchy and philosophy and all sorts of things, you know, and racism.

Debra Rienstra Colonization. Yeah, so that embodiment is important even theologically, because we’re not aiming for some abstract doctrinal perfection. We’re not aiming to become disembodied creatures. We’re aiming for this embodied redemption. And so working on the farm, healing, you know, getting muddy, walking through forests, harvesting veg, and you’re able to invite people into that embodiment. Little kids doing yoga, I think that’s wonderful. You know, just finding this kind of rest in their own little bodies. Eating—one of the most embodied and kinship-with-creation things we do, right? Taking it inside ourselves. And that, I think, is condensed in ritual. So I know that you have been playfully experimenting with rituals. I was able to be a part of the Forest Feast last night with my husband Ron and our friend Colin. And it was this beautifully curated event where we shared table together and then went through this prayer sequence that you described, and it was beautifully participative. I noticed you do a blessing of the animals too on the farm. So good thing these are blessed chickens and blessed dairy goats, blessed dogs and cats. What other sort of liturgical shenanigans have you tried to help people live into this embodied faith practice?

Elaine Heath We do so many things. It’s so much fun. It’s never boring. It’s never boring. We have a ritual in the fall, in late November, where we tuck the farm in and put it to bed for the winter, and we have the children come, we get some compost. You know, we’ve cleared out the beds, and they’re gonna rest now. And so the children put some compost in. And we have a liturgy that we use. We light candles, and we thank Mother Earth for the food, we thank God for the opportunities. And so this is one of the things that we do ritualistically. We also have a spring ritual. It’s very Hebrew-Bible like, right? With these seasons and the crops and the things with the liturgical seasons, we also have done a bunch of things. My favorite one so far was for epiphany, and this was two years ago. And so I had the interns from Duke Divinity School do the bulk of the planning. I just gave them a little bit of guidance about the four-fold order of worship and just some things like that. So we had a journey through the forest. It started here. We went on the forest trail. Of course, it was dark outside, and they had gone ahead and set up fairy lights at certain places where we’re going to stop. And one of the interns’ fiance was a musician, so he had his guitar, and he had one of those things where you can play the harmonica and play the guitar at the same time, but he was our troubadour, and all of us were the Magi. So there’s this troop of Magi, and we would stop at each station along the way, and there were prompt questions that we would take five minutes, and people could respond to these questions. There would be a scripture reading, and we respond to the question, we go to the next station. And it was so amazing. People shared from their lives in a very deep way. It surprised me how quickly they went deep. Well, it was dark, and there were these twinkle lights, and there was the troubadour. Then we finally got up to the Christ child, and we went into the goat barn. And honestly, I get chills every time I even remember this. But the students had set up in the goat barn—and the goats were in the barn. Okay, they were behind a little chain link thing so they didn’t step on the icons and everything. But they had set up an altar at the base of the feeding trough with a big icon of Mary with the Christ Child, candles, and some other things there. There were different icons and some fairy lights. And we went in there, and we all crowded in and began to sing. We sang “This Little Light of Mine,” we sang some Christmas carols, and finished the story. And then we came back to the house and had some snacks and talked about what kind of wisdom was given to us since we were Magi. We were going to be people seeking wisdom and seeking—it was the most beautiful thing. And we’ve done lots of things like that. We see the land here is a primary text to learn from and to listen to and to observe, not as a metaphor, but as, it’s actually a conversation partner. So we do things like that.

Debra Rienstra That playfulness is so exciting to me, this sense of using our tradition, using our scriptures, using the skills that we’ve honed as people of faith over generations, singing together, praying together, but experimenting with those things in new contexts and new ways, in new forms of embodiment that are just faithful and yet playful. And so, as you say, people go deep because they’re sort of jarred out of their habitual ways, and that can be such a great formational moment and bonding moment too, and it’s very memorable. We remember that in ways—you know, you had such joy on your face as you’re describing that. What would you say as you look back over the last, well, let’s see, it’s been almost eight years? Seven, eight years here at this location. What would you say has given you the most anguish and what has given you the most joy?

Elaine Heath Oh, anguish. Which story should I tell?

Debra Rienstra Yeah, I don’t want to make it sound like it’s all been beautiful and romantic and perfect.

Elaine Heath Whenever you have community, you have drama. Well, you know, at your typical church, you’re gonna have drama sometimes. But what we’ve found a few times, and it’s pretty predictable. This happens in traditional monasteries too, which is why they have novitiate periods that are sometimes quite lengthy and sort of staggered, like you put your toe in the water. People of very high capacity who are deeply grounded spiritually and have a real vision for the gospel, are attracted to community life like this. People who are really hurt, who’ve had a lot of brokenness, especially from religious institutions or abusive situations, trauma that that is unresolved, that has a lot of unhealed wounds, are also attracted to places like this, often with a sort of utopian hope, because of, you know, life’s deficits.

Debra Rienstra And they feel that this is a place of healing, and they’re right about that.

Elaine Heath They’re right about it. And so what actually happens is sometimes with the person, the second category of person, will come and join in and just be so full of gladness, because, “Oh, these, these are real people, like they’re really doing things in the world. This is what I’ve longed for.” But then, as relationships form, and we’re doing life together, and we all bump up against each other at times, the unhealed wounds fester. And the way I see it is, God’s bringing them to a place where, if they’ll just do their inner work now, now that it’s clear what’s the next step—if they’ll take the next step, whether it’s get some therapy, stay on your meds, get some support for your addiction recovery, whatever the things are—if you’ll take the next step, then this is a very supportive community that can help you. It’s a village that can be around you and you will heal here in the context of this village. But sometimes people are not willing or not able, or it’s not time in their own sense of what they can do, and so then they’ll leave. Sometimes when people leave, this happens in traditional churches, for whatever reason, this is a common sort of psychological reaction, they’ll create some sort of chaotic drama to be the excuse for leaving, rather than have to face the fact that it was time for me to take the next step, and I was too scared. Because that takes a lot of self awareness, you know, to come to realizations about things like that. So I know from talking to people, from, you know, friends that are in traditional monasteries and convents that this is a common thing that happens there. So it happens here sometimes, and it’s never easy. It’s always painful and always challenging, you know, but with God’s help, we get through it. And so that’s the anguish, when those kinds of things happen. We’ve had a time or two where, over the last 20 years, really, where a person would come in, usually a young adult who’s very idealistic, and they’re like, “This isn’t a new monastic community. You’re not forcing people to pray three times a day!” You know, whatever the thing is that they have in their head that is supposed to be, because we’re pretty gracious, you know.

Debra Rienstra You don’t get up at three in the morning.

Elaine Heath Yeah, that’s not us. We can’t do that because, especially if you’ve got families with children and, you know, you’ve got to get up and go to work in the morning. So sometimes there will be somebody that figures they know more than everybody else in the room, and they want to take over and run the joint. You know, that’s not going to happen. So then that sometimes creates some anguish. What about the joy? The joy is—and there’s so much to give me joy. I really, really love seeing people come alive, like I really love seeing people who have, especially people who have been harmed by religion, because of their identity or because of anything, and they find deep spiritual friendship. They find how to connect, in Buechner’s words, their deep passion with the world’s great need, and start a new thing. And it gives them so much joy. And it’s actually helping people. It’s helping the world. And just sort of fanning that flame, that gives me a lot of joy. I have so much joy being in touch with the land and the animals. I just really experience them directly mediating God to me. I feel the divine life in them, and I feel, I guess I get a lot of dopamine hits when I’m out there harvesting and when I’m, you know, brushing the goats and talking to the chickens and whatnot.

Debra Rienstra They are blessed chickens!

Elaine Heath They are blessed chickens.

Debra Rienstra What advice would you give to church people who, even though they love their church and their community, recognize that something needs to change, but they don’t know where to start? What advice would you give?

Elaine Heath To start in their own home, if at all possible, start in their own neighborhood. Start having neighbors over for dinner. Do not tell them we’re going to have a Bible study now, because that’s—it’s not to have a Bible study. It’s to form friendships with our neighbors. Start neighboring well. Figure out who lives on my street. Who lives across the street? Invite them for dinner. Have neighborhood potlucks. We did this in Texas, right after we moved there, I think they’re still going. We’d have 50 people in our house sometimes. But just invite the neighbors for dinner. Have a potluck. Get to know them. Remember their birthdays, go to their kids’ graduation. When you find out their mother died, go to the funeral. It’s so simple. It’s just such basic neighboring. That’s where to start. It’s not a church program. It’s not making you stop going to church somewhere, to go to church over here. What you’re actually doing is living church in your own neighborhood. Start doing that.

Debra Rienstra Elaine, it’s been such a pleasure to be here on the farm with you and to talk with you, get to know you a little bit. Thank you for what you do, and thank you for spending some time with me today.

Elaine Heath It’s been a joy. Thank you for the interview.

Debra Rienstra Thanks for joining us for show notes and full transcripts, please visit debrarienstra.com and click on the Refugia Podcast tab. This season of the Refugia Podcast is produced with generous funding from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. Colin Hoogerwerf is our awesome audio producer. Thanks to Ron Rienstra for content consultation as well as technical and travel support. Till next time, be well.

Father Pete Nunally is the founder of Water and Wilderness Church, a Washington DC-based outdoor church and watershed community. You can read more about the model of Water and Wilderness Church here. Father Pete is a passionate and well-spoken advocate on his social media pages and other forums, as in this interview with Creation Justice Ministries.

