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What I Learned from MOSES

Nathan Aaberg —  February 29, 2016 — Leave a comment

From Thursday to Saturday, I joined 4,000+ people at the MOSES 2016 Organic Farming Conference that is held in La Crosse, Wisconsin. This annual conference, organized by the non-profit MIdwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service, is now in its 27th year and is the largest of its kind in the country. (It may also, by the way, be the largest gathering of flannel outside of a lumberjack convention.)

I felt fortunate to attend as there may not be a more important topic than farming that relates to how we treat Creation.

Farming is where human culture intersects with God’s earth in the most dynamic, ongoing, transformative ways while still leaving land and water as land and water. With 40% of the earth’s non-ice terrestrial surface being used to grow food, how we farm has a tremendous impact on the health and vitality of God’s earth as well as on the health of all of us.

With all of that at stake, you’d think Christians and the Church would pay great attention to discerning the proper ethics and principles that should make up the culture of agriculture.  But that rarely seems the case.

And that needs to change.

So who am I to be engaged in this discerning? It’s a bit of a mystery how someone raised in in inner city Chicago could find himself in workshops learning about cover crops, soil sampling, glomalin, high tensile fencing, and the workings of the FSA (Farm Services Agency). That I would find it so compelling is an even bigger mystery.

But here I am, and here are just a few notes and anecdotes from the conference that I hope you find meaningful.

I was taken by the goodness and passion of so many of the farmers there. I met a woman from Minnesota who, along with her husband, is raising pastured animals and other food outside of a small town. They were inspired by the books of Joel Salatin, a Christian farmer, and they are just getting by as they slowly build their business. Yet, they are working their hardest to produce healthy food in ways that work well for the animals and the land. She admitted to be a person who for most of her life has been most comfortable with animals and less so with people. Yet, out of necessity, as they sell their products directly to customers, she is finding pleasure and satisfaction in talking with people about their farming there. She and her husband have faith that this will eventually pay off.

In the midst of the positive energy of MOSES, there were also notes of concern and even despair about world and national trends. Wildlife continues to decline. Did you know that there has been a 90% decline in monarch butterfly populations in the last 20 years? Weather patterns are becoming more severe. A farmer told of how a wind storm destroyed their orchard, and that those kinds of wind storms are becoming more frequent and more powerful. And at times, our own government works against the interests of what is good and what the public and God’s earth need.  Instead, it too often works for people and organizations wholeheartedly in thrall to money,. Another Minnesota farmers said these haunting words based on her own experience and those of others: “Our laws don’t seem to be protecting us.”

Yet, the relationship between people with open, loving hearts and the land they tend and care for can be tender and deep. The farmer, whose quote I shared at the end of the last paragraph, also said this, “We love this land so much.”

Several farmers I met and heard made the emphatic point that you will not make lots of money raising livestock on pasture in ways that are good for the animals. One Wisconsin farm where pigs are grazed on pasture in multi-age groups with much consideration for their welfare has five goals: (1) financial sustainability, (2) environmental sustainability, (3) top-level animal welfare, (4) top-level food quality, and (5) overall system robustness. He and his wife do their best to optimize those goals and must continually tinker, rebalance, and refine their system. When you eat food, are you eating food from a farm that cared about all of those elements? Are you and I supporting farmers who have that kind of value system?

I was struck by how adaptive, attentive sustainable farmers need to be. Every year is different. Every field is different. When one part of your farming system changes, it has impacts on the other parts of your system. Ray Archuelata, a conservation agronomist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), explained during a day-long course on enhancing living soil that he and his fellow instructor weren’t there to tell attendees exactly what tools to use in every situation. Instead, they wanted to inspire the farmers to work from an ecological consciousness and awareness and figure out the exact means on their own land.

The soil is central. A common theme was that creating healthy soil is the central task of the sustainable farmer. Healthy soil leads to healthy plants which lead to healthy foods which leads to us, the consumers of those foods, being healthy. How fitting that Genesis describes God forming Adam out of the ground and that “Adam” itself is related to the Hebrew word “adamah” which means soil or ground. Check out this video about soil stewardship using cover crops and livestock that is authentic and inspiring.

Human integrity = ecological integrity. This is a statement that Archuelata made several times. I believe that what he means is that the degree to which the natural systems of the earth will thrive is determined by the degree to which we have as much integrity in applying our core values to our stewardship of nature as we do in treating family, friends, and neighbors. Integrity, like God-centered values, is not meant to be compartmentalized.

I hope you will join me in praying for the lives and success of farmers and their families as they respond to a calling to work the earth while at the same time causing it to flourish and thrive.

 

 

 

 

 

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Heaven Comes to Us: An Interview with John Phelan

Nathan Aaberg —  November 9, 2015 — Leave a comment

The Creation story and Revelations are the challenging bookends of the Bible. The first, at first blush, seems to run counter to science. The second makes the powerful claim that, among other things, this world will not continue on its present course for all time. Somehow and at some time, Jesus will come again to make all things new, and the spiritual dimension of God will fill all of the heavens and all of the earth. And come to think of it, that’s about as counter to a strictly scientific mindset as you can find as well.

In the churches I’ve attended, these two bookends – the beginning of the world and its new beginning to come – have received little attention, and by the lack of attention and transparent engagement, I’ve sensed an unspoken unease. I’m aware, on the other hand, of more fundamentalist churches that have engaged those bookends with fierce insistence on their literal truth in ways that show little engagement with the nuances of the texts and that are at odds with the themes and chords of the rest of the Bible.

For insight into what the Bible points to in terms of the future of God’s world, I’ve come across a book that I would heartily recommend – Essential Eschatology: Our Present and Future Hope by John E. Phelan Jr.. Below you’ll find an edited transcript of my recent conversation with him that explores some of the themes of the book. I believe you’ll quickly see why I wanted to talk to him.

John is currently the Senior Professor of Theological Studies at North Park Seminary in Chicago, which is the seminary for the Evangelical Covenant Church. In classic Scandinavian self-deprecation, he says of that title, “It just means I’m old, I guess.” Until 2010, he was the seminary’s president and dean, and in the 1980s, he was the dean of students. Between two distinct stints at the Seminary, he was pastor to congregations in Florida and Kansas. I first realized I had much to learn from John when I found myself cutting out his lucidly-written essays from the Covenant Companion, the Evangelical Covenant Church’s award-winning magazine, because I wanted to further meditate on his insights. He was kind enough to be willing to be interviewed.

