{"id":34234,"date":"2025-04-04T06:00:03","date_gmt":"2025-04-04T10:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/freelancechristianity\/?p=34234"},"modified":"2025-04-04T06:37:49","modified_gmt":"2025-04-04T10:37:49","slug":"compost-theology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/freelancechristianity\/compost-theology\/","title":{"rendered":"Compost Theology"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><p>A couple of days ago, Kate Bowler interviewed Jeff Chu on her podcast \u201cEverything Happens.\u201d Jeff Chu is a journalist, an author, a pastor, and one of the most interesting people in the progressive persons of faith atmosphere. Along with Sarah Bessey and the late Rachel Held Evans, he is one of the founders of \u201cEvolving Faith,\u201d a movment that fashions itself as a home for persons of faith who are deconstructing a faith that has turned out over time to be toxic, meaningless, or both. Jeanne and I attended the 2023 Evolving Faith Conference in Minneapolis, a wonderful experience that turned out to be the beginning of Jeanne\u2019s path to Lutheran seminary and future ordination.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-embedded-content\" data-secret=\"QZ5bVHnqYr\"><p><a href=\"https:\/\/katebowler.com\/podcasts\/good-soil\/\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">Good Soil<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-embedded-content\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts\" security=\"restricted\" style=\"position: absolute; visibility: hidden;\" title=\"\u201cGood Soil\u201d \u2014 Kate Bowler\" src=\"https:\/\/katebowler.com\/podcasts\/good-soil\/embed\/#?secret=XdvfBgU2e7#?secret=QZ5bVHnqYr\" data-secret=\"QZ5bVHnqYr\" width=\"500\" height=\"282\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Jeff Chu was asked to finish Rachel Held Evans\u2019 final, unfinished manuscript upon her untimely death in 2019. The result,\u00a0<em>Wholehearted Faith<\/em>, ia beautiful\u2013I highly recommend it. While studying at Princeton Theological Seminary, he took a course called \u201cTheology of Agriculture\u201d that took him and his fellow students to a plot of land called the \u201cFarminary\u201d just outside of town. I wrote about his experiences and the insights he gained while at the Farminary a couple of years ago\u2013enjoy!<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-embedded-content\" data-secret=\"Ejww2m8mSY\"><p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/freelancechristianity\/the-bible-as-a-compost-pile\/\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\">What Compost Piles Teach Us About Faith<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-embedded-content\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts\" security=\"restricted\" style=\"position: absolute; visibility: hidden;\" title=\"\u201cWhat Compost Piles Teach Us About Faith\u201d \u2014 Freelance Christianity\" src=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/freelancechristianity\/the-bible-as-a-compost-pile\/embed\/#?secret=oUbm62nPJ4#?secret=Ejww2m8mSY\" data-secret=\"Ejww2m8mSY\" width=\"500\" height=\"282\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A couple of days ago, Kate Bowler interviewed Jeff Chu on her podcast \u201cEverything Happens.\u201d Jeff Chu is a journalist, an author, a pastor, and one of the most interesting people in the progressive persons of faith atmosphere. Along with Sarah Bessey and the late Rachel Held Evans, he is one of the founders of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2938,"featured_media":28728,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Compost Theology<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What can we learn about the life of faith from a compost pile?\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/freelancechristianity\/compost-theology\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta 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