An Earth Day Invitation to Watershed Discipleship

“We have lost our way as creatures of God’s biosphere,” writes Ched Myers in the May 2014 issue of Sojourners magazine, “but the map woven into creation can lead us home.”

What is the map?

Many of us are un-placed people, Ched writes, which means that we don’t know much about the places in which we live. To care for a place, we need to love it. To love a place we have to know it. And one way to know your place is to think in terms of your watershed. It’s a kind of map that tells us how we might care for not only our local ecosystems, but the also the planet.

In his article Ched calls for the church to take up what he calls watershed discipleship. “Watershed discipleship invites Christians to ‘re-inhabit’ that corner of creation in which we reside by engaging everything within it in terms of ecological resiliency and social justice.”

Ched lists five marks of how watershed discipleship can lead to the renewal of our broken world: theological re-grounding, re-placed economics, political imagination, social justice, and ecclesial renewal.

Those five marks cover pretty much every area of our lives. In other words, watershed discipleship is not a riparian club for Christian biology geeks who want to get better at identifying salamanders. It’s for all of us. It’s about rethinking how we live on this earth. 

Earth Day is not something we should celebrate only once a year. Every day is Earth Day, and God’s mandate to “serve and preserve” (Gen.2:15) this Earth is really an invitation to love. Learning about watershed discipleship can give our love hands and feet.

If these ideas interest you, I invite you to join Ched, myself, and others in the NC mountains June 16-20. The course is called “Sabbath Economics and Watershed Discipleship,” and it combines morning lectures, afternoon site visits and permaculture training, communal meals, music, and discussion. Each day is bookended with Lauds and Vespers, led by our in-house musician and chaplain. The course takes place on the lovely campus of Warren Wilson College, in Swannanoa, NC, with site visits to several model food gardens.

Thus far we have a great group of folks who’ve signed up: the director of the Memphis Center for Food and Faith, several pastors from around the country, a community garden manager from Lexington, KY, several students. We even have an international contingent: a couple from England working on food and faith issues across the pond and two Anglican mission workers coming from Brazil.

It’s an impressive group. Which means that the learning will happen not only in the classroom, but also out in the garden and in conversations around the table. Early Bird registration ends May 15, and we still have spaces left.

The map of creation is before us, and we have the opportunity to help each other become better map readers. I hope you’re consider joining us. Course details here.