Archives For Nathan Aaberg

Interview with Jon Terry, Executive Director of the Au Sable Institute

Nathan Aaberg —  September 30, 2022 — 2 Comments

Jon Terry standing in woods with Au Sable Tshirt on

When I reached out to Jon Terry, the Executive Director of the Au Sable Institute of Environmental Studies, to ask for an interview, Jon immediately suggested that the Institute’s new director of college programs might be a better candidate. Jon, it was clear, felt that the new director would have more interesting things to say. How fascinated would readers be in budgeting, staff leadership, and strategic planning? But on instinct, I stuck with my original intention. And I’m glad I did.

Much of the progress we have to make in Creation Care isn’t in theology and isn’t in remote, pristine places. We need to make progress in the messy and challenging places where our the ideals of whole Christian values meet the realities of how we use land and water and how our human society works. Leadership of an organization is one of those places. As you will see, Jon is eloquent, insightful, and candid about practical leadership, theology, and emerging challenges. He believes Christians should be on the forefront of solving the most pressing challenges that God’s earth faces. 

Prior to joining the Au Sable Institute, Jon was president of Capitol Youth Strategies LLC in Washington, D.C. His company provided strategic consulting to nonprofit organizations working to ensure that young people are prepared for college and  career and are able to achieve  success in life. Jon holds a bachelor’s degree from Calvin College and a graduate certificate in Nonprofit Management from George Mason University. He has been married to Kristen for 27 years and they have two sons in their 20s. 

Nathan: Can you share your journey of faith and how a concern for Creation has become part of that?

Jon: I was raised in a Christian home and come from a long line of faithful Christians. So it was presented to me as a young age, but like any good teenager, I rebelled. There was a period where I was like, “What do I really believe?” And so I set out to live my own way, but I couldn’t shake the belief that I was created and loved by a god.

There’s some author, maybe it was C.S. Lewis, who talks about the idea that in the center of everyone there’s a believing self and a doubting self. I relate to that and feel, on most days, my believing self is about 51 percent and the doubting self is 49 percent. And I have to choose which side to nurture. I choose every day to nurture my believing self.

As far as caring for the earth and Creation, I guess my defining moment for that was when I was studying at Au Sable in the middle of winter in January of 1991. I was an undergrad at Calvin University in Grand Rapids and took a, a course up here at Au Sable where I now work. And God spoke to me one night – which is a story in and of itself – but it changed the trajectory of my life. It was when I was on a walk by myself in the middle of the night, just kind of standing on the edge of a frozen pond. It was really impactful to me. For some reason, I could hear God better when I was out in His Creation. I was grateful for that and wanted to tap into that.

So it was a completely selfish desire to tap into wisdom and truth. It was less about caring for Creation at the time than just kind of recognizing there’s something special about being out in the created world. I’m able to be closer to the Creator there than when I’m in the middle of the, a city, at college, or inside a house. I don’t think it’s required. I don’t think you have to be standing on the edge of a frozen pond. But for whatever reason, it certainly helped me at that time.

Nathan: You were born and raised in Michigan. What’s special to you about the land and water of your state?

Jon: I love Michigan, particularly northern Michigan. Halfway between the equator and the North Pole is the 45th parallel, and it runs between my house and Au Sable. So every day I pass over it twice going in each direction. And I always say that you’ve got to be north of the 45th parallel, or at least close to that, to really be in Michigan. <laughter>

I grew up in Charlevoix, which is on Lake Michigan, about an hour from here. When I lived on the East Coast for about 20 years after college. I just missed the lakes, especially the big lake – Lake Michigan. And when I’m swimming in that cold lake now late in the evening before the sun goes down, that’s when I feel most alive. There’s just a lot of beauty here. You’re always aware of it, because like half the year it’s trying to kill you. <laughter> It’s just that you’re not in control, particularly during those winter months.

When I lived in a city for those 20 years away from Michigan, someone once asked me, “When was the last time I stepped foot on the earth?” And it had been months. You’re just constantly on pavement or a sidewalk. That’s not the case here, which is great.

Nathan: I first visited the Au Sable Institute in 2017 and was really taken by it and the warm, welcoming spirit of the people there. Can you share what the mission of the Au Sable Institute is and what it’s doing?

Jon: Yes. I work for a really cool and amazing organization. Our mission is to inspire and educate people to serve, protect and restore God’s earth. We were started in the late 1960s by a professor of biology from Taylor University in Indiana as a camp for kids in the summer. He needed counselors. The college students he knew were all biology students, so he brought them up to be counselors for kids. And he quickly realized that the counselors were actually getting more out of the experience, or at least as much out of it, as the kids. So he essentially established a field station for Taylor students who were in the biology or, or environmental sciences. Then Calvin College joined with them.

If you go to a big university, the university will have a field station for the science students. Most Christian colleges don’t have that for themselves. So we serve that role for about 53 Christian colleges throughout the U.S. and Canada during the summer. Students from these schools come to us here in northern Michigan. We also have a campus off of Seattle on Whidbey Island that we call our Pacific Rim campus. So if you’re interested in marine life, marine biology, and alpine ecology, you take courses out there. And we also have one course in Costa Rica that focus on sustainable agriculture. The rest of the year we work with local schools and churches on habitat restoration projects and environmental education programs.

Students in the Field Biology of Spring course show-off a piece of God’s creation

Students in the Field Biology of Spring course show off a piece of God’s Creation – a lily pad rhizome retrieved from the pond behind them.

Nathan: You mentioned you had been in Washington, D.C. for 20 years. What brought you back to Au Sable? What was that calling?

Jon: Honestly, it was a calling just to get back to northern Michigan. My wife and I just felt it was time. It was fun living in a big city when you’re young and energetic and proving yourself. That was important to me when I was young and right out of college. But after a while, the great achievement was just making it through a year. You make a ton of money; you spend a ton of money. And everything’s kind of a fight. We were ready to live differently, and we wanted to come back to northern Michigan.