Many thanks to Father Pete and the lovely group of people who welcomed Ron and me to Fletcher’s Cove to worship with them last May.

Winter? No problem. They worship outside anyway. Father Pete and some very faithful ducks.

TRANSCRIPT

Pete Nunnally And so this expression and experience of worship begins to expand, and I think people are really looking for that. They want the church to tell them and to show them that God is everywhere, and that particularly in the natural world, the theological thumbprint of God is on all of this, and there’s not a distinction or separation, but actually there’s a union.

Debra Rienstra Welcome to the Refugia Podcast. I’m your host, Professor Debra Rienstra. Refugia are habitats in nature where life endures in times of crisis. We’re exploring the concept of refugia as a metaphor, discovering how people of faith can become people of refugia: nurturing life-giving spaces in the earth, in our human cultural systems, and in our spiritual communities, even in this time of severe disturbance. This season, we’re paying special attention to churches and Christian communities who have figured out how to address the climate crisis together as an essential aspect of their discipleship.

Today, I’m talking with Father Pete Nunnally, founder of Water and Wilderness Church. Father Pete is an Episcopal priest with a tender heart and a sense of adventure. The Water and Wilderness community meets outdoors for worship in several locations around the Washington DC area, adapting traditional worship forums in ways that enrich our encounter with God by reconnecting us with the rivers and trees and sky around us. Water and Wilderness is also a dispersed community, connecting anyone anywhere through online book studies, in-person retreats, and more. I talked with Father Pete outdoors, of course, at Fletcher’s Cove on the Potomac River, just before joining their outdoor worship service. This interview includes a bonus trivia component. For extra points, see if you can identify the birds that join our conversation in the second half of the episode. Let’s get to it.

Debra Rienstra Father Pete, thanks so much for being with me today.

Pete Nunnally I’m so glad to be here.

Debra Rienstra It’s great to talk to you. So let’s start with what Water and Wilderness Church is right now. You’re not a traditional congregation with a building. What are you, exactly?

Pete Nunnally We are a church. We’re an outdoor worshiping community geographically located in DC, but we are also a watershed community of the heart and worked in a lot of churches, and everything that that church did, wherever I was, was really only for the people at that church. But what’s different about Water and Wilderness Church is the concept of watershed community. So the local community here in DC is like a wellspring, and out of that flow tributaries that go all over the country, and we create this watershed. And I use that word to mean both the watershed of a new idea or a new understanding of something, but also, like our physical watersheds are so important to us. And so anybody, anywhere—what I often say is Water and Wilderness Church, what we do is for anybody, anywhere, all the time. So if you are in Indiana, Arizona, California, these are states where we have people that are actively engaged in some of our online formation and things like that. That everything we do is for everyone, and most importantly, for the benefit of the earth.

Debra Rienstra I wanted to ask about whether watershed was both literal and metaphorical for you, and it definitely is. You’ve also described Water and Wilderness Church as a threshold space. So what does that mean to you?

Pete Nunnally I am influenced by so many of my friends that don’t go to church anymore, and so many folks that label themselves spiritual but not religious. They just aren’t going to go into a traditional church building. And I want to take what’s beautiful and valuable about our Christian tradition, and I’m Episcopalian, so, you know, the Episcopal version of the mainline expression, and translate that and then bring it out to where people are. My sister, during Covid, said they take walks on Sunday morning with her family in different parks. And she said, “I get more out of that than I do going to church. I don’t think we’re going to go back to church.” And I thought, man, I get that. And when I tell that to priests and other church people, they nod their head and they say, like, yeah. Some of them are like, “I wish I could take a walk on Sunday morning.” Like, well, how can we receive this reality that people are living into, and they really are searching and seeking deep spiritual connection, but they’re forced to take an a la carte approach. Like I walk in the woods and I get peace there, or I read a book by Thich Nhat Hanh, and I get a little bit of peace. I do you know, like a little bit of divinity here, a little bit of divinity there. Nothing that grounds all of that together. So to me, to take what’s ancient, holy and divine about our Christian tradition and what we understand about God, and then to bring it out of the doors of the church, but with integrity, into the wild places, engraft our worship onto the worship of God that is creation. And I think that’s what I mean when I say a threshold space. Like this is the world. This is the human world, this is the natural world. And then we sometimes just hide all of our really juicy, beautiful stuff about the Christian life as we’ve understood it for 2000 years, and we kind of lock that up into the church. And so we’re trying to bring that out of the church and in a way that has integrity, but is in new spaces and lowering barriers for entry for people.

Debra Rienstra Yeah, so you’re responding to this kind of pervasive alienation between people and the natural world. One of the things I read on your website, and one of the things that you’ve said frequently, is, “What’s good for the earth is good for the soul.” Yeah. Say a little more about how that phrase is meaningful for you.

Pete Nunnally I think we forget that we are part of the community of creation. This is a phrase I got from you.

Debra Rienstra Well, I got it from Randy Woodley.

Pete Nunnally Randy, what a great writer and theologian. And so for a long time, we’ve forgotten that. Did you know our Christian tradition is an indigenous tradition, really? And we’ve scrubbed all of that away. You know the concept of Ubuntu, the African concept of “I am because you are,” and I cannot be a person if you’re not a person. So like the sacred in me recognizes the sacred in you. Like we understand that African sort of understanding that Desmond Tutu and others talk about, but what if we looked at creation the same way? That we can’t be fully human unless the wild world that God created is free to be itself also. And we do. We’ve isolated ourselves from this world, like nobody knows—we’re eating foods that are out of season all year round, and kids grow up and they think that the food comes from the grocery store. And yet, part of what draws us out into the world—see, part of why I like worshiping here is there’s just people around. And you know, like they wanted to come and just be by the river today.

Debra Rienstra Explain where we are today.

Pete Nunnally We are at a place called Fletcher’s Cove and Boathouse. It is a park along the Potomac River in DC proper. And once you get in, kind of the whole place opens up. There’s forest that goes right up into the river. And actually, the Potomac River is tidal in this area, believe it or not, we still have tides all the way up here, and it’s a beautiful place. All kinds of people come to the edge of the river to enjoy themselves. It’s incredibly diverse: people of different nationalities, and celebrating birthdays and graduations and beautiful days. And I like to worship here because you have the combination of people, but also, it really is forest along the river, and so the trees are down and slowly giving themselves back to the earth, and you’re interrupted sometimes by, in our worship, by what’s going on in the natural world. And of course, that’s not an interruption, it’s just what God brings us next. So we have migratory birds and blue herons, and the shad run is just about over, but shad and herring come up the river to spawn, and that brings fishermen out along the river, including myself. And so you get to experience a fuller version of what happens in the world when you’re in a wild place, and when you worship in that same space over and over again, you get to know it through the seasons, and it gets to know you. So we become known to the trees and the river when we continue to come back over and over.

Debra Rienstra Yeah. So you do outdoor worship, but you have other things going on too. So describe some of the other things that you do.

Pete Nunnally Well, we do Zoom book studies. Our very first one was Refugia Faith.

Debra Rienstra Oh, I’ve heard that’s good.

Pete Nunnally It’s really well written, insightful, highly recommend to everyone. And that’s exciting, because we have 20 to 30 people from all over the country who join and it really is a community of the heart, like, “Oh, I believe that I see God in nature.” And a lot of these folks come from a Christian background, but their traditional worship, it’s not doing it for them anymore. And they want to be validated, because you feel so alone when you’re like, “I love Jesus. I grew up with church, but I don’t think it’s responding to the times that we’re in,” and when the world is on fire and our planet needs us so much, so often the church is silent or has trouble finding out what to do. So to me, the natural world is going to show us what to do, and the more we come out here together and graft our worship onto—take the wisdom that we have and add it to the wisdom of nature and the ecology of God, then we’re going to know what to do and cultivate a love of something, then you can really do something. So just to add one more thing on top of that, we do in-person retreats. And those are really, really fun. Next week, we’re going to the Chincoteague Bay Field Stations, an educational marine lab, and they take us into the field, and they teach us about the marine environment. So we’re learning about how barrier islands are formed, or, you know, dropping a net down and bringing up sea urchins and sea sponges. And we really get to experience and see what’s underneath the surface of the water. And then we apply that to our spiritual life and see, not only is God amazing and all these things like—there’s just the granularity of what God has has brought into this world, but then we can see where our faith can grow and our understanding of God can grow by encountering things we haven’t seen before.

Debra Rienstra Yeah. So I often ask people about their spark point, so the moment when you began to realize the urgency of the climate crisis. What was that point for you?

Pete Nunnally I’m a fisherman, and fishing populations have been going down. I read a really wonderful book called Beautiful Swimmers by Warren Wilson; it won the Pulitzer Prize in the 70s about the Chesapeake Bay and the waterman. Even then he was talking about how the watermen were saying that the bay is sick. And I grew up here in the Delmarva area, seeing the sign “Save the Bay” and things like that, but it wasn’t personal to me until I started spending more time there and and you can see like the effects of hardened barriers versus living shorelines at the end of the people’s property. And that the fish population is leaving, like they’re moving. And some of the charter captains that I know talk about like there are no stripers in the river, in the bay anymore. I mean, there are some, but the water is too warm, so they go north and they don’t come back south. And then when I started doing Water and Wilderness Church, that was really an important entry point for me as well.