Nathan: What inspired you to write Essential Eschatology?

John: It’s been a long interest of mine ever since I was a young boy. And over the years of being at the seminary, a lot of pastors and laypeople asked me if I could recommend a book on eschatology. I would usually say no, because I thought so many of the books did an inadequate job of really wrestling with the issues of the text or were too complex for many pastors and most laypeople to wrestle with or too much of the academic field. Because I thought the subject was, in popular culture, very much abused, I decided to do my part to try to bring clarity to it.

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Nathan: In your book you write that eschatology is at the heart of Christianity. Can you say more about that?

John: Jesus comes and talks about the kingdom of God: his message is that God was in the process of making all things new. Whatever else eschatology is about, it is about participating in God’s intention to redeem and restore and renew the world. That’s the essence of eschatology. At one level, then, we are called to work alongside of God for renewal of the creation. We have a part of that and that’s a significant part of what it means to be the church.

Nathan: You write, in a way that echoes NT Wright and others, that “our destiny is an earthly destiny.” What does the Bible tell you about the end of history and God’s coming?

John: I think you could make an argument that what is most important in the book of Isaiah is the hope for the peaceable kingdom, for the renewal of heaven and earth, for the restoration of God’s people to land and home and place. It is very earthy. You see that very profoundly outlined in the book of Isaiah. But then you get to the book of Revelation and you have a very similar kind of ending. As I’ve said before and as I say in the book, “We don’t go to heaven; heaven comes to us.” The new Jerusalem comes down and God makes his dwelling place with us. At the end of the book we end up on earth and not in heaven. I think that’s often been obscured or ignored.

Even in 1Thessalonians 4, a passage that is often used wrongly to speak of the so-called Rapture, you have the people go to meet Christ and then return to the earth.The image there is of the people of a city meeting an imperial visitor and welcoming him to the city. So even there it’s very clear that there’s an earthly destiny. Whatever else it means and however we understand it, at the end it means that God intends to make all things new.

Nathan: For me that sounds very compelling, but why do other interpretations that we often hear – for example, the Left Behind series – have so much power and popularity?

John: The great appeal of that approach is that it’s a compelling story. It’s an interesting narrative. I think it’s appealing for people to be part of the end group, part of those who are going to be snatched away from all of the difficulty and pain of the world and taken up to heaven. But there’s absolutely no Biblical basis for “the rapture. “ It’s simply not there. There’s nothing in the Bible that indicates a two-stage return of Christ. There’s ever only one. The notion that somehow that this secret rapture, which occurs in Christian thought only in the mid-19th century (never before that), has somehow become one of the dominant forces in thinking about eschatological matters among evangelicals is still quite stunning to me.

But it’s had a very good press. People have presented it very well. They’ve told a very compelling story, and not just with Left Behind but well before that. I remember as a child the prophecy charts and the conferences. And then you have incidents like the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, which seemed to be part of the fulfillment of the expectation of the Dispensationalists. Whether or not that was the case, there were things that people could point to. But it’s something that only works if you live within acertain framework of engagement of the text and if you come with some rather large and unsupportable assumptions.

What I’ve told my students over the years is that the problem with the rapture is that it’s not in the Bible. Maybe that’s simple enough. It’s an extrapolation from of a set of assumptions that the old Dispensationalists made about the Bible. It originally came from a vision that a woman had in the 1830s, and then it was imposed on the texts. And as I said one of the key verses in 1Thessalonians 4 has nothing to do with the rapture. For one thing there are all kinds of angels and trumpets and bells and whistles. There’s nothing secret about it at all. And then the Dispensationalists have done other things like in Revelation chapter four with John’s great vision of the throne room. And the angel says, “Come up here.” Well, they’ve taken that to be the rapture of the church. That’s John being taken on a heavenly journey. That has nothing to do with the rapture of the church. You see what you want to see once you’ve determined that you want to see it. I think, unfortunately, that is what has happened with the rapture.

Nathan: I know you’ve told me the story in the past of how you came from a more fundamentalist background and when you went to college you had an experience that changed how you looked at the Bible. Can you share that?

John: Sure. I was raised in the Plymouth Brethren, and the Plymouth Brethren is a group that has a significant part of its origin in the work of John Nelson Darby. Darby was, if not the person who originated dispensationalism and the precursor of the whole Left Behind series, the significant organizer and preacher of it in Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States. This approach to eschatology was central to my upbringing. It’s what I knew from the very beginning.

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I ended up going to the Emmaus Bible School and signed up one semester for a course in prophecy. The regular professor that taught the course wasn’t teaching it that semester. Someone else was teaching it and he said, “We’re going to do something a little different.” Normally, when you study prophecy from a Dispensationalist viewpoint, it was more of a deductive thing – these are the assumptions on how we read this. You come in with a set of lenses, and there it is! He said “We’re going to study this inductively. We’re going to go to texts and we’re going to look at it as it stands – in Isaiah, Ezekial, Daniel, wherever – and we’ll see the system emerge.” And it didn’t for me. In fact, the more we read and studied those texts in their context the more I thought, “No, that’s not what its saying. I don’t think that’s right.”

That was an important class for me not just for that but for my whole thinking about how to read the Bible. It’s far too easy to read the Bible with your theological structures in place and lo and behold, what you think is there emerges, rather than reading it and asking as much as you can, “What was that context? What was that writer trying to say?” Which is not to say that that writer doesn’t say anything to you now. Rather it warns against imposing a structure which you’ve already determined as the way to read something and claiming that you found it there. Well, no. That’s not quite right. That was really a significant turning point for me, as I realized that not only did the system not arise there but later New Testament writers did all sorts of things with those texts that didn’t fit into that system either.

Nathan: I remember when a guest preacher spoke about the Second Coming at a church we were attending. He seemed to take a lot of pleasure in the redemptive violence that was going to come. There seemed something profoundly wrong in the emotional tone of that.

