Tag: Ched Myers

Eco-Lent Resources

Eco-Lent Resources

Cherice Bock

Lent is a meaningful time in the church calendar to focus on watershed discipleship: How will you be a more faithful disciple within your watershed this season?

We suggest below a number of Lenten devotionals focused on care for creation and environmental justice. A member of the watershed discipleship community, C. John Hildebrand, put together a daily reading schedule for Elaine Enns and Ched Myers’ new book, Healing Haunted Histories: A Settler Discipleship of Decolonization, so you can read through it during Lent, knowing others are doing the same. Here are some of our suggestions for focusing your Lenten practice on watershed discipleship:

Image: “Sunset through Horatio N. May Chapel,” Tim Nafziger

Pre-order “Healing Haunted Histories” | Discount code

Pre-order “Healing Haunted Histories” | Discount code

Cherice Bock

In Healing Haunted Histories, Elaine Enns and Ched Myers invite readers to consider how the call to follow Jesus is also a summons to racial justice and decolonization. They chart a path for how we can dig into our family histories to face our own “ghosts” of settler colonialism, Indigenous displacement, and white supremacy.

This 400-page book is equal parts: memoir (mostly focusing on Enns’ Mennonite family and community, who endured the Russian Civil War, fled the Soviet aftermath, and settled on Indigenous land in Saskatchewan in the 1920s);  social analysis; theological reflection, and workbook for those ready to “do their own work.”

For a limited time, friends of Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries are eligible for a special discount off the softcover edition of Healing Haunted Histories $38 USD retail price. Get the coupon code and learn more>

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Indigenous Justice & Christian Faith: Land, Law, Language | February 18–22, 2019

Indigenous Justice & Christian Faith: Land, Law, Language | February 18–22, 2019

WD Editors

[Artwork: Wowasake kin slolyapo wowahwala he e: Know the Power of Peace, Diptych icon of Black Elk by Robert Two Bulls, artist-in-residence at this year’s Bartimaeus Kinsler Institute.]

This year’s Bartimaeus Kinsler Institute will consider the topic, “Indigenous Justice & Christian Faith: Land, Law, Language.” Held February 18–22, 2019 at Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries (BCM) in Oak View, CA (unceded Chumash Territory, Ventura River Watershed). Regular registration is open through January 27, and late registration will be available through February 3 (with a 10% extra fee). Read more →

Christian Food Movement: an interview with Nurya Love Parish

Christian Food Movement: an interview with Nurya Love Parish

Cherice Bock

by Cherice Bock and Nurya Love Parish

In 2014, Rev. Nurya Love Parish began organizing a network she called the Christian Food Movement, and started a farm-based ministry called Plainsong Farm in Michigan. A former Unitarian Universalist and now Episcopal priest, Parish preached on ecology, food, and faith as far back as 2002, but her vision for putting the themes of faith and ecology together in her life and ministry began to coalesce in 2014 when she encountered Fred Bahnson’s Soil & Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith, which led her to Wake Forest School of Divinity’s Food, Faith, & Religious Leadership Initiative. There, she heard about watershed discipleship, and hatched the idea for catalyzing a Christian Food Movement that connects Christians who are integrating food and faith, in the style of the Jewish Food Movement. Read more →

Elaine Enns & Ched Myers teaching at Ghost Ranch retreat on watershed discipleship June 24-30

Elaine Enns & Ched Myers teaching at Ghost Ranch retreat on watershed discipleship June 24-30

WD Editors

Join Elaine Enns and Ched Myers at Ghost Ranch June 24-30 for a retreat called “Signs of the Times — Watershed Discipleship and Restorative Justice: Mapping Bloodlines, Landlines, and Songlines.”

Ghost Ranch is a beautiful education and retreat center in New Mexico, an excellent location in which to rest, explore, and learn together with others. Read more →

Reflection on the Bartimaeus Kinsler Institute 2018

Reflection on the Bartimaeus Kinsler Institute 2018

WD Editors

Editor’s Note: Luke Winslow attended the Bartimaeus Kinsler Institute in January, entitled “Digging In: Heels, Histories, Hearts.” You can read other reflections from the Institute here.

by Luke Winslow
Guest Contributor

It felt like the Puget Sound hadn’t seen the sun since November. It might’ve come out for a few minutes here and there this winter, but my curiosity in visiting a completely different bioregion for the Bartimeus Kinsler Institute was matched by a readiness for immediate sunburns the moment I arrived in Southern California. I’m grateful for the flexibility of an academic schedule—a few months away from finishing my master’s work at The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology—to have this weeklong Institute nicely timed with spring break. Driving through occupied Duwamish, Puyallup, Nisqually, and others’ territory to leave my adopted watershed after an Ash Wednesday service, I felt a twinge of vulnerability. Read more →

If an Ancient Cathedral Had Burned: Farewell to Grandmother Oak

If an Ancient Cathedral Had Burned: Farewell to Grandmother Oak

Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries

by Ched Myers

Old trees are our parents, and our parents’ parents, perchance.

— Henry David Thoreau, Journal, Oct 1855

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, three weeks into the Thomas Fire here in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, the losses from California’s largest wildfire on record (scorching more than 280,000 acres) became searingly real, personal, and almost unbearable.

Ventura County, CA after the 2017 fires, photo by Tim Nafziger, used by permission.

The weather was warm and blessedly clear of smoke, the fire now 85% contained and only still burning far in the backcountry. So after the Farmer’s Market, Elaine and I took a ride on our little scooter. We figured we’d recovered enough psychologically from the immediate trauma of the conflagration to be able to take a look around the perimeter of the Ojai Valley. What we saw was sobering: from East End to Matilija to White Ledge Peak (upon which we gaze every day from our home) to Red Mountain, there was little but ashen scars in every direction. Entire mountainsides had been burned down to dirt and stone.

We saved the last leg of our impromptu tour for that part of our watershed most beloved to us: the hills behind Lake Casitas. Here in 2005 we first encountered uncompromised chaparral and undisturbed old growth oak savannahs—exceedingly rare in overdeveloped southern California. Here we hopped fences and hiked off grid, sat under trees, and came to know plant communities. Here we received the deepest confirmation of our decision to move to this place. Read more →

Indigenous People’s Day

Cherice Bock

Today is increasingly being recognized as Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and in honor of that, we would like to share a few links about ways that people are working with the Indigenous people of their area through watershed discipleship. Christianity is about loving God, and loving our neighbors as ourselves: in short, about reconciliation and creating right relationships. Through watershed discipleship, we recognize that the work of reconciliation before us in this time and place (especially as American descendants of Europeans) includes reconciliation with God, creation, and the people around us whose land our ancestors settled. This is not easy work, and can feel daunting, at least to me, so here are some resources on what it looks like to do this type of reconciliatory work.