Debra Rienstra How did you get other people involved in water and wilderness church? When was the moment where you said we need to worship outside and I need to gather people? How did that all work?

Pete Nunnally Well, it started because we were at the end of Covid. We were kind of inside, kind of not. And I’m an old camp counselor, and I said, “I think...I think we can do this outside. And I’m pretty sure it all used to be outside.” And so many stories of Jesus: he’s talking to people at the edge of the Sea of Galilee. He’s talking to them, they’re hiking up a mountain. Like these are things that we can actually do. And so these are rituals. And we walked and talked during Water and Wilderness Church. And so I just started it and said, “Hey, does anybody want to do this?” And some people came out of necessity, because we didn’t really have a lot of church stuff going on.

Debra Rienstra Yeah, this is at your parish?

Pete Nunnally My church, yeah, St. Mary’s in Arlington. And every Sunday we did it. We did twice a month. I thought, this is the Sunday no one’s going to come. And people just kept coming. 23 people came in a snowstorm. Well, not a snow storm, but it was snowing. And the weather was bad, and people would bring hot cider. And when the weather was hot, they’d bring cold lemonade. And, you know, kids started bringing their instruments. So then we had this little homegrown, intergenerational band that started leading the music, and all I did was just keep showing up and saying, “I think this is good.” And then, you know, a beaver comes in the middle of our homily one day, and now all the attention is on this beaver that, Ron, is the size of you. It’s a humongous beaver, and it slaps his tail like you see in the cartoons. And so this expression and experience of worship begins to expand. And I think people are really looking for that. They want the church to tell them and to show them that God is everywhere, and that particularly in the natural world, the theological thumbprint of God is on all of this. And there’s not a distinction or separation, but actually there’s a union. I grew up on four acres and a semi rural area right across from the Potomac, further up river. So I grew up playing in the creeks and the rivers, and spent a long time away from that, and during Covid, kind of came back to it. And as a priest, everything looked different after my seminary training. And I’m like, “Wow, this whole thing is magic. This whole thing is a miracle.” I mean, the river, it’s the same river, and it’s never the same river. We’re here, and y’all can see this, but we just had major flooding in DC, and hundreds and hundreds of massive logs have washed up so far up, no one has seen it this far up and it’s closed the road down here. And there’s this immense redistribution of what used to be. And I think there’s a spiritual biomimicry that we’re trying to get at when we worship out here as well.

Debra Rienstra

Hi, it’s me, Debra. If you are enjoying this podcast episode, go ahead and subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. If you have a minute, leave a review. Good reviews help more listeners discover this podcast. To keep up with all the Refugia news, I invite you to subscribe to the Refugia newsletter on Substack. This is my fortnightly newsletter for people of faith who care about the climate crisis and want to go deeper. Every two weeks, I feature climate news, deeper dives, refugia sightings and much more. Join our community at refugianewsletter.substack.com. For even more goodies, including transcripts and show notes for this podcast, check out my website at debrarienstra.com. D-E-B-R-A-R-I-E-N-S-T-R-A dot com. Thanks so much for listening. We’re glad you’re part of this community. And now back to the interview.

Debra Rienstra So you served as a rector for a long time, and now you’re serving as the wilderness priest. So what has that dialectic been for you between traditional congregational life and what you’re doing now? And maybe there’s people in your community who are still doing normal church, so to speak, and also part of this. So talk about that dialectic a little bit.

Pete Nunnally Yeah, when we began Water and Wilderness Church, I talked a lot about it being a good compliment, and that is—for anybody trying to do something new, it’s a great way to position your new idea relative to the traditional authorities. And it is. People that are formed traditionally can see and understand what we’re trying to do out here. And people say that they’re like, I see the Episcopal, the mainline underpinnings of what’s going on. On the other side, for people who are spiritual but not religious—and just so many good reasons to be that—I really want to affirm the journey that the church needs to take in order to repent and to worship God with integrity and consistency. But the deeper roots that we have as an ancient tradition, and as we were saying earlier, as originally, the followers of Jesus were following an indigenous tradition, and the people of Israel as well. But what the experience of worship is, we do Eucharist, but I tell the story of salvation in a way that’s, I think, right size for people and personalized for people. The language in our Book of Common Prayer as Episcopalians is exquisite in some places. Also still has some language that can be interpreted as penal substitutionary atonement. And we wonder why people have that view, and it’s kind of baked in in some of our stuff. So how can we focus on the story of Jesus to somebody who has never heard of Jesus, that’s what I’m thinking. You’re a spiritual person, or you love nature, and somebody invites you and says, “Hey, there’s this church. I know you’ve been looking for more community, so you can’t be spiritual in isolation. And maybe you could come here. It’s kind of a church, but it’s more relatable.” But we’re not gonna get rid of Jesus. You know? So what does Jesus mean to somebody? Why do we need the Eucharist, for example?

Debra Rienstra So talk about ritual, especially because one of the things I’ve been thinking about is the importance of ritual, and the way that people of faith are stewards of ritual. We have the sacraments, our sort of central rituals, but we also have other rituals, and you’re adapting an Episcopalian flavored Eucharist in particular, maybe baptism too. Is it different when you do those outdoors? What do you do that’s the same? What do you do that’s a little different? How does it feel different when you’re doing those rituals outdoors?

Pete Nunnally When I was in my liturgy class, our professor—I fought with him a lot. Praying shapes believing was like the thing. And just to talk about the Episcopal thing, this is a mainline, this is for everybody, like the church needs to break down the barriers of denominations and all the rest. So this is really for everybody, but I’m an Episcopal priest. But I think the rituals become alive to me when they’re done out here, and they are changed and translated sometimes. So when I tell the story of salvation, like typically we hold the bread and wine up at the end and say, “These are the gifts of God.” And when I started doing it outside, I said, “Well, hell. Like all of this is a gift from God.” And when you’re inside, it’s still all of this, but it’s different when you say, “Look at the river, look at the sky.” This is all—and they say, “look at one another,” like you are all gifts of God. But I never would have come to that point without doing it outside. And then we say, “Take them and remember that Christ died for you and feed on him in your hearts by faith.” And I’ve never really liked that, because there’s this sort of like, “Remember that Christ died, you know, and you should feel a little bit bad about it.” Christ died for you—and I thought, that’s not what the Eucharist is really about. The Eucharist is about Christ living for us. And so I said, “Take this and remember that Christ lives for you, that love and justice and mercy and forgiveness, they live for you, with you and in you. And that is what these things are.” That’s what we’re about.

Debra Rienstra So the way I’ve learned about the Eucharist is it’s remembrance, communion, and hope. So it is remembrance of sacrifice, but it’s also right now, communion with Christ, communion with each other, and then this kind of eschatological hope. But we do often in various traditions tend to get stuck in the remembrance part, and we miss the communion and the hope part. The hope for the feast to come, right? The heavenly feast to come, the ultimate telos. So even just doing it outdoors triggers that a little bit.

Pete Nunnally Yeah, and this river is at least a million years old. And so when you’re in an ancient place, in a regenerative place, all these logs are eventually going to become soil somewhere and feed on itself and to sustain the next thing—that’s the communion of saints that we are part of. It’s not just the people we read about in the Bible. It’s us too, no different than the disciples, the women that supported Jesus’s ministry.

Debra Rienstra Have you ever seen the Cathedral of the Angels in Los Angeles? It has these beautiful murals on both sides of the nave, and it’s depictions of famous saints, but then mixed in are regular Angelenos. The artists—just so that sense that we’re all a part of this community is amazing.

Pete Nunnally One more thing on ritual is that we we’ve had rituals pop up here—

Debra Rienstra —That was my next question!

Pete Nunnally —that we do now. Somebody, about a year in, somebody came and said, “Hey, Father Pete, there’s always different groups of people here. It’s like some come pretty regularly, and we have some new people. And how about every time, every beginning, we introduce ourselves and say one thing we’re grateful for.” And I was like, “Lucinda, that’s a great idea.”

Debra Rienstra So simple.

Pete Nunnally It’s so simple, but can you imagine going to your priest or pastor at home and being like, “I have an idea for how we should start the service now”? Like, it’s impossible to do. But so we do that every single time, and we circle up so the shape of us changes. When we gather, we’re individuals, kind of a mob, and then we circle up so you see somebody says at traditional church—which, by the way, I love traditional church. But they say, “I go to church, I sit in a pew and I see the back of people’s heads,” but at Water and Wilderness Church, we’re circled up. I see your face. But yeah, so that’s a tradition or a ritual here of offering ourselves up to God by speaking our name and beginning with gratitude.

Debra Rienstra Yeah. Do you see a role for the church in—I don’t want to say inventing, because that can make people nervous—but in, let’s call it stewarding ritual, not just the sacraments, but other kinds of ritual that people really need in a moment of crisis, maybe rituals of lament, thanksgiving, as you suggest, other sorts of threshold type rituals that we really need as we deal with this moment of crisis?

Pete Nunnally Do I see the church being able to do that?

Debra Rienstra Yeah. Is what you’re doing a kind of experiment in thinking about what what my husband Ron Rienstra would call liturgical shenanigans?

Pete Nunnally Yeah, I think so. And I think that—again, like I’m from a highly liturgical tradition. We’re just not able to change that much, you know? We’ll have a season of creation, which we did last year, my traditional church, you know, I love those resources. They’re great, but everything else is exactly the same, and so we save different words. But what I like to think that we’re inviting people into is an alternative way of being in the world based on Jesus’s radical love. And one way to do that is to do this outside and let our worship be informed by something that’s been here a lot longer than we have.