John: Yes. Think about Jesus weeping over Jerusalem rather than rubbing his hands in glee over what is going to be happening. I think there’s something quite ugly about the notion that we ought to rub our hands in glee over the anticipated suffering of our enemies. In fact, we ought to take passages that warn us about the impact of our actions to our own hearts and not be applying them to others. People who live in a kind of black and white world where there are friends and enemies and never the twain shall meet and who have this notion of God finally vindicating me, proving me right, can find themselves in the very ugly situation that you’re speaking of. I think the prayer of Jesus as he weeps over Jerusalem is a better model for us than the satisfied look at those we perceive as our enemies.

Nathan: Following up on that, can you talk more about God’s judgment being a good thing?

John: We often think of judgment in terms of punishment. We think of a law court. We think of a judge sitting at the bench handing down a sentence, having to go to prison, having to be executed, whatever it is. A judge in ancient Israel is not someone who punishes but someone who seeks to put things right. A judge in the Bible is someone who looks at a situation and says this is wrong and we’re going to put it right. We want to restore. We want to reclaim and renew. So the role of the judge is not simply to pass judgment or to do something to the offender but to look at the situation and ask , “How can I make this situation right?” In fact if you look at the law, a lot of the law is about what you do to set a situation right, not just what you do to punish an offender. I think the punitive way of thinking about legal matters is more of a modern than ancient.

You think of Solomon and the two woman claiming that they are the baby’s mother. Solomon wasn’t there to punish anybody. He was there to decide whose baby it was and to restore the baby to the mother. I think we need to look at our model of judgment and retribution and all that and think a little differently about it. Even in eschatological matters, to restore the people to the land, to restore God’s people to a relationship with Him is not a matter of punishment. Now bad things do happen to people, but that is a byproduct of setting things right and sometimes people resist God’s efforts to set things right. I think looking at that differently would be helpful for us so that we might recognize that there are people over there who might need things set right in them but there might be some things in us that might need to be set right as well. God as a judge is about restoring not just about punishing.

Nathan: You write that God’s coming “will involve all people and the whole creation.” How have Christians missed, overlooked, and ignored the value of creation to God?

John: I think this is one of the more difficult and frustrating areas for me. A lot of the eschatological theories in the late 19th century had a sense of the immediacy of God’s coming. In the famous book written at the end of the 19th century – Jesus is Coming Again – the author thought it was within a few years, so every ten years or so he updated his expectations. So when you couple that with the idea that the world is going to be destroyed, why care all that much about creation? Why invest all that energy to set something right or clean the air or purify the water if it was all going to be destroyed? So you have that certain area of Christian life, that eschatological expectation, that makes people indifferent to the creation.

I think the other thing is that on the more conservative evangelical side of things people have tended to also support our economic system. Anything that would limit the way you would use the world and its resources, not only ran against your eschatological expectations but your economic convictions. And so some folks would resist any kind of limitation on the way they ran their business or cared for (or didn’t care) for their farm and their land. On the evangelical side, then, there have been economic and eschatological and political reasons why people have resisted the idea that we should care for the environment when, again to go back to Isaiah, you have this notion of the peaceable kingdom at the center of what God is promising for his people.

Nathan: It’s striking to me that at the beginning of Genesis and at the end in Revelation you do have humanity, God, and Creation in some sort of unity.

John: Right. In Revelation you have this lovely picture of the water of life running through the city and these trees on either side producing leaves for the healing of the nations. So there is this healing relationship between the created order represented by the water of life and the trees and the nations, which of course means the Gentiles, the goyim. Those things are brought together in this beautiful image of the water of life and the trees of healing.

Nathan: You have some really interesting passages in the book about the American tendency to almost worship freedom in a way that is alien to the Bible. Please talk about the value of creation to God and our obligations to it in the context of the American belief in freedom as an ultimate value.  How should we think about our role in the world and freedom?

John: That is a very complicated question because in one sense, obviously, freedom is one of the great gifts and virtues of the Christian life. Freedom from sin, freedom to love God, freedom to pursue a life with God – all of those things are critically important. “The Son has set you free and you shall be free indeed.” The notion of freedom is really important in the New Testament and certainly in the Old Testament, where you have the great narrative of the liberation of slaves from Egypt being one of the overarching narratives of the whole text, that “you were once slaves in Egypt and God has set you free.”

But to use that image, freedom, in the case of the Israelites, did not mean the kind of individualistic, laissez faire notion of freedom that we have today, that I as an individual should to be able to do anything that I want. When they arrive at Mount Sinai they realize that freedom from Egypt had brought them into a covenant with God and that relationship with God needed to be maintained in relationship with their fellow Israelites. Freedom never implies a lack of any kind of obligation or relationship with someone else. It never implies an absolute moral and spiritual autonomy that we sometimes seem to imagine in our American notion of freedom. It never implies that we have no obligations to God, each other, or to creation itself.

Nathan: How can local churches and the Church be ambassadors of God’s reconciliation in a meaningful way when the world’s issues, including the destruction of creation, are so big?

John: That’s one of the most perplexing questions. I would even start back a step earlier. How can the church (either small “c” or big “C”) be an agent of reconciliation in the world when we can’t get along with each other? When the church is so divided and people are so angry at one another, it’s really difficult. Part of the problem there is that people haven’t figured out how to live with difference. Certainly in our country we haven’t learned to live with difference. We haven’t figured out how to live with the other, whether politically or socially or educationally, whatever the “other” is, and learn to accept that people will look at things differently and there’s going to be conflict. That doesn’t mean that it requires that we demonize the other. Reconciliation does not mean that I win and you lose. It means that we come together around something common with our differences and stay together in spite of our differences, something which the church and society have found is singularly difficult to do.

I think that there is no huge, top-down solution to this. There are no orders from headquarters, whatever the headquarters happen to be, that are going to enforce the reconciling work of God within our churches or through our churches. But it involves the ongoing, challenging, difficult work of first seeking reconciliation with one another and then asking how we might be agents of reconciliation within our communities. We Americans, whether we are conservative or liberal, tend to look for big solutions. Big solutions are not always available, and they’re not always helpful. I’m much more drawn to the smaller solutions, the local solutions that move individuals toward reconciliation with God and each other.