Au Sable wasn’t on my radar at the time. My initial plan was to keep my foot in Washington, DC. And that wasn’t working out. A year or two after I was back in northern Michigan, I was questioning what I was doing with my life. What am I supposed to do? It wasn’t working out, as I thought it would work out. A position opened up here focused on external relationships communications, fundraising partnerships, and alumni relations. So I applied for that position and, thankfully, got it. I’m very grateful for that. That was about five years ago.

God is much more creative than I am. I never could have figured this out on my own and make it happen on my own. So I’m just really grateful to have ended up back here.

Nathan: Tell me more about how Au Sable is evolving and how your leadership is helping make that possible. I’m confident you’re a servant leader and not a dictator.

Jon: Well, that’s my goal, but you should talk to the staff. <laughter> My approach is to hire really good people, trust them to do their jobs, empower them, and remove barriers for them.

As far as our programming, there are a couple of issues we’re working on now, particularly related to our engagement with community schools, where we’ve been doing things the same way for 40 years. We’re asking, “Does that still make sense? Is that still a need?” We’re still trying to crack that.

I think one thing I’ve brought here is just a willingness to really look at things, even our college program, and see if it’s time to do it differently. There is value in how we’ve done things. I respect that. But I also think it’s good to ask the question, “Why do we do it that way?” I’d like us to be willing to try new things, be willing to fail. That’s a big thing that I’d like us to do. Hopefully not too much failure, but that’s how you learn.

As an example, next summer, we’re going to add an agro-ecology class course and a one-week program for people who aren’t college students. There are a lot of people other than college students who are really interested in the issue of caring for the earth, particularly from a Christian perspective and what it means for their faith. And right now, if you’re not a college student who wants to spend five weeks on our campus taking a really intensive course, there’s not much that we offer for you. We’re still figuring out exactly what that course will be, but it will be a chance for those people who care about these issues and want to spend a week on our campus exploring them.

Nathan: We talked at the very beginning of this interview about servant leadership, and I see a parallel between leading an organization with a servant leadership paradigm and serving God’s Creation, enabling it to thrive by both protecting and restoring it. So have you learned anything from being a servant leader for the organization that might apply to how we take care of Creation?

Jon: Maybe the commonality is being willing to lead while still being humble. I think I am humble, because I just know I have a really limited view of the big picture and just how complicated things are, particularly if it involves people.

You know Creation and ecosystems are full of complexity as well. When you go into leadership or Creation stewardship thinking you have it figured out and you have confidence that you have it figured out. I guarantee you don’t have a clue. You can’t really know what’s really going to happen when you pull one thread out when everything’s connected to it.

I talked earlier about coming back to Michigan and thinking I had a plan and being really confident in that plan. Nothing transpired the way I thought it would play out. So I guess I’m just recognizing my limitations. One of my favorite verses is in Psalm 100. At our staff meetings, we usually open with a scripture. If I’ve forgotten to assign someone to bring one, my fallback is Psalm 100. “Know that the Lord himself is God. It is He who has made us and not ourselves. We are his people and the sheep of his pasture.” It’s not my job to figure everything out. I need to be reminded of that. And, frankly, a burden is lifted when I realize that I’m just a sheep. When I forget that and think I’m the shepherd, then there’s issues. Things don’t go well.

One of the recurring themes in a lot of the writings of Wendell Berry is about humility in the face of Creation, what’s around us, and these longstanding patterns and relationships that we’re just barely perceiving. Science leads us to believe that we can manage everything and control everything and understand everything. And that’s just really, really faulty.

I read a good book called The Life and Death of the Great Lakes. Every step along the way in the building of the Erie Canal, people think they’ve got it figured out and know exactly what’s going to happen. Then the sea lamprey comes through (and that became an ecological disaster). And when we go to fix one thing, then that screws up another thing. Everything’s connected. We’re just constantly screwing things up. It’s just way more complex than we can understand. There are limitations.

Nathan: What sort of impacts have you seen Au Sable have on the students who come through?

Jon: What I consistently hear is the word “misfit.” Before coming to Au Sable, many students felt like misfits in their church communities and perhaps in their families and even at their schools because of their love of the earth. They didn’t quite fit in, and they’re kind of looked at with suspicion. And then in the scientific community, they’re looked at with suspicion because of their faith. So they just felt they didn’t fit in to any circle. When they’re all here at Au Sable together and surrounded by other students from all these other schools, it’s the first time they don’t feel that. If they see a snake, for example, they all gather around it. They have competitions to see which of the dorms can find the most different bird species. In most other places, that kind of thing would be kind of weird. Here it’s really encouraged and celebrated.

White board with bird names listed

List of birds spotted by Au Sable Institute students recently.

I just sent out an email to our students who were here both this summer and the year before and about 10 students replied. One got a job at an environmental nonprofit. She wrote: “I think about Au Sable often. I’ve enjoyed sharing what I’ve learned with my friends and family. I can’t thank you enough for everything you’ve done that led me to Au Sable because it has been one of the greatest joys of my life.”

Then this other student wrote: “I’m now a restoration technician at the Midewin National Tall Grass Prairie with a nonprofit organization called The Wetlands Initiative. I’m constantly inspired by how Midewin is healing. Although many areas are still in early stages of restoration, the native floor and fauna are coming back and thriving. I’m thankful that I have the opportunity to help restore what is left of the Prairie State. I’m excited to be caring for God’s Creation while sharing its beauty with others.”

Other students shared how Au Sable first showed them that doing the things they value could be a career, that this matters to God, and that this work can be part of building God’s Kingdom. And they’ve never heard that before.

Nathan: That is awesome. Are you seeing trends among those colleges in terms of Creation Care?

Jon: It’s hard to tell, to be honest. Some schools are farther along. They’ve got clubs on campus specifically around sustainability projects and caring for Creation. At others, this is really not on the radar at all and not any sort of priority. We serve all sorts of different schools in all stages.

Nathan: What are some of the biggest challenges that kind of keep you up at night?