Debra Rienstra Yeah, yeah. So I wonder if there’s something about these sort of experimental spaces that effectively can jar traditional churches, which I also love, but jar us into being a little more inventive, a little more attentive to the moment, by doing something so different, you know, we can learn from your example in more traditional churches and congregations and say, “You know, it’s not so scary to try stuff.” We tried stuff during the pandemic too. And honestly, I really miss being outside and hearing the birds worship with us, essentially. You know, I feel like worship is not complete without birdies! But we, I think churches so often just say, “Well, let’s just do things how we always do them,” because it’s already hard, but to have experimental spaces like yours, where you’re just trying stuff and it’s fine and you’re actually discovering riches and richness that you wouldn’t have discovered otherwise. Okay, but true confession time. What do you miss about traditional worship in a sanctuary, high Episcopal sort of traditional worship, if anything?

Pete Nunnally What we’re still working on is how to build lament in every time. And I like the confession of sin and the absolution. It’s important to me, and it’s important for everybody. Again, you know, our spiritual-but-not-religious brothers and sisters, I’m with you. I totally get it. I’m first in line to criticize the church. But if our spirituality is just what feels good to us, then we’re never brought into that place of pain, and in reality, the reality of ourselves in our lives, and then the reality of God’s forgiveness and sustenance and redemption. And confession is a big piece of that, particularly in the natural world, we have done so much and continue to do things to harm your planet.

Debra Rienstra I guess I would not have guessed that your first thing would be confession. But it suggests that there are these theological wisdoms that come from practice and reflection over centuries of the church, and you’re in a place now where you’re thinking through where our emphasis needs to go, and maybe lean away from, so maybe leaning away from our sort of focus on buildings and programs. And leaning into some of these deeper things. There’s certainly advantages to buildings and programs, right? But what sort of theological ideas, or even—I don’t know practice is the right word—but what sort of theological ideas or practices do you feel we need to really lean into right now, at this moment?

Pete Nunnally Obviously, I think we need to go outside, like do it outside.

Debra Rienstra Maybe lean into that kinship with all creation. That’s part of the tradition, but...

Pete Nunnally We’re not on top of it. We’re supposed to be within it. And the body of Christ is not just humans, it is the natural world as well. I look out, the river is—we’re water people, and I did a river baptism last week.

Debra Rienstra Did you?

Pete Nunnally Yeah, down in Petersburg, Virginia, and it was amazing—to have everybody on the bank, and we walked out into the river and took this little baby, Rixie, and dunked her in three times. And it’s hard not to feel there’s the intimacy of God in that moment, because it is a flowing river that’s connected then, to the James River, which goes to the bay, which goes to the ocean. There again, with the communion of saints and this interconnectedness, I think we just run away from God in so many different ways. And one way is that we hide away from this natural world.

Debra Rienstra Yeah, and people are so hungry for embodiment. So to me, connecting embodied ritual with the world is a deeply incarnational response, right? If we really believe, as you say, that Christ is incarnate, then we can’t forget that we are bodies on a planet. So that, to me, is where you know something like a river baptism just—sorry about this, but overflows with the resonance of our embodiment and with incarnational theology. So two final questions: where is Water and Wilderness Church headed? Your goal is not growth. You don’t have a building to deal with or programs to continue. So what is the goal for you? Where are you envisioning the future for Water and Wilderness Church?

Pete Nunnally I do want to grow, but one of the goals is to show—when I was younger, and people would say like, “Oh, you know, understand your life, and then like, you’ll find what you really want to do.” And Buechner talks about your vocation is where the “world’s deep hunger and your deep gladness meet.” And it was about a year into doing this before I realized, like, oh, my whole life makes sense. So I grew up outside. Fished a lot. I’ve loved church. I went to church camp, and was always confused by the gap between this embodied reality of God in community at camp and then we go to church, very sacred space, but very, very different and not as embodied to me, and... what was the question?

Debra Rienstra The question is, what do you envision the future of Water and Wilderness Church to be?

Pete Nunnally I have always kind of felt like I’m on the outside of things, but that situates me very well to do something like this. And I think the future is that we continue to offer this, and this is a church community, so we’re going to build a community of people, and our building will draw, you know, 20 or 30 people here today to worship in this way, and draw people in who’ve been waiting for something like this. Henry Ford said, if he’d asked people, they would have said they wanted a faster horse. Nobody knew they wanted a car until they got that opportunity to have one. And so that’s a little bit of what this: “Hey, you can do it like this,” and it’s not just all woo, woo, making up stuff. It’s true woo. It’s true, but it has these ancient roots. We’re not getting rid of the central reason why we’re here. We’re just opening it up and letting God speak to us through nature. And I see tributaries all over the place. I see this as a movement. So we hopefully will keep a monthly service in Delaware. I want to have a monthly service in Maryland, in DC, obviously, weekly here in Virginia, and so that for people on our border from North Carolina, they’re like, “I want to be on a board so that I can help this come to us in North Carolina.” Yeah, it’s particularly people with neurodivergent kids. Like worshiping in nature is an incredible way for them to encounter God. It’s so hard to sit still and pay attention to a traditional service. So I want to see wherever you go, you know, in six or seven months...wherever you go in the country...

Debra Rienstra Hmm, six or seven months, huh?

Pete Nunnally No, but eventually that there will be churches like this all over. And there are some. I think what’s different about us versus some of the other expressions, is that we are faithful and have integrity to our Christian tradition, but it’s really an act of recovery. We’re not making anything up. We’re just remembering what our spiritual forebears used to know about the wisdom of creation as it relates to God’s ecology and our own personal lives. So I want to see churches like this in every state, in different places. We do it in DC, and people are always like, “Oh my gosh, you should do it in this very remote, beautiful place. “And I’ll be like, “Well, I’d love to do that...” The highly populated areas, cities like DC and New York and Boston...the need is so great for people to be pulled off of the hamster wheel, because everybody wants to climb a ladder, you’re going to realize it’s leaning against the wrong wall. You get to the top, and you’re like, “This isn’t what I wanted.” All that work and effort. So my vision of the future is that there are multiple Water and Wilderness Churches. That’s not a new concept. Evangelical churches and multisite churches all over the place, and it wouldn’t be like that at all.

Debra Rienstra Yeah, you’re just prototyping, and people can find an expression.

Pete Nunnally Somebody has to show other people that you can do it this way, and you can get it funded and make it self-sustaining. The watershed community is part of how we keep that self-sustaining, because you can encounter and you have touch points with our Zoom book studies, or with the videos that I do, or the blog or other resources. It’s this gathering movement, this rising of the tide of spirituality that really is, like it’s going to happen, because people—I talk to so many people and they’re like, “Yeah, I don’t go to church anymore, but I would go to that church.”

Debra Rienstra That’s something.

Pete Nunnally They’re like, “I would do that. I can’t do this because it reminds me of past harm or hypocrisy or whatever, but I would do something like that.”

Debra Rienstra It answers a deep, deep need that people don’t always have the words for. But, as you say, when they see the possibility, something in them says, “Yes, that’s what I’m looking for.”

Pete Nunnally Yeah, Debra, and like me too. I still don’t have the right words to express what happens to me when we do this. All I know is that I have to do this, and it’s not easy. It’d be a lot easier to take a nice-paying, traditional church job with a staff, and you know, this regular stuff, but it’s not what God wants me to do.

Debra Rienstra Well, thank you so much for talking to me today. I have one final question: favorite fish, favorite fishing spot?

Pete Nunnally My favorite fish would be, I mean, I sure love fishing for catfish, but that’s a lot of hanging around. I would say redfish, and I like to fish down in the Northern Neck, which is where the Potomac and the Rappahannock and the York rivers go into the Chesapeake Bay. So the bottom end of those rivers are all salt water and they’re just exquisite. So it’s just so beautiful. And I love chasing down those redfish. Tastes delicious.

Debra Rienstra Well, happy fishing. And thank you again so much for talking to me today.

Pete Nunnally Thank you. Thanks, Debra.

Debra Rienstra Thanks for joining us for show notes and full transcripts, please visit debrarienstra.com and click on the Refugia Podcast tab. This season of the Refugia Podcast is produced with generous funding from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. Colin Hoogerwerf is our awesome audio producer. Thanks to Ron Rienstra for content consultation as well as technical and travel support. Till next time, be well.

Doug Kaufman directs the Anabaptist Climate Collaborative, an organization that leads climate justice initiatives from an Anabaptist faith perspective. Doug and his team support Mennonite and other Anabaptist churches, helping to build networks, train leaders, and empower climate-related initiatives. Doug describes environmental work as a form of peacemaking, a way of countering the slow violence of actions that cause and exacerbate climate change. Thanks to Doug for geeking out with me on theology and offering some glimpses of Mennonite climate work.

Explore some of Doug’s writing on climate advocacy here.

In this episode, we highlight several Anabaptist faith communities who are pursuing climate justice through simple, sustainable living:

* The Taftsville Chapel and their climate initiative called the Schoolhouse for Simple Living

* Doug’s “Mennonite cookbook canon”:

* More-with-Less Cookbook by Doris Longacre

* Simply in Season by Mary Beth Lind and Cathleen Hockman-Wert

* Extending the Table by Joetta Handrich Schlabach

* Sustainable Kitchen by Heather Wolfe and Jaynie McCloskey

Dave Celesky founded called Redeem MI Land, a nonprofit organization inspiring communities of faith in Michigan to invest personally in land restoration projects. Dave describes how his home church, Unity Reformed in Norton Shores, Michigan, has supported the very first Redeem MI Land project, creating a prototype for other communities to follow. Dave’s church is also joining a cohort of A Rocha USA, an organization that supports Christian communities in doing environmental restoration work and integrating love for creation more deeply into congregational life.