Nathan: You use the term “missional collapse” when you are talking about the church. What would a church look like, concretely, if it were doing the reconciliation that you speak of?

John: I think that a church that’s paying attention to its own community, to where there is brokenness within its own community whether you’re talking about the community of the church itself or whether you’re talking about the community in which the church is set down. It’s difficult to save the world if you can’t help and be a light in your own community. It’s difficult to do something really large if you can’t do something fairly small. Sometimes I think small things in communities – whether it’s a feeding programs or cleaning up a local park or helping out at the local homeless shelter or advocating for more green space – can seem small and insignificant but I think they’re quite significant. They help demonstrate the presence and power of God’s love. Jesus goes around casting out demons here and healing a blind man there – significant acts but there were lots and lots of demon-possessed people. Even in his case, it was kind of a local thing. Preaching in Galilee, in this backwater. He ended up in Jerusalem, that’s where he got killed, but that’s not where he did most of his teaching work. He did it in the area where he had been born and raised. Being alert to the local and the personal and to forming the community within the local area is the only place to start.

Nathan: Towards the end of the book, you have a section of a chapter that’s called “The Strange God of the Bible” that talks about how we have tended to create these philosophical constructs of how God must act and how God is and how the God of the Bible is different than that. Can you say something about that?

John: We really don’t like God to be free. We would rather God be tied up and predictable, and, unfortunately, that’s just not the way God is. That’s pretty abundantly clear if you read the Bible carefully. And if God isn’t free, how can God be God? God can do whatever God wants to do, and that can be rather uncomfortable, particularly when you look in the Old Testament where there are some cases where God changes his mind. And the other startling thing about the Bible is that God evidently expects us to take a role in all this in ways that we might rather Him fix it Himself. We have an overwhelmingly interventionist idea about God, when God actually appears, at times, to say, “It’s up to you.” And that can be very uncomfortable.

The other thing I say is that we can only speak of God by way of analogy. If God is God, God is transcendent and eternal and I am mortal and set here in the earth and limited by my mind and imagination. So whatever I say about God, the best thing I can say about God is always partially wrong because I’m speaking out of a human experience. If you and I have a common experience, I can say to you, “Well, Nathan, I know how you feel.” But that’s not true. You know that and I know that. I know there’s an overlap, right, but we’re different people, and even the same experience can cause people to feel differently. And if that’s true of you and me, if I can’t fully understand you and you can’t fully understand me, how in the world do we think we can fully understand God?

So I think some humility and leaving some space for mystery, which is not something people in our tied-up evangelical world often want to do, is really important. We want God to be consistent in the ways we want God to be consistent rather than God having the freedom to act and interact with His world. I think it’s all too often that evangelicals are deists. They want a god out there who’s pretty well settled and perhaps intervening now and then when we want Him to or controlling everything so we don’t have much responsibility.

I think that’s one of the great complexities that we haven’t quite reckoned with – a free God.

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Bold Insights from a Different Francis

Nathan Aaberg —  July 16, 2015 — Leave a comment

Before I began reading his book Pollution and the Death of Man, I had only heard of Francis A. Schaeffer in reference to the Christian pro-life movement. He is one of the founding fathers of the intense conviction that abortion is profoundly wrong and that Christians should do all they can to stop it.

In light of the fact that there are many fellow Christians who are zealously pro-life when it comes to abortion and yet are completely sanguine about the destruction of the rest of life on God’s earth, I couldn’t help assuming that Schaeffer had a similar theological incoherence. This impression was reinforced by the fact that I first heard of the book from listening to Christian radio talk show host Janet Parshall. She regularly refers to Pollution and the Death of Man when she talks in alarm about the growing concern people have for the environment. She reminds her audience that Schaeffer had warned that human dignity would be compromised if humanity was presumed to have anything in common with nature and if humanity’s freedom to use the world in any way was questioned.

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Forty-five years since its publication this book’s arguments still resonate.

Nevertheless, out of curiousity, I ordered the book and read it. I was floored. It certainly conveys a fierce love of God and commitment to the ideas that come from the Bible. But it also fiercely asserts that those ideas uniquely give real value to nature and that Christians have for too long been AWOL in caring for nature the way they should. It contains powerful ideas about what the true relationship should be between humanity and the rest of nature. And these ideas challenge the way Christians have thought about nature and acted towards it for centuries.

Because the book’s essential ideas have been misrepresented and because those ideas are still relevant today, I am using this blog post to share 10 key points about the book. I am including Scheaffer’s own words as much as possible because of their passion and power.

I would also encourage you to learn more about Francis Schaeffer. He was a complex person who led a complex life and challenged, in some way or other, almost everyone.  He was a relentless warrior on behalf of Biblical truth in the world of theology and philosophy. There are, in fact, elements of what he wrote and spoke that I profoundly disagree with. He was also a person who desired to bring people together and engage with them in conversation, fellowship, and mutual learning. He and his wife Edith founded the L’Abri community in Switzerland in 1955 which has become a network of learning centers around the world where people can ask honest questions about the Christian faith while enjoying fellowship and hospitality. He also believed that Christians should be compassionate and engaged with the culture around them even as they hold tightly to Biblical truths. Along those lines, he wrote this startling sentence: “Biblical orthodoxy without compassion is surely the ugliest thing in the world.”

You can learn more about him here. The best article I read was by Michael Hamilton in a 1997 issue of Christianity Today (you must, sadly, be a subscriber to read the whole thing). Here is an excellent quotation from that article about Scheaffer:

“Ideas were to him literally matters of life and death. History, thought Schaeffer, taught that the intellectual base on which a people build their society will determine that society’s laws and character: “There is a flow to history and culture. This flow is rooted and has its wellspring in the thoughts of people.” His singular message was that a society cannot hope for righteousness and justice without thinking the thoughts of God from the bottom up.”

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This gives you a sense of his intensity and intellectual energy. It also helps you understand a bit why in his view the unmooring of Western civilization from Christian foundations and its movement towards cultural relativism alarmed him.

That same intensity and intellect is displayed in Pollution and the Death of Man. I don’t necessarily agree with every single point he makes.  Yet, there is much treasure and truth here. It makes one wonder what would the world would be like if Christians and the Church had been living out the principles Schaeffer presents in this book over the last two millennia. Above all, this book shows that taking the Bible seriously and reading it carefully leads to a profound commitment to being a good shepherd of the earth who finds wonder and beauty in it.