Jon: The divisiveness of our culture is really hard. Christian colleges are on a spectrum of theological beliefs on a lot of hot button issues. We serve all of them, and we want their students to come to us and be a community while they’re here. But students often pick their schools because they’re aligned with the students’ particular beliefs and upbringings. And so they’re kind of expecting us to be like their home school.

One of our benefits is that we’re not. We have students across the spectrum, and we all come together. But students then need to grapple with what does community means while they’re here. How do you respect people that have different views on the age of the earth, on climate change, and on human sexuality issues? Schools are taking positions. And people are picking what group they want to be in and just want to be around people of that group.

I have a deep fear that that it’s going to just continually be harder and harder for us to be neutral. I don’t know if “neutral” is the right word. We stand for something. I’m a zealot for what I believe. But how can people from different schools all come together and be a community, particularly while they’re here, and respect each other and love each other?

Nathan: We’ve had multiple conversations in the past, and you often circle back to liturgy, the work of the people. Can you say a little bit more about that?

Jon: I love liturgy. When I was in DC, we went to an Anglican church where liturgy was a big part of it, and I loved the rootedness of it, the faithfulness of it, the beauty of it. Here, we like the idea of liturgy – it could just be a walk through the woods – as daily habits and as a way to push back against the larger culture. Your time in church on Sunday morning is not enough to reorient your frame of thinking about your role in God’s story. Our country’s culture can be distorted and give you distorted thinking about your values. So we need to ask what are the things we do on a daily basis that help remind us of God’s story, the truth of God’s story? A walk in the woods can remind you that you’re the sheep and not the shepherd. It’s humbling.

(Note – Jon led the development of a beautiful liturgy workbook around Creation Care at Au Sable that is entitled Liturgies of Restoration. You can order a free copy here.)

Nathan: I’d like to take that thought about a liturgical culture further. You’ve gone to different churches in many different places. Do you have any thoughts for what Christian culture would be like if it was true to God and yet made a concern and consciousness of Creation an essential element? How could we build that kind of culture?

Jon: I don’t have an easy answer for that. I think a lot of it has to do with what is your end? We shouldn’t want Creation at the end of the day to be the end goal. Our goal isn’t that we have clean water. What we need to ask of anything is, “Is this going to glorify God?”

Caring for Creation is a natural expression of Christian faith. It’s a part of what you do to be faithful to Jesus and to love the things that God cares about. It’s like a spiritual discipline to me. So when you read about spiritual disciplines like prayer and fasting, you do those things. Not because you want to be really good at prayer and fasting. You do them because you want to be more like Christ. And if you could be more like Christ without those things, then you wouldn’t have to do them. So, to me, being aware of the earth and God’s Creation and caring for it is just another spiritual discipline, a means to the end of being more Christ-like.

I think more Christians would be willing to go along with Creation Care if they realized that being more Christ-like was the end goal and not feel like the most important thing is the health of the environment. They don’t want to feel that you will use their faith in order to get them to do what you want. It’s more about, “I love Jesus. I believe what the Bible says about God and His Creation.” That’s the end. It’s just natural for me then to want to respond to that. As opposed to starting with, “We need to address climate change so let’s use your faith to have you act differently.”

So, if it’s about Jesus, the climate gets changed even though the work itself might look the same. I guess it goes back to that divisiveness issue again. Some Christians fear (that if they work to protect Creation) that all of a sudden they’re going be driving a Prius with a Coexist bumper sticker.

 

Students at Au Sable Institute’s Pacific Rim campus enjoy the life of the Pacific Ocean edge.

Nathan: We have two thousand years of history in which taking care of Creation hasn’t been seen as part of how we serve and love God. It’s been peripheral. In fact, being concerned about Creation made you suspect, because it seemed like you were worshipping nature. How would you change that in a local church? What would make possible a church culture that cherished this world that God loves?

Jon: My grandma’s favorite song was, “I’ll Fly Away.” It’s a beautiful song. And it’s also completely wrong. It’s the idea is that we’re bound for something else, and this earth is not it. This idea needs to be changed.

When I speak to churches now, I always include a strong focus on the cosmic scope of Christ’s desire to restore all things. In advance of this interview, you said you were going to ask what my favorite Bible verse is around Creation Care. Christians usually go to Genesis 2:15 where we’re called to serve and protect Creation, which is what dominion looks like. But I was actually going to read from Revelation 21:1-4 in which there is the image of the new heaven and the new earth coming here. We’re not going to be sucked away.

The best book I think that you can read on Creation Care isn’t specifically about Creation Care. It’s called Surprised By Hope and is written by N.T. Wright. It blew my mind. It made me understand Christ’s resurrection as the first fruits. Christ’s resurrection gives us a glimpse of what the new earth is going to look like. That changes everything about what building the kingdom looks like now, particularly in the sense of the earth. If there was more of an understanding of where we’re headed and how it doesn’t just involve people – it involves everything! – that would be very helpful.

Nathan: I really appreciate you bringing up Revelation and what the end goal is. We need an alternative to the Left Behind series.

Jon: Well, that was half my childhood. They were big at the time. I had a good friend who anytime he’d come home and his parents weren’t home, he’d freak out because he thought he was left behind. He was scarred for life. And Left Behind is not true. The whole story in the Bible is about God coming down here. It’s really beautiful. It changes how you live now.

Nathan: Absolutely. Jon, I believe anytime we’re doing what God wants from us in our lives, we’ll usually be compelled to grow as people. God doesn’t usually give us a task that’s super easy. We’re often called to things that stretch us and take us beyond what we think we want to do. So I’m curious about how sense you’re being called to grow.

Jon: That’s a great question. I guess I’m growing in two ways. The first is that I’m growing with grief and suffering. I lost a younger brother a little over a year ago.

Nathan: I’m sorry.