Many thanks to Dave for hosting Ron and me one sunny afternoon as we visited the worksite now in the process of restoration from an old garbage dump to a healthy meadow and wetland.

In this episode, Rev. Dr. Heber Brown, founder of the Black Church Food Security Network, describes how experimenting with one small church garden led to connections with other churches and then with farmers and eventually to a transformed ecosystem—in this case, a food shed. This inspiring refugia story weaves through health justice, food security, and climate resilience. Even more, this story celebrates the power of relationships among thousands of gifted, passionate, faithful people.

Many thanks to Heber Brown for graciously welcoming us to a church garden at one of the network churches in Baltimore, where we enjoyed chatting together in the greenhouse. To learn more about Rev. Dr. Heber Brown as a pastor, writer, and speaker, take a look at his website. You can also explore the wider work of the Black Church Food Security Network here.

Rev. Dr. Heber Brown

TRANSCRIPT

Heber Brown Our garden has really become like a front door. It’s a demonstration site. You’re not going to feed an entire city or community with a church garden, but it becomes an activation space for your congregation members and the neighbors to come and reap the personal and individual benefits of just being closer to soil, but then also to practice what collectivism looks like in a garden space. It’s a very controlled environment for a laboratory for, “how do we do this together?” And those learnings can roll over into other places as well.

Debra Rienstra Welcome to the Refugia Podcast. I’m your host, Professor Debra Rienstra. Refugia are habitats in nature where life endures in times of crisis. We’re exploring the concept of refugia as a metaphor, discovering how people of faith can become people of refugia: nurturing life-giving spaces in the earth, in our human cultural systems, and in our spiritual communities, even in this time of severe disturbance. This season, we’re paying special attention to churches and Christian communities who have figured out how to address the climate crisis together as an essential aspect of their discipleship. Today, I’m talking with Rev. Dr. Heber Brown, founder of the Black Church Food Security Network. Beginning with a small congregation, a 1500-square foot garden, and a divine calling, the Black Church Food Security Network now connects 250 Black churches and 100 Black farmers in the Mid-Atlantic states and beyond. Reverend Brown’s story weaves through issues of health justice, food security and climate resilience. And I love how beautifully this story illustrates the power of refugia. One small experiment started to form connections, then spread and eventually transformed a whole ecosystem—in this case, a food shed. I think you’ll find Heber’s brilliance and humility and joy inspiring, but he would be the first to say that this network is built on relationships among thousands of gifted, passionate, faithful people. People finding and exercising their beauty and agency is the best part of this story. Let’s get to it.

Debra Rienstra Heber, it’s so great to talk to you today. Thank you so much for spending some time with me.

Heber Brown Thank you for the opportunity.

Debra Rienstra You’ve told your origin story about the Black Food Security Network a million times. Will you tell it again for our listeners?

Heber Brown Absolutely. So, somewhere about five years in to pastoring a beautiful congregation here in Baltimore City called the Pleasant Hope Baptist Church, I began to notice a pattern of members of our congregation who were being hospitalized, and in response to that, like any well trained pastor will do, we do the things that seminary and other places have taught us: to show up by the bedside, give prayer, give encouragement, don’t stay too long, and get to the next member who needs that kind of pastoral care. And so I was doing what my family—which was a family full of pastors—and seminary taught me to do: to go and visit. And during those visits, and while extending that encouragement, those prayers and the like, I also got the opportunity to do deep listening and learn some things about the people in my church, that stuff that doesn’t necessarily and normally come out on a Sunday morning during all of the activity of a service. And one of the things that would come up, that started to come up in the confidentiality of those sacred circles, was the ways that diet and food was a part of the picture that was leading to the dis-ease and suffering, physical suffering, of those in the church. And I began to hear that over and over again. So I’m going, I’m praying, I’m giving scripture, I’m listening, shaking hands and moving on, and listening and hearing about food being in the picture. Alright, next visit. I’m going, I’m praying, I’m giving scripture, I’m giving encouragement, I’m listening, shaking hands, move to the next person. Food comes up again. It came up so much that eventually I got tired of just hearing about this challenge and walking away. I got unsettled by listening to people who I love and share life with, share with me their challenges, and as much as I believe and know that prayer is powerful, I wondered if there was ways that I could pray in a different way, pray through action.

And so I got the idea—well, God gave vision. Well, no, God didn’t give the first vision. The first one was just my idea. And my idea was to partner with the local market that was really right across the main intersection from our church. And I wanted some type of pathway so that food from that market could get to our church, get to our members, and it could improve their quality of life and address the health challenges in our church. But I still remember the day I went over to that market. And when I went to that market, and I looked at the prices of the produce, and then I also took note of the—as the young folks would say—the vibe of the space. It failed the vibe test, and it failed the price tag test. I saw barriers that would prevent, or at least slow this idea around nutrient-rich produce coming from that market right across the main intersection to our church within walking distance. And I got frustrated by that. I was frustrated because what we needed was right within reach. It was right at our fingertips, literally, but those barriers there would have made it very difficult for us to acquire and obtain the food that was there. Over the years, and like you said, I’ve told this story many times, and it’s a living story, and so even my reflections on parts of it illuminates different ways, even at this stage of my journey with this. But I thought about like, what stopped me from talking to the market manager anyway? So I made the decision on that day just to walk out and say, “No, I’m not going to pursue partnership.” As I reflect on it, I interrogate myself, like, “Why didn’t you at least have a conversation? Because who knows, something could have come out of the conversation, and maybe they would have given you the food for free or the discounted rate...” et cetera, et cetera. And when I sat with that and I thought about it more, I think there was something within me that didn’t want free food. I thought, and I still think to this day, in a different, deeper, more conscious way, more aware way—but back then it was just something within where I thought that free food would have been too expensive. And not in a dollars and cents kind of way. That would have cost us too much with respect to our dignity, our sense of somebody-ness, and I did not want to lead my congregation in kind of genuflecting to the benevolence and charity, sense of charity, of the “haves” of the neighborhood. I did not want to reinforce kind of an inferiority complex that comes with staying in a posture of subservience to what you can recognize to be unjust and racist systems that keep food away from people when I believe that food is a God-given right. Healthy, nutritious food is a God-given right. I didn’t want to lead my congregation into that, and I didn’t want to reinforce even a sense of superiority, which is an equally devastating and damaging thing to the human soul, to think that these poor Black people are coming across the street to get food, and we are in the position to help those poor, at risk, needy people. Whether inferiority or superiority, both, I believe, are corrosive to the human soul. I did not have the articulation of that then, but I had enough in me that was living in that space that stopped me from leading our congregation into a partnership there.

And so I left out, I walked back to the church. While I’m walking back to the church, near the front door of our church, there’s a plot of land, and that land I’d walked past a thousand times before that day, but on that day, with divine discontent bubbling up inside of me, that’s when God gave a vision. God vetoed my idea, gave a real vision, and that vision was rooted in us growing our own food in the front yard of our congregation. And so I go inside the church and I announce this vision to members of the church, and I remember saying to them, “Hey, y’all. God gave me a vision!” And I saw eyes rolling, like, “Oh, here he goes again.” I was at that time, I was in my early thirties. I started pastoring at 28 years old. And, you know, I came in at 28, I had all the ideas in the world. We was gonna fix everything by the weekend. And this patient congregation gave me room to work out all of that energy around changing everything immediately. So they were used to hearing this kind of stuff from me before, and so the rolling of the eyes when I said, “Hey, y’all, let’s start a garden,” was quite expected, but I’m grateful for a remnant of the folks who said, “This one actually might work. Let’s stick with him. Let’s go with him on this.” And that remnant and I, we got together, we started growing food in the front yard of our church, and long story short, that garden helped to transform the spiritual and the physical material conditions of our congregation. 1500-square feet. We started growing 1200 pounds of produce every season: tomatoes, broccoli, kale, corn, even watermelon some years. It just transformed our ministry and even attracted people to the ministry who were not Christian, who’d never come to the church. Some people flew in from out of town. Like this little congregation of like 125 people with the 1500-square foot garden became, for some people, a destination, like church. And I was like, “What is this? We don’t have bells and whistles and smoke machines and everything else. We’re just a regular church on the side of the road with a little piece of land. And this garden is becoming a calling card for our ministry.”

Debra Rienstra It was such a wild thing to do, and yet—it’s just a garden.

Heber Brown It’s just a garden!

Debra Rienstra So, I want to come back to, now, you know, long fifteen years later, you have this network of 250 Black churches and a hundred Black farmers, mostly up and down the East Coast, but all over the US. And we’ll get to that exciting development in a bit, but I want to go back to those early days, because we’re really interested in how congregations get excited. So could you talk about Maxine Nicholas?

Heber Brown Yes, yes. Maxine Nicholas was the president of the sanctuary choir when I first got to Pleasant Hope. And she also was the one who organized a lot of exciting trips for seniors. They went shopping and went to plays. And you know, that was my introduction to her, when I first got to the church. And really, that was the extent, pretty much, of what I knew about her, how she showed up in the ministry. And when I shared this vision from God for us to start a garden, she was one of the members who said, “I’m gonna help.” And it was critical that she...what she did was critical to even us having this conversation today because she had the agricultural and farming know-how. I didn’t.