1. Schaeffer wrote in the context of a growing consciousness that humanity is destroying the world that led some to blame Christianity: Published in 1970, Pollution and the Death of Man was Schaeffer’s effort to insert Christianity into the battle of ideas surrounding the realization that nature was being destroyed. In 1962 Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published and caused America to rethink its relationship with chemicals. In 1966, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation released plans to build two dams in the Grand Canyon (can you imagine that?), but the Sierra Club and others vociferously fought those plans and were ultimately successful. In 1969 the Cuyahoga River caught fire for the thirteenth time in its history, a brutal symbol for all that was wrong with America’s use of technology and relationship with nature (check out this article about how local responses to the problem of industrial pollution, not necessarily the Clean Water Act, resulted in the 1969 fire being the last on the Cuyahoga).

Thinkers grappled with the ultimate causes of this environmental destruction. In 1967, Lynn White, Jr.’s article “The Historical Roots of Our Environmental Crisis” was published. In it, he centered the blame for Western civilization’s unrelenting exploitation of nature on Christianity. An expert in Medieval technology, White argued that the paradigm-shifting triumph of Christianity had squashed the notion that there was spirit and sacredness in nature. Instead, it established humanity’s proper role as harsh, exploitative dominators. Nature, in other words, existed solely for the use of humanity. This assumption, White insists, has always made Christianity the most anthropocentric religion in the world.

Another key thesis of White’s was that the tsunami of negative impacts brought by science and technology can’t be addressed by applying science and technology in new ways. Christianity is at the root of the marriage of science and technology and is at the root of the idea that a tree is just a tree and is there for our exploitation. If we don’t change how we think of nature morally and ethically, nothing else will change. And because Western civilization’s great moral ideas come from Christianity, Christianity must be part of any solution. White pointed to Saint Francis as offering a better Christian path of faith and life.

2. Neither polytheism nor modern science are the answers, and both threaten the true nature of humanity: In Pollution and the Death of Man, Schaeffer wholeheartedly agrees that there is an environmental crisis. He also agrees with White that the destruction of nature is, at heart, a religious and moral problem. But he asserts that neither pantheism nor a modern, science-based philosophy are good answers either.

A morality based on either results in only a pragmatic concern for nature. “The only reason we are called upon to treat nature well is because of its effects on man and our children and the generations to come. So in reality,….man is left with a completely egoistic position in regard to nature. No reason is given – moral or logical – for regarding nature as something in itself.”

Schaeffer asserts, too, that pantheism and modernism undercut man’s dignity and will indeed bring the death of man in a metaphorical sense because all is reduced to particles and particles have no meaning. When humanity is merely another part of nature, which both pantheism and modern science suggest, then people can be treated like any other element of nature.

3. The wrong kind of Christianity will lead to wrong views of nature: Listen to these words by Schaeffer:

“It is well to stress, then, that Christianity does not automatically have an answer; it has to be the right kind of Christianity. Any Christianity that rests upon a dichotomy – some sort of Platonic concept – does not have an answer to nature; and we must say with sorrow that much orthodoxy, much evangelical Christianity, is rooted in Platonic concept. In this kind of Christianity there is only interest in the “upper story,” in the heavenly things – only in “saving the soul” and getting it to Heaven.”

In one of the best stories of the book, Schaeffer relates how he walked over to a pagan community across a ravine from a Christian school he was visiting. He was told that he was the first person from the school to ever have visited them. What especially struck Schaeffer was that the Christian school was ugly while the pagan community’s landscape and buildings were beautiful. Schaeffer considers this situation and writes: “Here you have a Christianity that is failing to take into account man’s responsibility and proper relationship to nature.”

Later, Schaeffer writes: “God is interested in creation. He does not despise it. There is no reason whatsoever, and it is absolutely false Biblically, for the Christian to have a Platonic view of nature. What God has made, I, who am also a creature, must not despise.”

4. We should respect what God has created: For Schaeffer, understanding nature properly rests on the fundamental truth that God created the world and the cosmos. God is not part of nature. Nature is separate from God. This, Schaeffer asserts, is the basis for science.

But the distinctness of God from nature does not mean nature is of no value. Because God made nature, all of nature deserves our “high respect.” Listen to what Schaeffer writes:

“But while we should not romanticize the tree, we must realize God made it and it deserves respect because He made it as a tree. Christians who do not believe in the complete evolutionary scale have reason to respect nature as the total evolutionist never can, because we believe God made these things specifically in their own areas. So if we are going to argue against the evolutionists intellectually, we should show the results of our beliefs in our attitudes. The Christian is a man who has a reason for dealing with each created thing with a high level of respect.”

To consider the things of this world as worthless or low, Schaeffer asserts, is to insult God.

In addition, we have God’s own example to follow. Schaeffer writes, “… God treats His creation with integrity: each thing in its own order, each thing the way He made it. If God treats His creation in that way, should we not treat our fellow-creatures with similar integrity? If God treats the tree like a tree, the machine like a machine, the man like a man, shouldn’t I, as a fellow-creature, do the same – treating each thing in integrity in its own order? And for the highest reason: because I love God – I love the One who has made it! Loving the Lover who has made it, I have respect for the things He has made.”

5. Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension remind us that all things spiritual and material have value and will be redeemed: The things in front of us are sometimes the hardest to see. Schaeffer looks directly at the historic center of the Christian faith – Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension – and sees an affirmation of a principle that is too often overlooked by Christians. He writes: “The resurrection and ascension prove there is no reason to make false dichotomy between the spiritual and the material. That is a totally non-Biblical concept.” In other words, matter matters. Nature matters.

Schaeffer pays attention, too, to the eighth chapter of the book of Romans. “As Christ’s death redeems men, including their bodies, from the consequences of the Fall, so His death will redeem all nature from the Fall’s evil consequences at the time when we are raised from the dead.” In other words, nature is an essential part of the Biblical story of the world from the beginning to the end.