Jon: Thank you. I’d made it 50 years of my life without ever experiencing what death and grief were. When I’d have friends or a loved one who would lose someone, I’d say the right things, but not have a clue of what they were feeling. So I’m just growing personally a lot through this grief. And with my parents and my wife’s parents, it feels we’re entering a phase where there’ll be more grief, and we’ll be learning how to live with that. I don’t know how I missed out. So how do I learn more about being Christ-like through suffering? That’s a big chunk of my life right now.

The other half specifically related to my leadership is that for a lot of my life I liked people to like me. I like making decisions, but when you’re a leader, the stuff that comes to you isn’t the fun stuff. The good stuff gets taken care of without me. The hard stuff comes to me. With every decision, someone’s going be disappointed. I have to learn to just live with that and grow through that. A big growth area for me is making decisions when you know it’s going to disappoint someone, but then remaining in relationship with them and moving on and continuing to respect each other and work together. It’s not easy.

Nathan: Is there anything else I didn’t ask you that you’d like to share thoughts on?

Jon: No, this has been great. I appreciate you helping me think about these issues. I’m grateful for your interest in our work and what you do to push it forward and to bring attention to it and your willingness to be a misfit, too.

Group shot of students at Au Sable Institute’s Pacific Rim campus based at Whidbey Island.

 

permalink

Another Way of Thinking About Jesus, Pigs, and Demons

Nathan Aaberg —  August 31, 2022 — 2 Comments


 

My post about the Bible story involving the pigs, demons, amd Jesus has somehow ended up being the most popular article I have written.

This popularity, along with the the diversity of comments, tells me two things. First, this story from an ancient time and from three of the gospels is still profoundly provocative. In it, Jesus shows powers and a beyond-human presence. He is no mere wise man. Demons, which for 21st century readers raise all kinds of questions, also appear.

And there are the pigs.

Interestingly, we don’t see Jesus interacting with animals very much in the Gospels (although the story from Mark 1:12-13 is very significant), and even here he does not directly do so. We want to ask Jesus, “Do animals matter to you?” I want to ask him, “As someone from a Jewish agrarian society, what did you think when you saw the pigs?”

We have complicated perceptions of pigs, too. In Charlotte’s Web, we sympathize with a gentle, intelligent animal. Yet, we also associate pigs with many negative attributes. We don’t want to be called a pig.

In the story, the massive herd of pigs die suddenly and violently. Their death is clearly connected with the demons being allowed to go into them. But here it’s not clear from the story whether the pigs are passive creatures who are only acted upon in the story or whether they have volition of their own.

Even more strangely, as I have already written, we know pigs can swim. So how could they drown?

And this is where Biblical storytelling creates mystery as well. The story gives us discrete data points. It doesn’t give us a clear statement that explains how those data points fit together. It is up to the reader of the story to discern what that interpretive thread should be.

The second conclusion I gather from the interest in what I have written is that people are not convinced by the standard theological explanations of the story. Despite what many theologians and pastors have said, people with common sense and a heart for God’s Creation have a hard time accepting that Jesus would care nothing about the pigs.

All of this has made me even more curious about alternative readings of the story.

So when I came across one such interpretation in the book by Norman Wirzba entitled This Sacred Life, I wanted to share it with you.

 

Norman Wirzba is, by the way, someone I deeply admire. He is the Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Christian Theology at Duke University and Senior Fellow at Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics. He has also written books like Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land and From Nature to Creation: A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World. And I am just scratching the surface of the attention he gives to Creation in his thinking and writing.

So I was surprised to find myself disagreeing with one key element of his interpretation.

Let’s have you judge for yourself. Wirzba’s interpretation appears in a footnote that is just one large paragraph on page 171 of This Sacred Life. I’m sharing it below and have taken the liberty of dividing it into paragraphs for easier digestion:

“Readers of this story are often puzzled and dismayed that Jesus allows the demons (at their own request) to enter a large herd of swine that numbered around 2,000. Upon entering the swine, the whole herd ran down a steep bank and into the sea (or lake) where they drowned.

Why did Jesus allow this? Does Jesus really hate pigs? It is, of course, difficult to know exactly what Jesus was thinking at this moment, but one plausible interpretation would suggest that the death of the herd was Jesus’ indictment of intensive and abusive forms of ancient Roman agriculture practiced on latifundia in the provinces and around the Mediterranean that were known to degrade the land, creatures, and farm workers (many of whom were slaves). To raise a herd that size, the best that a pig can do is register as a “unit of production” (to borrow a term from today’s industrial agriculture).

It is important to note that Jesus did not send the demons into the pigs. The demons asked to be located there, sensing (perhaps) in the pigs’ abusive condition a place where their violent, demonic ways would be at home. If this interpretation is correct, then this story expands the scope of Jesus’s concern for the integrity and value of creaturely life beyond the man to include the pigs as well. Jesus, in other words, seeks to undo the powers that degrade people and pigs.”

There is much in Wirzba’s book that has enriched my understanding of the connection between God, humanity, and the rest of Creation. In particular, he highlights our “creatureliness.” We, like the rest of Creation, have been created. We are created kin. And the life we and all other creatures enjoy is sustained by God. Life, in other words, truly is a gift that we share in common with the rest of Creation.

It is out of that view of Creation that Wirzba’s theory comes.

I’m completely in alignment with that frame of thinking. I do believe that Jesus’ ultimate mission and purpose is to undo and defeat the evil in the world that degrades people and other living things. Jesus redeems people in part so they can be the stewards and humble shepherds of Creation they were meant to be.

Yet, I ultimately disagree with this interpretation of this specific story. Essentially, his interpretation asserts that by permitting the destruction of the pigs by demons Jesus was indicting the inhumane treatment of the pigs within the Roman latifundia system.

That, to borrow a phrase from the Vietnam war, is like bombing a village to save it.

Wirzba’s thinking seems to be based on the assumption that the size of the pig herd was unusually large and abusive. In fact, from what I can tell, large flocks and herds were not unusual in ancient times. As this blog post from the website The Theology of Work reminds us, Jacob made a gift of at least 550 animals to Esau in advance of them meeting again after many years of being apart (Genesis 32:13-15). From the fact that in the story the pigs did not appear to be fenced in, the pigs very likely had the ability to move about and enjoy fresh air and sunlight. This is completely unlike factory farms today.