Debra Rienstra You didn’t know anything!

Heber Brown No, I didn’t know anything! I was, I mean, born in Baltimore City. Yes, I spent summers down the country. As we say in my family and community, we say, you know, “We’re going down the country for the summer.” And so, when school let out, my parents took us down to our relatives’ home in rural Virginia, and my big mama, mama Geraldine, we would stay with her. She had land. She grew, you know, all the things. I wasn’t paying attention to any of that when I was a young child, but some seeds were planted. But it really wasn’t what I was focused on then, so I didn’t know much about growing or, you know, agrarian kind of rhythms of being at all. Sister Maxine, though, grew up with multiple brothers and sisters on a farm in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. She moved to Baltimore from North Carolina around the fifties, joined Pleasant Hope shortly after that, and had really grown with the church over the years. Though she left the farm, the farm never left her. It was still in her. I didn’t know it was there. My seminary-trained pastoral eyes were socialized to lock in on the gifts that people had that could be in service to our Sunday service, the production of the corporate worship experience. So if you can sing, I was trained to say, “Hey, I think you should join the choir.” If you could play an instrument, get on the band. Could you stand for two hours or so? The ushers’ ministry. But I had some major blind spots about the gifts of God in people that were detached— seemingly detached and devoid—from what corporate worship and liturgy could look like in our space. Sister Maxine stepping forward helped to challenge my blind spots. She’s not just a sanctuary choir president. She’s not just the planner of trips for the seniors. She was a farmer.

Debra Rienstra Isn’t that remarkable? I think so many churches are full of such talent and passion, and sort of untilled passion, right? That, as you say, we’re so focused on church programs, whatever those might be, for a church, that we often don’t realize what people are capable of in the service of the name of Jesus, right? So, now you say, when you go to work with a potential partner church, you look for the Sister Maxine.

Heber Brown That’s right, she’s a profile.

Debra Rienstra How do you find the Sister Maxines? Everybody wants them.

Heber Brown Yeah. Many times, well, one thing I know for sure, I’ll say. Sister Maxine is rarely the pastor. It’s not the pastor or anybody with the big highfalutin titles up front on the website, on the camera. It’s rare. I’ll just say that: it’s rare, in my experience, that that’s your Sister Maxine. They do play a crucial role in the furthering and establishment of this kind of ministry, “innovation,” innovation in air quotes. But Sister Maxine is, in many times, in my experience, that’s the one who is recognized as getting things done in the church. And many times, they’re almost allergic to attention. They’re the ones who are running from the microphone or the spotlight, but they’re the ones who prefer, “I’m in the background.” No, they often say things like that: “No, no, that’s not for me. I just want to get stuff done. You know, I don’t know what to say.” Oftentimes they talk like that. But everybody in the church knows if it’s going to get done, this one’s going to do it. Or, you know, maybe it’s a group, they’re going to get it done. And so that’s one of the things that I’ve just trained myself to look for, like, who really is over—you know, when I shake the hand of a pastor, many times I’m looking over their shoulder. Who is behind you? Because what I know is, “Pastor, and no disrespect, but you’re not the one who’s gonna be with me in the garden on the land. You’ll be getting an introduction to the land most times, just like I will be when I first arrive.” Who’s the person who already knows it? And then too, I think you find the Sister Maxine by listening. Hearing Sister Maxine’s story, and really listening to the fact that she grew up on a farm in North Carolina. And watching her face light up when she talked about growing up, she talked about her parents, and she’s since passed away, but I still remember so many conversations we’ve had. And she would tell me about how her parents would send all the children out to work the farm before they went to school. And she would chuckle and say, “My daddy sent the boys and the girls out there to work that land,” to kind of challenge notions of this is not a woman or a girl’s work. Her parents like, “Nope. Everybody get outside.” And she chuckled and laughed and smiled sharing so many of those kinds of memories. And I think you can find the Sister Maxines oftentimes by doing deep listening. And sometimes it’s not a Sister Maxine that’s really doing the farming thing, but it might be a Sister Maxine who’s into herbalism, or, you know, or who has stories about their elders or parents who could walk in the field and put stuff together and tend to a rash or a wound or a bruise. These things might not show up on a resume, but they’re in the lines of the stories of the people who are right under our nose. And so maybe I’ll just offer it finally, that maybe it’s, you know, you find Sister Maxine by doing deep listening.

Debra Rienstra Yeah, yeah. Okay, so now you’ve got a church garden. And it’s transforming the congregation. How? What’s changing?

Heber Brown Well, one of the things that transformed with the congregation was just like the pride. Members of the church was taking pride in what we were doing. You know, we’re not a megachurch in the city. Never have been a megachurch. In fact, our church blended in so much in the background of the neighborhood that when I first got to the church, the trustees—really one of the trustees in particular—was really adamant about us needing to build a steeple on top of our building, because the steeple would then indicate to the community that this is a church. And thank God we never got a steeple, but we didn’t need it. The garden became the steeple, and the members started taking pictures of the produce they were receiving from the church garden and posting it on their Facebook page, and putting it, you know, sharing it with their families. They began sharing recipes in the congregation related to what we were growing in our garden, and I saw people start coming to our church for worship and programming that were coming because we had a garden.

Debra Rienstra Lured by the cabbages.

Heber Brown That’s it! Not these sermons I worked so hard to put together.

Debra RienstraNope. It was the cabbages.

Heber Brown I’m trying to say, “You know, this word in the Greek means...” and all this stuff. And I’m trying to, “Hey, y’all, I have a degree!” And I’m trying to show you I have a degree. Like, “no, we’re here for cabbage.”

Debra Rienstra You just need carrots. So, from there, we become this big network, and there’s a lot going on between those steps. So you’ve got the garden. You start having markets after services on Sunday. What happens next to begin creating this gigantic network?

Heber Brown Yeah, so this network, I mean, this activity with our garden continues to grow and mature. We’re testing. We develop an appetite for experimentation and a curiosity, and nurturing kind of a congregational curiosity about what could happen, like, what if? What if, what if? And in that kind of context, my “what ifs” also grew to: “What if other churches could do this too?” And what if we could work together to systematize our efforts? And so I was very clear that I was not interested in a scaling of this experience in such a way that would create additional siloed congregational ministries. Like, that’s not going to fix and help us get to the root of why we are hungry or sick in the first place. If we’re going to, you know, really get at the root of, or some of the root, of the challenges, we have to create an ecosystem. We have to have churches who do it, but also work with other churches who are doing it. And we compliment—like a choir. You got your sopranos, your altos, your tenors, and you got some churches that will do this part well, other churches will do that part well, but if you sing together, you can create beautiful music together. And so that idea started rolling around in my head, and I started talking to farmers and public health professionals here in the city, and other folks, food justice folks in the city, and just kind of getting their reactions to this idea. I had never seen or heard of anything like that before at that time. And so I was just trying to get a read from others who I respected, to kind of give some insight. And in the course of that, this city, Baltimore, experienced an uprising related to the death of Freddie Gray.

Debra Rienstra Yeah, this is so interesting, how this became a catalyst. Describe that.

Heber Brown It kicked at the uprising and the death of Freddie Gray at the hands of Baltimore City police officers. And for those who are not familiar, Baltimore City, like many communities around this country, sadly, had experienced a long line of Black people who’ve been killed by Baltimore City police officers with no consequences to those officers or to government officials who supported them. So Freddie Gray in 2015 was the latest name in a long list of names and generations of Black families who’ve endured the brutality and the horror of those kinds of experiences. When the city goes up in demonstrations and protests against police brutality against Black people in Baltimore, one of the things that happened was those communities nearest the epicenter of the demonstrations and protests that were already what we call “food apartheid zones” and struggling with food access and food security, those neighborhoods...things intensified because the corner stores that they were dependent on also closed during that time. Public transportation did not send buses through the neighborhood, so they were stranded there. Even the public school system closed for a few days, and 80,000 students in Baltimore City, many of them who were dependent on free breakfast and free lunch from school, had to figure out something else. So with all of that support not there anymore, members of the community started to call our church, because by 2015 we were known kind of like as the “food and garden” church. They got food. It was our calling card. So they called the church office. They said, “Hey, Reverend Brown, Pastor Brown, we need food.” I called our garden team. We harvested from our garden. We called farmers that we knew. Other people just made donation to us. We transformed our church into like this food depot. We started processing donations, harvesting, loaded it up on our church van, and I was driving our church van around the city of Baltimore in the midst of the uprising, getting food to people and into the communities that called us to come.

Debra Rienstra Wow, you’ve done a lot of driving vans around, it seems like. We’ll get back to that. But it’s just so fascinating that that moment catalyzed, it sounds like, an awareness of food insecurity that made it really real for people who are maybe aware of it, but now it’s reached a sort of acute moment. And I love the way that you talked in an interview with Reverend Jen Bailey about how Black churches are already a network. And so that moment, it sounds like, activated that network. And in fact, the way that you talked about the legacy of Black churches having a spiritual vocation connected to social change for a long time, and so many people used to doing things with hardly any obvious resources, like not money or power, and depending on God to make a way out of no way. And it sounds like you just leveraged all of those incredible assets born of years of struggle and said, “We can do this. We can move from being consumers at the whim of systems like this to producers that create food security.” So how did you, you know, sort of leverage those assets and help people understand that they had them?