6. Separate from yet united with nature: A core theological concept for Schaeffer is that the God of Christians is unique “in being both infinite and personal.” All of matter is separated from God who is the Creator and who is infinite and who has always been. Yet, God created people in God’s image, which makes them unique. This means that people have a unique relationship with God that the rest of nature does not.

While many Christians stop right there, Schaeffer doesn’t. He asserts that we simultaneously have two different relationships with nature. Yes, we are unique, we are separate, and we do have dominion (the right kind of dominion). But we also have fellowship with everything else in nature. Why? Because we collectively share the same status – we are all creations of God.

“This is the true Christian mentality. It rests upon the reality of creation out of nothing by God. But it also follows that all things are equally created by God. All things were equally created out of nothing. All things, including man, are equal in their origin, as far as creation is concerned.” (Those italics are Schaeffer’s.)

Schaeffer emphasizes this point throughout the book. Here is a startling line in the context of the balance Schaeffer advocates between our right to use nature wisely for our ends and our fellowship with the rest of nature. “Even the moss has a right to live. It is equal with man as a creature of God.”

Humans, especially Christians, however, are quick to assert that we are distinct and separate from the rest of nature. Schaeffer would agree that we are distinct and different and would argue that our ability to have consciousness, choice, and will power are key elements of our uniqueness. This presents a fundamental and spiritual challenge to us. We as humans do have options. We have choices. One of our fundamental choices is whether we do all to nature that we have the capacity to do.

Unthinkingly using all of our unique capacities to manipulate the rest of the created order for our satisfaction and convenience at the cost of nature’s vitality lowers us to the state of the rest of the natural order. Conversely, making the conscious choice to limit ourselves for nature’s prosperity affirms our own humanity.

This is where Schaeffer is making, I believe, a subtle argument that people like Janet Parshall are not picking up. It is easy to conclude that Schaeffer’s title refers only to the idea that pantheism and modern materialism, as reactions to the ongoing destruction of nature, will lead to the death of man. But Schaeffer is also all but saying explicitly that if we do not exercise conscious and moral choices in relation to nature than we are also denying human uniqueness. In fact, if we do that, we are acting with exactly the same values that would flow naturally from an evolutionary, materialist perspective. In other words, not limiting ourselves in how we use our creative powers to extract from nature what we want and not opening ourselves to a psychological relationship with nature leads also to the spiritual death of man even if we have some theologically correct ideas of God.

7. Christians have acted badly: Christianity has, in Schaeffer’s estimation, the answer to the environmental crisis. This is because “It is the Biblical view of nature that gives nature a value in itself…” Nature, in other words, is not just valuable for its practical benefit to us but has its own ethical and spiritual standing. And if we give ourselves to God and allow God to guide our values and actions, then we will treat nature as it should be treated.

But despite having a clear basis for acting rightly toward nature, Christians haven’t. In fact, Schaeffer’s story of the pagan community across from the Christian school captures the sense that Christians have done far worse than many non-Christians in how they treat nature.

“The Christian is called upon to exhibit this dominion, but to exhibit it rightly: treating the thing as having a value in itself, exercising dominion without being destructive. The church should always have taught and done this, but it has generally failed to do so, and we need to confess our failures. Francis Bacon understood this, and so have other Christians at different times; but by and large we must say that for a long, long time Christian teachers, including the best orthodox theologians, has shown a real poverty here.”

And Christians have committed sins of omission throughout history by not defending nature.

“They (hippies) were right in fighting the plastic culture, and the church should have been fighting it, too, a long, long time ago before the counterculture ever came onto the scene.”

Schaeffer even poses this powerful question: “…what would have happened if the church at the time of the Industrial Revolution had spoken out against the economic abuses which arose from it?”

And listen to this critique of Christians and their selective interest in nature that is, 45 years later, as trenchant and stinging as ever.

“Nature has become merely an academic proof of the existence of the Creator, with little value in itself. Christians of this outlook do not show an interest in nature itself. They use it simply as an apologetic weapon, rather than thinking or talking about the real value of nature.”

Amen. AMEN.

Schaeffer takes that line of argument a step further.

“We must confess that we missed our opportunity. We have spoken loudly against materialistic science, but we have done little to show that in practice we ourselves as Christians are not dominated by a technological orientation in regard either to man or nature. We should have been stressing and practicing for a long time that there is a basic reason why we should not do all that with our technology we can do. We have missed the opportunity to help man save his earth. Not only that, but in our generation we are losing an evangelistic opportunity because when modern people have a real sensitivity to nature, many of them turn to the pantheistic mentality. They have seen that most Christians simply do not care about nature as such.”

This is one of the reasons why Schaeffer believes the church has become “irrelevant and helpless in our generation.”

“We are living in and practicing a sub-Christianity.”

In other words, when Christians articulate and live out a faith that is not whole, that does not give proper emphasis to the earth and cosmos, then people are not to be blamed if they find the Christian faith unappealing, inauthentic, and inadequately challenging and so decide not to become disciples of Jesus.

Ultimately, Schaeffer levels a damning suggestion about the impact of a wrong view of nature as well. He suggests, in the form of questions, that our faith in God is not real, that we don’t truly love God (the ultimate Lover), that our faith is not whole and complete and alive in us, if we don’t care for nature.

“If I love the Lover, I love what the Lover has made. Perhaps this is the reason why so many Christians feel an unreality in their Christian lives. If I don’t love what the Lover has made – in the area of man, in the area of nature – and really love it because He made it, do I really love the Lover?”

8. The Church should bring substantial healing to nature: Schaeffer believes that the Fall caused many divisions – man from God, man from himself, man from other people, man from nature, and even nature from nature. These divisions will eventually be completely healed when Christ returns to earth. But we are not simply to wait passively until then. Christians are to believe that with God’s help “substantial healing can be a reality here and now.” “God’s calling to the Christian now, and to the Christian community in the area of nature (just as it is in the area of personal Christian living in true spirituality) is that we should exhibit a substantial healing here and now, between man and nature and nature and itself, as far as Christians can bring it to pass.” In short, the Church and the local church are to do their best within their sphere of influence to live out God’s healing of all relationships as a sign of what God’s kingdom will look like when fully established in all dimensions of life.

What are some characteristics of the substantial healing the Church and the local church should bring?