Nor are large numbers of animals on a landscape inherently damaging to the land. An example of this is White Oak Pastures in rural Georgia, a farm run by Will Harris. View this video to get a sense of the scale of the thoughtful stewardship going on.

 

I don’t mean to be critical of Wirzba’s concerns and sensitivity to the pigs in the story at all. We have a tendency to bring our current concerns with us when we venture into the texts of the Bible. That’s not wrong. It’s entirely human. I’ll admit I do the same thing. But what we need to do is ask hard questions. Are, for example, the ancient texts and contexts of the Bible addressing those concerns in the ways we are thinking about them?

In this regard and in connection with this particular story, I have much more of a problem with the cultural blndness of Saint Augustine of Hippo than I do with Wirzba’s suggestion.

Here is a quotation I’ve found attributed to Saint Augustine in several places on the Internet (yes, I know i need to get a more specific notation) in regard to this story:

Christ himself shows that to refrain from the killing of animals and the destroying of plants is the height of superstition, for judging that there are no common rights between us and the beasts and trees, he sent the devils into a herd of swine and with a curse withered the tree on which he found no fruit.

The lack of nuance in this statement is breathtaking. The cruel callousness towards the life of God’s world is stunning.

A key nuance that Saint Augustine missed and that Norman Wirzba and others have noticed is that the demons asked to be allowed to go into the pigs. They were not driven there. How could Saint Augustine make the argument he did? I’m convinced that the forces of culture around him prejudiced his judgement against what is actually in the 66 books of the Bible and what open hearts can tell us.

This brings us back to a central theme of my past years of study and writing. Christians have demonstrated a lack of discernment in reading the whole Bible in relation to Creation for centuries now. We have also had a weak, shallow, narrow idea of what we are redeemed by Jesus for and for what role humanity was originally created. The result is that we ignore Creation or, even worse, rationalize the grinding of Creation under our heels.

This, I’m coming to believe, is why the interpretation of this puzzling, provocative story matters so much.

permalink

Love God by Prospering Your Farmland (Even if You Aren’t the Farmer)

Nathan Aaberg —  July 30, 2022 — Leave a comment

When you think about farmers, you probably assume they own the land they farm. And you may well assume the farmers are the only ones who can decide how farming is done on the land.

In fact, there are many farmland owners who do not do the farming. And, in fact, those farmland owners can decide what kind of farming they want done on their land.

According to an insightful report from The Nature Conservancy, 41 percent of all U.S farmland is owned by a non-farming landowner and that figure is 62 percent in Midwest. In McHenry County (just east of Lake County, Illinois, where we live), that figure is over 80 percent!

The news that Bill and Melinda Gates had become the largest private farmland owners in the country highlighted this phenomenon.

If someone uses your property in a way that you agreed they could, the logic is clear. You are responsible in part for what they do and the impacts of what they do. This means that farmland owners who don’t farm are still important decision-makers in our country’s food and agriculture system.

And that means they have a whole lot to do with the stewarding of God’s earth.

After all, fifty-two percent of America’s land mass is used for agriculture.

But do farmland owners apply stewardship values to the management of their farmland to the degree they could and should?

The answer is generally not.

That same report from The Nature Conservancy I quoted from earlier revealed that 80 percent of the landowners surveyed relied more on their farmers for information about conservation than any other source.

It is true that many farmers do take conservation seriously. They do so, however, within the paradigm of farming as they know it. That paradigm is a production-oriented, industrial approach. That paradigm, even if tweaked and refined, generally results in declining soil life, erosion, a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, and miles and miles of land where a monarch butterfly cannot find a single milkweed.

But thanks to pioneers in regenerative agriculture (which is rediscovering principles of food production indigenous peoples have known for millennia), we now know there is a very different paradigm for agricullture that is better for God’s earth and good for the farmer, too. Gabe Brown, a Christian farmer, exemplifies what that kind of farming can look like. Check out his book, this podcast, and this video to learn more.

If you are a farmland owner who doesn’t farm, I urge you to apply your Christian faith to how you manage your farmland.

Ask yourself these questions. How well that does the farming on my land reflect the values I find in the Bible? How well does the farming on my land reflect what I know of God and God’s Creation through the Bible and my own experiences in Creation?

Our faith is clear that we do not own this earth.

As Dr. Allen Williams puts it, God put us here to be both servants and masters of that earth. We are not here just to use the earth and then escape to heaven.

It is clear, especially from the Old Testament, that we are to have limits to how we use Creation. Remember that for the Israelites even the land was to have its sabbath every seventh year. This was likely, in part, a wise systeming for maintaining the fertility of the soil. But the command was also teaching the Israelites that the land, too, had its own needs that mattered to God.

That priniciple has not expired. Efficiency and economic production are not the greatest good for God.

It is also clear, especially from the New Testament, that our hearts are remade by faith in Jesus. When they are, we will reflect the fruits of the Spirit (Galations 5:22-23) – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control –  in all we do. I believe those principles apply to how to we treat people and how we treat God’s earth.

From the Bible, we see, too, that the living things of this earth have their own relationship with God and are sustained by God. In fact, from Psalm 148 and Revelation 5:13 we can conclude that the living things of this earth are part of the choir of Creation that we are also members of.

In other words, the land a Christian owns, whether it is a suburban lot or a 500-acre farm, is not just a financial asset. It is not “real estate.”

The land you own is a unique portion of the living earth that is part of the overall world that God so loves. It is alive. It supports other life in complex ecological relationships. What is done to the portion of God’s earth that you temporarily steward impacts land and water and living things far beyond it.

I don’t mean to suggest that being a fully engaged steward of your farmland with the goal of prospering Creation is easy.

You may rely on the income from the land for a significant portion of your yearly budget.