Heber Brown Yeah, I think that what was helpful to me early on was to almost look at the church like, assume the posture of a social scientist. And to almost go up on the balcony of the church and look down on it. Like, just back up and try as best as possible to clean your lenses so you can just look at it. What does it do? What does it care about? What does it prioritize? Like, just really take notes. And that’s a part of what I was drawn to do early on, was just: what does Pleasant Hope— and not just Pleasant Hope Baptist Church, but all the churches that we’re in relationship with, and all the churches that I knew, being a preacher’s kid, my dad still pastors in this city. And so I’ve grown up in the church, the Black churches of Baltimore and beyond, and so just stepping back and watching to see what it does gave me some curiosities, some clues, some tips and hints, like: wow, if it already does that, then if I can just run downfield a little bit and get in the path of where I know it’s about to come, then potentially it could make what it’s going to do anyway even more impactful. So an example is: pastors’ anniversary or church anniversary services always have food in the picture. You’re going to eat. And you don’t have to be a Black—that’s any church. You’re going to eat throughout the year. It’s a part of the practice of the faith. If you can run downfield and get in front of where you know the congregation is about to come—because church anniversary is the same Sunday every single year. And you can reverse-engineer like, at what point will the church need to buy food? At what point do they need to decide where they get the food from? At what point is the budget decided for the following year so they see how much money they’re going to spend on food. If you can get in and kind of almost double dutch into those critical moments, like jump rope, and be like, “If I make this suggestion at this particular moment, then it’s going to introduce something into the conversation with the trustees that might increase the amount of money spent on food that we then could use to connect with this particular farmer, which we then can use to connect with the kitchen ministry, who they can then use to create the menu for the meal.” And before you know it, you have a plate with local food right in front of everybody’s faces at the church.

Debra Rienstra You have said that after the pulpit, the second holiest place in the building is the kitchen.

Heber Brown It really...honest to God, is the second, and it’s a close second too, because everybody can’t walk into that kitchen. And if you can strategize and think about how to leverage the stuff, the assets, but also your knowledge of how this entity operates, it could really be transformative.

Here we are, chatting at the greenhouse.

Debra Rienstra

Hi, it’s me, Debra. If you are enjoying this podcast episode, go ahead and subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. If you have a minute, leave a review. Good reviews help more listeners discover this podcast. To keep up with all the Refugia news, I invite you to subscribe to the Refugia newsletter on Substack. This is my fortnightly newsletter for people of faith who care about the climate crisis and want to go deeper. Every two weeks, I feature climate news, deeper dives, refugia sightings and much more. Join our community at refugianewsletter.substack.com. For even more goodies, including transcripts and show notes for this podcast, check out my website at debrarienstra.com. D-E-B-R-A-R-I-E-N-S-T-R-A dot com. Thanks so much for listening. We’re glad you’re part of this community. And now back to the interview.

Debra Rienstra You’ve really asked people to go back in the system to origins, like the origins of the soil, and think about the provenance of everything they eat—in the church, but also at home and and say, “Well, why can’t we help Black farmers find markets for their food by creating this whole network?” Talk a little bit about what the network actually looks like. So you’ve got farmers, they create produce, and then you go with a truck, and sounds like it’s all you! You go with a truck, bring their stuff to a church. So explain how that all works now in the larger network.

Heber Brown Yeah, so now, after getting our official start ten years ago, so I started 15 years ago on this journey. The network itself, this is the tenth year. 2025 is our ten year anniversary. And now what our network looks like is helping member churches to start gardens on land that they own. We are very clear about starting on garden-owned—sorry, on church-owned land, just because in this kind of context, gentrification, eminent domain, that’s real. You got Black communities who don’t know if their land or property will be taken because a highway needs to be built here. And we don’t, we’ve not tapped into, or don’t have the sense of agency, collective agency, yet to push back against those kinds of things. And so church-owned land really is important because it creates some political buffers against systems that would be hesitant to snatch church land. Just politically, it’s not a good idea. So knowing that about the political environment, that they don’t want to mess with—they want votes from congregations. They don’t want to, you know—congregations coming after them is like, “Oh, okay, well, let’s grow food on the land that is less likely to be taken by politicians or developers.” And so we help churches to start gardens or agricultural projects. It might be composting, it might be rain barrels. It might be, you know, different types of things to either establish it or to expand it. And our gardens really become like a front door. It’s a demonstration site. You’re not going to feed an entire city or community with a church garden, but it becomes an activation space for your congregation members and the neighbors to come and reap the personal, individual benefits of just being closer to soil, but then also to practice what collectivism looks like in a garden space. It’s a very controlled environment for a laboratory, for, “How do we do this together?” And those learners can roll over into other places as well.

Heber Brown So gardens is one thing. Markets, Black farmers markets. We do them at churches. We like to do it on Sundays right after worship, when people are hungry anyway. We like putting those farmers right there before people get to their car. We want to make it feel like a family reunion, a cookout in your backyard, a holiday gathering. There’s a DJ, we’re line dancing, there’s prepared food, and there’s produce, games for the children. So kind of an event experience. It’s really fun. It’s an experience, you know? And that’s what we really try to do with that program. It’s not just transactional, “Here is your squash.” It’s: let’s give people a nourishing experience that even goes beyond the food that the farmers are bringing. And then we do Black farm tours, where we’re driving people around to kind of literally get your feet on soil. And it’s become an increasing request of groups and churches that many times they don’t even know there are farmers right under their nose, like right around the corner. We’re so disconnected from our local food environments. So Black farm tours are helpful. And then what you reference, with respect to driving food around—it’s almost like, I’ve called it the BCSA program. It’s kind of a play off of “CSA: Community Supported Agriculture,” like the subscription box program. Black Church Supported Agriculture looks like us helping farmers with the logistics of getting bulk items from their farm to congregations. And yes, over these past ten years, I have done a lot of the driving of refrigerated trucks and box trucks. It’s been my joy, though, to do that. It’s been a sanctuary for me, even while pastoring. I mean, so I’m preaching on Sunday, and then I’m delivering sweet potatoes on Monday, and like, behind the wheel of a big box truck. I love that kind of stuff, just because it helps me be feel free to explore my call beyond just more conventional, classic understandings of what it means to be a clergy person. So it’s been great for me to experience that, but ten years in, it is increasingly important that I get from behind the wheel and pass the keys to somebody else, so that we might really systematize it, because if it stays with me, this network won’t go far at all.

Debra Rienstra Yeah. Okay, so I want to read a quote from you, and then I want to ask a question about that very thing. So you put it before that your vision is to move people from being—and this is my summary—your vision is to move people from being disadvantaged consumers to confident producers, and that means, and here’s your quote, “co-creating alternative micro food systems, not just because of the racism and the oppression in the current food system, but also because of the impending challenges around climate change, the growing concerns around geopolitics, and, at the time you said this, Covid-19, which showed us how fragile our current food system is.” So the Black Food Security Network is wrapped up in health justice, food security, climate resilience. Do you have ways of communicating all of that to people? Are the folks who are buying the carrots and the kale aware of all that? And if so, how are they aware of all that?

Heber Brown Yeah, many. I mean, this food is a very political thing, and so it sets a good table for conversations around all of that and so much more that you just lifted up. And so there are many one-on-one conversations or small group conversations or online, you know, conversations that happen where people do recognize the implications of what we’re doing. Yeah, that goes far beyond your next meal. And so that is helpful. I am definitely interested, though, in how we do more in the way of communicating that. I would love to see, for example, Sunday school curricula created that kind of takes—again, if I’m looking at how churches operate today, Christian education programs are one of the things that have been on the church budget and in the air of the programming of the church for a very long time, and I suspect it’s going to stay there. How do we inject it with Sunday school curriculum that fits? So climate change, racism, social justice, food justice. How do we have Sunday school curriculum, vacation Bible school and summer camp experiences that speak to that? How might we reimagine our Sunday live streams? Is anybody really watching the full one hour of your live stream on Sunday? Could it be that we could produce programming that perhaps pops in on a piece of the sermon, but then pops out to another segment that touches on these different things, so that people really have a dynamic experience watching? Maybe there’s one stream of the Sunday service that stays just on the whole service, but maybe there’s an alternative link for those who may be closer to the outer edges or different edges of the ministry, who’s really not interested in hearing the church announcements and when the tea is gonna be and when the that...Maybe, if we thought about how to create material, curriculum, streamed experiences that are a little bit more dynamic, it would also create a runway for the sharing of those. And last thing I’ll say is: what about our small group and discipleship programs at our churches? And so many congregations have book clubs and small group studies that have done wonderful things over the years. I wonder if there could be, in addition to those kinds of groups, where there’s an action component. So we don’t read just for the sake of reading. We read to reflect. We read to be activated to go do, and then we come back and reflect, and then we read the next thing, and then we go do, and then come back—a praxis. Could our small group and discipleship programs embrace a different kind of praxis, or for how they are experimenting with the practice of this faith in this day and time?

Debra Rienstra “Okay, let’s pause and go out to weed a little bit.” There you go. So one of the things I love about your story is the way you began with this—we could call it a “low-resource refugia space,” one congregation. And I’m curious how things feel different now. So ideally, refugia in nature persist and grow, connect and spread through corridors, and eventually you have this renewed ecosystem. So the Black Food Security Network is essentially a successful refugia network. You’ve created an ecosystem. What feels different now for you and for the whole network? You’ve been at this a long time.