One is an emphasis on Creation. It is important and not some secondary, optional, tertiary concern.

Another is the right idea of dominion. Dominion is not sovereignty. “It (nature) belongs to God, and we are to exercise our dominion over these things not as though entitled to exploit them, but as things borrowed or held in trust.”

And at the heart of the correct understanding of dominion is the concept of conscious, self-imposed limitations in light of the fact that our dominion is under God’s dominion and that nature is something God values. We will accept limits to our freedom for the sake of what is good and holy. We will not do all that we can do with science and technology. We will be patient.

9. The Christian who gets the relationship with nature right will have a psychological bond with it: Schaeffer is careful not to condone a romanticization of nature but in a nuanced way he repeatedly declares that we can and should have a psychological bond with nature because we know that we are distinct from nature and yet part of it.

“Psychologically, I ought to “feel” a relationship to the tree as my fellow-creature. It is not simply that we ought to feel a relationship intellectually to the tree, and then turn this into just another argument for apologetics, but that we should realize, and train people in our churches to realize, that on the side of creation and on the side of God’s infinity and our finiteness we really are one with the trees!”

Elsewhere Schaeffer writes, “In this sense Saint Francis’s use of the term “brothers to the birds” is not only theologically correct, but a thing to be intellectually thought of and practically practiced. More, it is to be psychologically felt as I face the tree, the bird, the ant.”

He also writes, “Because it is right, on the basis of the whole Christian system – which is strong enough to stand it all because it is true – as I face the buttercup, I say: “Fellow-creature, fellow-creature, I won’t walk on you. We are both creatures together.””

10. Making the choice to accept limits and treat nature rightly brings many benefits: When Christians and the Church act toward nature and relate with nature in the way they should, Schaeffer asserts there will be substantial healing. This healing will be seen in a “new sense of beauty.” “The aesthetic values are not to be despised. God has made man with a sense of beauty that no animal has; no animal has ever produced a work of art. Man as made in the image of God has an aesthetic quality, and as soon as he begins to deal with nature as he should, beauty is preserved in nature.”

And the resulting improvement in the ecological condition of the world will benefit the long-term health of our economy as well as the value of humanity.

We will also experience a renewed sense of wonder. I love this line from Schaeffer in connection with this them: “Life begins to breathe.” And, provocatively, he calls attention to the fact that Charles Darwin shared in his notes that as he got older he lost his joy in the arts and in nature. By contrast, people who believe in God’s creative force behind the world’s creation can and should find that nature inspires joy and wonder.

Finally, choosing to relate to the nature as God intended will endow us with psychological freedom and open up an enhanced relationship with God.

My guess is that you already knew that.

 

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Cover Crops & God’s Renewal: An Interview with Dave Robison

Nathan Aaberg —  April 23, 2015 — Leave a comment

I met Dave Robison at a talk he gave about cover crops to a farmers group in downtown Chicago. I was struck by his passion for his topic, his gracious way of interacting with the audience, and his gift for communicating complex information clearly and with humility. Many people came up to him afterwards with many questions, which he patiently answered for more than a half hour. This commitment is not new. For many years now, he has poured tremendous energy into sharing insights into this way of being a good steward of farmland. At one point, for instance, he made 51 presentations on cover crops in 50 days. And as you’ll see in this interview, he is a Christian who does what he does out of his faith. As way of background, Dave and his wife Sally have seven children and live in northeastern Indiana. Dave manages the alfalfa division of Legacy Seeds. The love, energy, and mission that come from his faith are palpable in his words. (To learn more about Dave and cover crops, visit his blog at www.plantcovercrops.com. Cover crops, by the way, are crops that farmers plant for land stewardship purposes – like preventing soil erosion, managing water, building soil fertility, creating better soil structure, and suppressing weeds. Uncovered soil is vulnerable to erosion, weeds, and a decline in soil vitality.)

Dave Robison

From your blog, I learned that you received a degree in agronomy from Purdue and that you were also the pastor of a country church for three years. That’s an interesting combination. Can you tell me a little about your life and your faith history?

DR: I graduated from Purdue in 1980. I got married right after college, and few months later, my wife got saved. In the church I was in, it was all about works and working my way to a relationship with God. My wife started spending a lot of time reading the Scriptures, obeying God’s Word, and I was seeing a real contrast between what I had grown up with and her life. Of course, I always thought she was wrong. (laughter) Then I began listening to Bible ministries of J. Vernon McGee and Chuck Swindoll and John McArthur and started having a better grasp of the Scriptures. I had taught Sunday school for years. I became chairman of the deacons, and there were 60 deacons in the church. I was chairman of committee on committees. So I was working hard to prove to myself, to my wife, to everybody that I was a Christian even though I had no relationship with Jesus. In 1989, nine years after my wife had been saved, I was listening to a sermon by Charles Stanley and it was just like, “I give up.” Salvation by grace through faith is the only way. So that day, as I was driving around Indianapolis on Highway 465, I gave my life to Christ and started crying. It was one of those Apostle Paul scales-falling-off-your-eyes kind of experiences. I had taught Sunday school for years, youth group for years. I was in some fairly high positions at the church, and then I got saved. A few months later I got baptized, which really sent reverberations around the church. What’s the chairman of the deacons doing getting baptized?

A couple years later, we felt called to the mission field, and both my wife and I went to Grace Theological Seminary. We got our masters of divinity at Grace, but during seminary we also had two more children so that now gave us four. We had school debt and farm debt and still owned a farm. So foreign missions was not going to work. But God brought the mission field to us in the fact that in the area where we live we have somewhere close to 10,000 Hispanic families. So about 12 years ago we started working with Hispanic families and sharing the Gospel. Most of that is with children and teenagers. There have been a number of families that have been saved and some teenagers that have been saved.

There’s been a remarkable difference in my life once Christ was truly Savior of my life, and I didn’t have to work to be saved.

So how does this tie in with your farming past and your cover crop work?

DR: We farmed for 11 years after we graduated from Purdue in 1980. In our first four years of farming (’80, ’81, ’82, ’83) we had two major weather events, and we had a mismanagement event. So all of sudden in those four years we had lost close to $90,000. We went from “This might work” to “This is really going to be hard.” So then I started working off the farm for a dairy farmer running a feed mill for him and that’s when I started learning about improved forages, especially improved alfalfa.