Agriculture and the ecology of soil, land, and water are complex. Farming has its own language, its own tools and equipment.

And the status quo approach to agriculture is a powerful status quo. It takes energy and tenacity and conviction to persist in a different approach. What’s more, you likely have an existing relationship with the farming renter who is likely a family member or friend in your community.

Complexity, however, is not a justification for inaction or procrastination.

Through its wisdom literature, the Bible prepares us for applying God’s values in a complicated world that is not always black and white.

Jewish and Christian thinkers have also produced wonderful writings and bodies of wisdom guidance. Use those resources to grow your wisdom and apply what you learn to your farmland management.

Wisdom also requires you to learn more about soil life, the realities of conventional farming, regenerative agriculture, farmland ownership, and the situation of your current farmer in your county. Being responsible for your farmland requires that you know enough to judge whether the farming is contributign to the life of God’s earth or depleting it. Loving your neighbor means being as fair as you can be to the farmer you lease to.

Then apply your faith-based wisdom to how you manage your farmland in your particular situation.

For example, if you are asking the farmer to invest in new, complex practices that will have long-term benefits for your land, then you should give the farmer long-term lease so he or she can also enjoy some of those benefits they are making possilbe.

You can also learn wisdom from other farmland owners. An Illinois landowner I know made clear to her renter (who happened to be here nephew) that she intended to move the farming of her land in an organic, sustainble direction. When the nephew showed no willingness or interest in learning more and adjusting to her values, even in an incremental way, the landowner had no choice but to not renew the lease when it expired. Sometimes, making those hard decisions are the only way to be true to God’s values. I’m happy to report, by the way, that the landowner eventually found a farmer completely in synch with her values.

In a different case, a landowner with land in Iowa planned to move that property to organic as a better way of caring for it. The farmer was uneasy because organic farming approach is quite different and requires much more documentation. But both the farmer and the landowner wanted to maintain their relationship. The farmer was open to changing his ways.

The landowner applied wisdom and love of neighobr. She is paying for an organic farming agronomist to advise and help the farmer during the transition process whenever the farmer  needs it. This is enabling the farmer to feel more comfortable and be more successful. Its a gesture, too, that shows the landowner is willing to share the risks of the change.

As part of my work that I mentioned earlier, I am helping to organize an event on Tuesday, August, 2nd for non-farming farmland owners. The event will feature three farmland owners who will share their experiences and lessons from moving towards better stewardship of their farmland. It’s extremely helpful to learn from other farmland owners.

 

I’m happy to report that more and more private and public farmland owners are working to improve their farmland stewardship. If you own farmland, I hope you will be bravely take full ownership of the responsibility and opportunity you have to prosper God’s earth. If you know a farmland owner on the journey of improving the stewardship of that land, please help them and encourage them and pray for them.

Don’t hesitate to reach out to me if I can I help you connect to the resources that would help you.

 

permalink

10 Ways a Commitment to God’s Earth Deepens Your Faith-Life

Nathan Aaberg —  May 30, 2022 — 2 Comments

On Sunday, April 24th, I gave another sermon to the good people of North Suburban Mennonite Church. They asked me to do so with an Earth Sunday theme but otherwise gave me no direction. I had complete freedom.

So I considered ideas and thoughts I had had in the past but had not presented about or written about.

I ultimately chose to call their attention to a number of ways in which a Christian faith-life that includes a deep commitment to shepherding Creation contributes to a whole, loving, God-honoring faith-life. This is something I’ve been intrigued by for some time. In this blog post, I’m going to share ten.

Isn’t it enough, you might ask, to just be 100% committed to the truth that Creation matters to God? In other words, do we really need to justify a commitment to God’s earth as one of the fundamental ways people of the Christian Way should live?

No.

And yet yes.

The reality is that the culture of Christianity in America and in the world is very diverse. And it’s safe to say that most Christian culture still either recoils at the idea that Creation matters or gives it some half-hearted adherence in theology but not in everyday habits and choices.

In the spirit of 1 Peter 3:15, I believe it’s useful to be able to offer a defense, with gentleness and respect, to the non-believer and to the believer, for why we follow Jesus and why our following includes loving Creation. I also believe that a whole faith necessarily holds together better and with more resilience than a partial faith. We should, as I have written, have an ecology of theology.

So let’s dive into the list. A whole faith that includes God’s Earth as a fundamental element of it will bear the following good fruit:

#1 Transformed Hearts

We know from Proverbs 27:19 and from many words of Jesus that our lives reflect the state of our hearts. In fact, the state of our heart is a major point of concern for much of the Bible. Being in God’s earth and understanding it and working to restore it all help to shape our hearts in salutary ways.

This can be the peace we feel and experience when we are on the water of a stream or lake or hiking through beautiful mountain forests. This can also be humility and wonder at the blessings of God’s goodness and creativity.

It can also be what the Old Testament labels “fear,” as in Deutoronomy 10:12 or Proverbs 9:10. From these verses, it is clear that this fear is something we need to have. Fear, of course, doesn’t feel like a 21st century notion of how we relate to God. But this is another example of interpretation that hides the original nuance. The Hebrew word we translate as fear is “yirah,” and it actually doesn’t have a simple equivalent in English. It actually conveys fear, awe, and reverence. All at once. Simultaneously.

Where is the best place to experience awe, reverence, and fear simultaneously? Can there be any doubt? It’s being in Creation, whether it’s observing a jumping spider in a backyard garden or encountering a grizzly in Denali National Park. And that awe, reverence, and fear is what our hearts often desperately need to be opened to the deeper realities of this world and to be open to a fuller conception of God in our hearts and minds.

 

#2 Pervasive Awareness of the Reality of Sin

When life is going well for us in our modern, technological world, it’s actually easy for the reality of sin to seem rather quaint and naggingly troublesome, like a small chronic pain in your knee that won’t quite go away.

The whole equation changes if we believe God holds us accountable for how we individually and as societies treat God’s Creation (and, I would add, the most vulnerable people of our world). If you believe that and pay attention to what we actually do to God’s Creation, then the wounds of sin become powerfully evident.