Heber Brown What feels different now? So I was thinking this week about the rhythm of nature, and in my personal embrace of this vocation, I try to mirror and mimic nature in a number of ways. And so like during winter, you won’t hear me a lot. I’m doing what nature does, and the energy is in the roots and not in the fruit. And I don’t take a lot of interviews. I don’t travel a lot. I get real still and real quiet. And during the spring, I start poking my head out a little bit more. During the summer, it’s go time. During the fall, it’s harvest time. So I look at that personally, but now I’m also beginning to look at that organizationally, and with respect to this network. And I’m saying, I’m intentionally saying “organization” and “network” separate. With respect to the organization, I am clearer today, as we go through the life cycles of what nature does, that I now have the opportunity, and the responsibility even, to till the soil again in the organization. And a part of that tilling of the soil, turning the soil over, means me renegotiating my position in the organization. That out of necessity, I leaned into a role that, for the past decade, I’ve been organizing and bringing things together, but I recognize, and I always have, my highest and best use is really not in the management of the day to day operations of a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. My skills are not as sharp in all of the ways that would continue to cultivate that kind of consistency and efficiencies in an organization. And so currently, I am working as hard as I can and as fast as I can to get out of positions that I’ve been holding, particularly with the executive director. This is not going to be overnight, but I’m articulating it and saying it out loud to help remind myself, remind my team, and also make it more real. I’m speaking it into—I’m manifesting it through my words that if the organization is to continue to grow and flourish. I can’t stay in this role.

Debra Rienstra Okay, you want to go back to the soil.

Heber Brown Right here. For those who are listening, we’re sitting at one of our member gardens, and this is where I belong. I still, I will obviously still have a role with the organization. I’m not leaving. But maybe there’s a different configuration. Maybe I become more of a John the Baptist. I’m just going out, and I go out and I’m preaching in the wilderness about, and painting the picture, about the necessity of this stuff. And then after that, after I paint the picture, get folks excited, show them that it’s real, help them in the early stages—I love talking about the early stages and my failures and all that kind of stuff. And then pass the baton. Once these congregations are activated and energized and ready, at some point very soon, passing the baton to those in the organization who will continue to work with them to mentor them and grow them. And then with the network as a whole, you know, going around and being like a people pollinator—that’s what I really feel called to. I want to grow food, and I want to go around and people-pollinate. I want to introduce people. I want to connect folks. I think that’s part of my highest use in the network, which will demand a renegotiation of how I show up in the organization.

Debra Rienstra Yeah, yeah, because you’ve talked all along about how important relationships are in making this. It’s always person to person, always about relationships. Yeah. So is the network right now fundamentally built on congregations, still? Like it’s a network of congregations plus farmers.

Heber Brown It’s a network of congregations and it’s a network of relationships with farmers. We really, over the years, one of the developments that we had over the past maybe year and a half or so, was that really the sweet spot of what we do well is work with Black congregations. That’s what we do well. Black farmers, because of a century of discrimination and so many other systemic injustices against them—they need a high level of advocacy, technical assistance, support, financing, et cetera. And we really came to a place about a year and a half ago where we realized...before that point we were trying to help the churches and the farmers. I was like, no, it’s enough getting a church to change one small thing, seemingly small thing. How are you going to do churches and farmers? And so a clarity around—what is the sweet spot of what we do well, and where’s the thing that others are not doing as much? There are a lot of organizations now, thankfully, that give a lot of support to farmers in general and Black farmers in particular. We don’t need to try to be the experts there. We can just be again in a relationship with those organizations that do that with the farmers, and just make sure that we’re dancing well together in how, “If y’all help the farmers and we help the churches, now we bring together what our advocacy, organizing and programming can look like.” And so right now, it’s congregations, and we’re trying to increase our ability to serve our congregations well.

Debra Rienstra Yeah, so that’s refugia-like, too, in the sense that refugia are very particular to a species in a place, and when they spread and grow through corridors, the biodiversity increases. So you know, you’re building, as you say, this ecosystem, and it naturally, you would have biodiversity increase, but there’s still going to be specialized pockets. Okay, lightning round. and then a final question. Lightning round, what’s your favorite veg?

Heber Brown

First thing that came up...oh man, that’s a lot. Nevermind. I’m gonna go with kale. Stay with my kale.

Debra Rienstra

Kale! Okay. I’d have to say carrots for me, because they’re so versatile. And they last a long time.

Heber Brown I’ve had carrot hot dogs. I’m vegetarian, and so I’ve had carrot hot dogs. They are really good.

Debra Rienstra Okay, so I wanted to ask you about being a vegetarian, because this is essentially the South, right? It is so meat centric. I’m vegetarian too. It is hard to find something to eat. How do you do that?

Heber Brown Yes, yes.

Debra RienstraWhat do you do about like, pork barbecue?

Heber BrownYeah. So a lot of things—social functions and fellowships—I know I have to eat beforehand or bring my own food. And so that’s what I do to kind of get through. It’s like, I’m not going for the plate, I’m going for the people.

Debra Rienstra Macaroni and cheese works.

Heber Brown Mac and cheese still works a lot. So the sides—all the sides, I’m good on the sides.

Debra Rienstra Yeah, me too. Most impressive farm skill?

Heber Brown Attracting labor to help.

Debra Rienstra That’s a huge skill!

Heber Brown Huge, huge huge. I’m still learning. I went to beginner farm school, and I’m still learning the farm stuff, and I’m excited about it, but I’m grateful that God has gifted me to get folks to show up to him.

Debra Rienstra Unappreciated farm skill. Okay. Elderberry syrup for communion. Talk about that.

Heber Brown When we all get to heaven, I think Jesus will be serving elderberry syrup. It’s like, no, I’m playing. Yeah, that was one of those experimentations.

Debra Rienstra Did it work?

Heber Brown It worked! And then the next week, Covid hit and shut down. So we were just beginning. I partnered with an herbalist who was gonna—and she also was a baker, so she was gonna be doing fresh bread and elderberry syrup every communion Sunday. The day we did this, she was in the church kitchen, baking the bread, and the smell of bread is just going through the congregation. And I knew she had the elderberry syrup in this big, beautiful container. And so it was such a beautiful moment. And I was so jazzed about...I was jazzed about that, not only because the bread was good and like children were coming back for seconds for communion bread, but also because I felt like with the elderberry syrup and the bread, that it was in deeper alignment with our ethics and what we preached.

Debra Rienstra It’s better sacramentalism. Because, you know, as you’ve been saying all along, it’s not consuming an element of unknown provenance. It’s producing. It’s the fruit of human labor, right? It’s the work of God, the gift of the earth, and the fruit of human labor. And it’s labor you’ve had your actual hands on. So it’s a lot to ask for churches to do this, but it’s, you know, one of these small experiments with radical intent that could be really, really cool.

Heber Brown And I think in a time when congregations, well, I’m thinking about trustee ministries, those who are over financial resources of the church, right? So one of the ways that it worked at my church was, I was like, “Listen, I noticed in our financial reports here that we’re spending X amount on buying these boxes of these pre-made communion cups. What if we could take some of the money we’re already spending and divert it to an herbalist who could grow, who could make us the syrup that we need, and what if we can do it that way?” And so I had to speak to that particular ministry, not from the perspective of like the earth and the soil, but in a language that I thought that they could better appreciate was dollars and cents.

Debra Rienstra Yeah, keeping those dollars local. Oh my gosh. Okay. Final question: what is your vision for the Church, capital C, in the next 50 years?

Heber Brown That we’d be baptized back into the soil. That Scripture speaks about the ways in which we are brought from the soil, and God breathed into Adam, the breath of life. And I think there’s more of the breath of life now back in the soil, if we would but release ourselves into the compost of what is happening socially now that we would be in a position where new life, resurrection, would be experienced in a different kind of way through our ministry.

Debra Rienstra Heber, thank you so much. This was such a pleasure. Thank you for your time today. Thank you.

Debra Rienstra Thanks for joining us for show notes and full transcripts, please visit debrarienstra.com and click on the Refugia Podcast tab. This season of the Refugia Podcast is produced with generous funding from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. Colin Hoogerwerf is our awesome audio producer. Thanks to Ron Rienstra for content consultation as well as technical and travel support. Till next time, be well.

Welcome to the first episode of Season 4! I’m so glad to share with you this delightful episode about a group of terrific Lutheran folks who exemplify joyful lay leadership and getting a whole congregation on board on behalf of climate action.

Many thanks to Judy Hinck and to the lively group of Mount Olive members who spent an afternoon with me and Ron sharing their climate justice journey (so far!). Special thanks to Art Halbardier, who graciously hosted and offered extremely helpful background before our visit.

To learn more about Mount Olive Lutheran’s work, check out this article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune about Mount Olive’s geothermal project. You might also appreciate this document recounting the history of Mount Olive’s climate work, or these links with more about the history of their climate justice initiatives, their 2017 statement, their climate justice page, and an FAQ document about their projects:

You can also learn more about the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s statements on climate justice and about the Minnesota chapter of Interfaith Power and Light. To read Pope Francis’ encyclical on climate, visit Laudato si’.

Join us for another season of the Refugia Podcast, with eight new episodes (plus a bonus!) releasing weekly starting September 14.