Consider that fifty percent of the coral reefs have died since the 1950s. And that matters because they are said to provide habitat for 25% of marine life. Factory farms house hundreds of thousands of animals in horrible conditions. Many of the wild animals mentioned in the Bible, like lion and bear and antelope, no longer live in that area because of hunting and human expansion. The existence of some animals on this planet has simpley winked out forever. The list goes on.

The tragedy and loss are clear when we consider that our number one human job is to serve and keep God’s earth. An art museum night guard who took part in the vandalization of some paintings in the museum and allowed others to be stolen and then burned would not be a guard for long  Sin, both individual and collective, is real. Its prevalence in the light of the destruction of Creation is unmistakable and heartbreaking.

This hearbreak illuminates human sin in flashing neon lights. It makes clear to us that we need God’s help and deliverance.

 

#3 Sharpened Wisdom

Immersing yourself in the systems and interdependencies of God’s Creation will grow the nuances of your thinking and perceptions. You will better be able to understand whole systems work. You will become more observant. You will grow the abiltiy to weigh principles and values in particular specific circumstances and choose the best practical course going forward.

That is wisdom. The Bible celebrates wisdom. Being wise in understanding and applying the whole Bible to one’s life uses exacty the same mental and heart muscles that figuring out how to sustainable use and restore God’s earth does. Being an active steward of God’s earth compels us to grow in wisdom. In the process, you can build your ability to be wise in other aspects of your faith-life.

 

# 4 Good Saltiness

We are called to be the salt of the earth. We are called to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Enabling Creation to thrive is a way of loving your neighbors near and far. And the neighbors who most benefit from a thriving Creation are often the poor and disadvantaged.

Struggling to prevent wells from being poisoned by agriultural inputs is a way of being the salt of the earth. Designing cities and rural areas in ways that don’t require every family to own many cars is a way to love the poor and build more community. Preventing overfishing so that future generations of coastal communities will be able to live off of the sea as their ancestors did is a way to love one’s neighbor while also cherishing the amazing life God declared to be good.

 

#5 Awareness of the Tempter

When Satan tempted Jesus and offered him the principalities of the world, Jesus resisted. Using and exploiting the resources of this world for unbridled power is the same temptation we, our communities, and our nations face. There are many ways to rationalize taking from God’s earth beyond what earth and the life of God’s earth can bear. But rationalization for our selfish, God-ignoring motives is the way of the Tempter. And one can, as Satan showed in the story, use Bible verses to rationalize things that are against God’s will.

Being alert to the rationalizations all around us in our Christian culture for going along with the harm to Creation will awaken your heart and mind to the efforts of the Tempter in many areas of life.

 

#6 Restraint and Simplicity

We live in a world full of conveniences and a myriad of recreation options, all there to meet every wish and need and hunger. Creating habits to protect God’s earth through our daily life choices requires us to limit ourselves, both individually and collectively.

There’s a strong thread of limits and restraints in the Bible that American Christians often want to ignore or categorize as no longer applicable because of the work of Jesus. The Sabbath, one of the core commandments, calls upon us, as Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, to be part of a ‘palace in time,’ to rest not only ourselves but also give rest to the land and livestock.

The practice of tithing causes us to live with less and have faith that God will provide.

Jesus fasted. Fasting is about restraint.

Restraints and limits are actually, in other words, blessed things.

The only way we individually and socially will protect and restore Creation effectively is if we restrain ourselves and adopt simpler lives. As a society, that will mean leaving some areas forever wild and even pulling back our human presence in other places. That will mean reducing reliance on fossil fuels. Acting and caring for creation help build our capacity to live simply and with restraint and with generous interdependence. That capacity will bear fruit in other parts of our lives.

 

#7 Resonant Lives and Faith

In the book Simply Christian, N.T. Wright calls the reader’s attention to the fact that around the world people, regardless of whether they are Christian or not, share common dreams of justice and goodness and peace, of what should be. These dream, these yearnings, N.T. Wright says, come from God and from what used to be.

When followers of Jesus ignore Creation and contribute to its destruction and justify its diminishment, we not only harm life that matters we also play a horribly out of tune note that ruins the whole song and the whole chord of what the Christian Way is.

Why would a young person or any person who knows in their heart that prairies and forests and oceans and the teeming life of the soil are all amazing and good, accept the other convictions of the Christian Way if the people following that way foul the world and don’t care that they do so?

On the contrary, when we defend and protect and restore God’s earth, we point to a unifying and compelling whole Way that is beautiful and challenging at the same time. This is a faith and a life that calls out to the heart without any false notes.

 

#8 Strengthened Agape

Attention and devotion to living in ways that provide for Creation grows selflessness in one’s heart. Animals and plants and fish and the vast universe of the soil rhizosphere cannot vote. They generally speaking can’t speak. To be sensitive to their welfare and to act on that sensitivity is to be selfless and loving at a very high level. It is to think and have empathy beyond oneself and even beyond one’s human neighors. This is taking the story of the Good Samaritan to a whole different level.

God calls us to selflessness throughout the Bible. Jesus, of course, is an obvious example. But I am also reminded of the 42nd chapter of Job: Job’s fortunes are not reversed and restored when he repents and acknowledges to God that God’s wisdom and ways are beyond his comprehension. Instead, God calls upon Job to pray for his three friends who had advanced wrong arguments against him and who God required to show repentance. And that is what happens, despite all that Job had already experienced and despite the further grief his friends had caused. Job prays for them. And then his fortunes are restored.

Caring for habitats or rivers or just a small woodlot or our pet all grow that same selflessness that God desires.

 

#9 Missional Impulse

Being convinced that we must keep and protect God’s Creation necessarily drives us to be missional and to have an outward focus. Protecting and restoring God’s earth requires us to go out! If we only change how we live as an individual or family or even a church, we will not have done all we need to. You and I, especially in a democracy, are part of collective systems – employers, local municipalities, state government, even a mighty nation. How they act is partly our responsibility.

By going out and speaking up and bringing about change in ways that stretch our comfort zones, we find that our missional and prophetic muscles also grow. Christ-like also means bold. Strong. Tenacious. Radically candid.

In Alan Hirsch’s provocative book The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church, he writes, “We are a message tribe.” By this he means we are meant to be a sent and missional people. We can’t expect to have people seek us out. We must reach out to them. Organizing and advocating for God and God’s earth takes us out of our homes and our church buildings and into the world. This is where we are supposed to be. This is where we are supposed to share God’s Way.

 

#10 Faith

Anytime we live out the values of the whole faith Way, we will be aware of the necessity of faith.

When we do something that makes us stand out and perhaps endure ridicule, then our faith will grow.

When we work to restore a forest or protect a river, we will not know whether our efforts will ultimately lead to success. But when we do it anyway because it is the right thing to do, then we are acting on faith and building faith at the same time.

 

I pray you will continue to pray and act for the life of God’s earth.

permalink

Moments in a Month on God’s Earth

Nathan Aaberg —  April 30, 2022 — Leave a comment

My tendency, as you’ve seen from my past blog posts, is to think big picture. I learn towards theology, ideas, trends, analysis of verses,patterns of people marring God’s Creation, and patterns of people regenerating God’s Creation through ingenuity and commitment and faith.

In this post, I go in a different direction. I share some moments in my life in the month of April that relate in some way to God’s earth.

April 10 – I volunteer along with other residents here in the Prairie Crossing conservation community to burn several sections of the prairies and other habitats of our community’s common areas. Our burn leader – Jim O’Connor – takes extreme care in the planning of the burns so that homes are never in danger. Jim also keeps track of when areas are burnt. It’s not good to burn at the same time of the year every time. Prescribed burns are essential to keep prairies healthy.

 

April 16 – This is the same area six days after the burns on April 10. Look carefully in the bottom left corner of the image. Can you see the mound that has a different texture than everything around it? And can you see the robin just to the right of the mound? The mound is that of a colony of prairie ants (likely Formica montana). With the weather warming, the ants had begun to appear on the surface. And that had drawn the robin which had been scarfing them down like a famished guest consuming a tray of hors d’oeuvres. Prairie ants play an important role in prairie ecology and provided a useful, high-protein, high-fiber diet supplement for the robin early this cold spring. I wonder what King Solomon would make of this.

 

April 19 – Many residents in Prairie Crossing have native habitats on their own properties as well. Here Jim O’Connor (yes, he is everywhere) and Bill Pogson (not in the picture) are helping me burn the natural habitats of our yard. Further down the alley we have a small open prairie. Here we have three oaks whose leaves burn nicely, contributing the fire ecology of the habitat. Prairie Crossing HOA regulations require us to have at least 3 adults carry out any burn and to also make sure that the weather is suitable for a burn that day. Burning together with neighbors brings us together. After the burn was completed (and perhaps inspired by the beer), Jim expertly recited portions of a Robert Burns’ poem.

 

April 21 – Any ideas what this is? A lunar landscape perhaps? It’s been a wet month. Rain the previous day turned some eroded soil along the edge of Harris Road near our non-profit organization’s office into mud. These are worm trails visible early on a weekday morning. The ephemeral trails were ever so faint traces of creatures whose lives are usually invisible to us.

 

April 21 – Another burn in a Prairie Crossing common area. My friend and neighbor Bill Pogson uses a drip torch to spread the flame. Earlier we had burned to the right of the image so the flames you see that are being pushed by the wind will only go a short distance and then run out of fuel. I had more work to do at the office that Friday afternoon, but I felt I needed to help out as good burn weather can often be rare. Glad I did. The needs of people and nature don’t always fit in nicely with our plans for a day.

 

Stir fried basmati rice

April 25 – It’s a weekday night, and Mayumi and I need to figure out what to make for dinner in a hurry. We had leftover basmatic rice I had made over the weekend, so Mayumi created a quick stir-fried rice dish with organic peas, onions, carrots, and pasture-raised eggs.

 

April 25 – Gus, one of our two cats, enjoying a nap in covers we’ve pulled up around him. I believe our love of our pets and how our homes feel much better with plants in them remind us of something profound we see in Genesis – we are meant to be in a state of shalom with the rest of life.

 

April 26 – Our small garden at the south end of our home. You can see the compost bins in the background. To the right of the bin is a choke cherry and a shagbark hickory, both native woody plants. And at the right edge of the image is an Asian pear tree. The abundance of vegetation you see in the garden itself is winter rye, a cover crop that my wife Mayumi planted last fall to build the soil. The winter rye stayed green all winter, and with all of the rain, it is now growing quickly, which means it is pumping dissolved sugars (liquid carbon) into the soil which feeds the microbes and fungi there. This is our first time using cover crops in these beds. We keep trying to learn.

 

April 27 – It’s not exactly in my job description, but on this Wednesday I led a tour of our farm and Prairie Crossing for ~40 students of AP Human Geography classes from a local high school. Here my colleague Meg Runyan explains how she gets 8,000+ plants germinating and growing in our greenhouse for our annual organic plant sale. Earlier I had shared why it makes such a big difference to human health and nature how food is farmed. One of the teachers said at the end of the tour, almost as an aside, that just reading about sustainabilty has little impact and meaning. Youth need to experience what it actiually looks like.

I also gave a sermon to the North Suburban Mennonite Church and Christ Community Mennonite Church on the Sunday after Earth Day. In preparation for the sermon I reviewed my notes from a book I had found inspiring some years agao – The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church by Alan Hirsch. A quote I found that I couldn’t squeeze into the sermon that I still find compelling and want to share is:

“To say this more explicitly, there is no such thing as sacred and secular in biblical worldview. It can conceive of no part of the world that does not come under the claim of Yahweh’s lordship. All of life belongs to God, and true holiness means bringing all the spheres of our life under God.”

permalink