From a cover crop perspective, our family started no-till farming back in 1968. My father was very much one who wanted to take care of the soil but part of that was also out of convenience. We were growing rapidly, and we did not have massive equipment and did not have massive amounts of labor. It was my mom and dad and myself and my wife, and once the babies started coming, my wife was very helpful but she was a stay-at-home mom and taking care of babies. My mother had a bad back, and my dad worked full time at Eli Lily as a research scientist. So we, pretty much out of necessity continued to do a lot of no-till. Like a lot of pioneers in industries, we tried things that just flat out did not work.

But one year in the early 80’s we had a tremendous crop of sweet clover that came up volunteer (in the farming and land management world, “volunteer”refers to plants that appear without having been planted) on one of our farms. I guess the weather conditions had been just perfect over the winter. We ended up having corn that year that yielded almost 200 bushel an acre. That was way before other folks were getting 200-bushel-an-acre corn. The fellow that sprayed for us had a sprayer in the back of a pickup, and the sweet clover was taller than his boom. He ended up getting some mediocre kill. We ended up having to come back in and do some rescue spraying and so forth and he told us, “If you ever do that again I’ll never spray for you.” So we heard that message loud and clear. We also saw that we got 200 bushels per acre, but we didn’t put together that it was the sweet clover that gave us the improved yield so we never allowed for much growth in anything to be there in the spring again.

About seven or eight years ago as my father and I were talking about cover crops, I said, “Dad, do you remember the year at the one farm where we had sweet clover?” And he said, “That was the best corn we ever had.” And I said, “That’s because we followed a cover crop.”

To go back to the faith question and cover crops, I guess the biggest issue for us was no-tilling was convenient. But, for me, after I was saved, it became “You know what, this isn’t just convenience, this isn’t just farming. This is we have to be good stewards of what God has given us.” We would verbally say that but then it became something that was real when we started seeing the results of the experiments we were doing. We started experimenting on our home farm south of Indianapolis, and that’s when we started seeing quite a bit of difference in soil.   Some of these soils have been no-till for 25 to 30 consecutive years, and we were seeing massive differences in our soil even after having cover crops for only one year.

Not that we worshipped the earth. We worship Christ. But we also realized then that we had a responsibility. It became a real issue for us when we found that we had compaction at about three inches deep on our farm, even though we had been no-tilling for so long. It was like, “Wow. We’re only farming an extremely shallow amount of soil here.” When we started using cover crops we started noticing that we were farming much deeper in the soil profile. I was on a farm then where we were having corn roots 70” deep. That’s really good for drought tolerance.

Back in 1979 I was in Fort Collins, Colorado, at a national public speaking contest for the American Society of Agronomy. The morning of the contest we were given a topic that we were to speak on, and my topic was on soil health, and I actually ended up winning the student sub-division of this national contest. I used an orange to compare the fact that we’re just farming the peel and even though the peel is the most nutritious part of the orange we typically don’t real good care of it. Therefore we need to do a better job of taking care of our layer of soil that God’s given us and that has the most nutrition.

I’ve thought many, many times over the years about the truth that God has given us the best part, but we have to take care of it and oftentimes we throw it away. We need to recognize that we have a responsibility not only to ourselves but also to future generations, a responsibility to take care of what God has given us. God’s called us to be responsible and good stewards, and we as farmers and as people involved in agriculture have some of the greatest responsibility.

How did you go from that insight to becoming a cover crop blogger and, to use the term loosely, evangelist?

DR: Back about six years ago I was working for a really awesome company out of Indiana as their forage manager and agronomist. I was in charge of alfalfa and forage sales and went all over the five-state region, especially Michigan and Indiana and Ohio, sharing about the value of improved forages and proper grazing techniques and how farmers could be much more profitable in their operations if they were managing well. I was invited to a field day at Purdue University’s southeast farm, and I was looking at the top growth of the winter rye and of the annual rye grass and the different wheat. They had dug soil pits, and I’m looking at all of this awesome feed that’s on top of the surface of the soil. It’s anywhere from knee high to waist high, and I’m thinking this will be fantastic for a dairy or a beef operation. Then we got into the root pit, and we were finding roots 35” deep on annual rye grass and the rye and the wheat about 20” deep.

2013-10-22 14.05.28

Dave in a root pit showing soil health impact of turnips used as cover crops.

Now I had already been doing some things about cover crops at that time, but I wasn’t thinking anything more than erosion control. Even with the experience with the sweet clover, I still wasn’t connecting everything yet. So I made a statement to Dr. Eileen Kladivko from Purdue who was running the field day. I said, “I really don’t care about what’s happening beneath the surface of the soil. All I care is about is what can be harvested on top. “ And as soon as I said that I realized that was contradictory to how I had farmed and also contradictory to what I had just seen. And everybody was like, “Whoa, I can’t believe you just said that!” I realized that my size-11 shoe was sideways in my mouth.

Two days later Eileen calls me and asks, “Would you be interested in being on the Midwest Cover Crop Council?” I agreed, went to a couple of meetings, and realized that this cover crop thing is vital to agriculture.

So then the company I worked for back in 2008 and 2009 was hit hard when the housing crisis hit. We took some pay cuts. I had already got pretty involved on the cover crop side and was already starting to promote our cover crops. I saw a huge need for our company to find another income source, but I also found that I was getting five to 10 phone calls per day from farmers saying, “Hey, I’m interested in these cover crops. Can you give me an hour?” That’s 10 hours in a day. So one of my best friends who worked at the same company said, “You know what? I’ve been looking into this stuff called blogging (of course, I had no idea what that was.). You write it. I’ll do some editing. And we’ll get it online, and maybe we can send people to the blog so you don’t have to spend so much time on the phone.”

So we did that and now we have about 80,000 people a year reading the blog, and somewhere around 3,000 people on the email list. And I probably get 20 emails a week from the blog that I try my best to answer. I speak all over North America on cover crops, especially the eastern half of the U.S. (Nebraska eastward) and in Ontario and Quebec. I don’t make money on that. It’s all volunteer.

The beautiful thing to me is that the company I got started with is now moving over 20 million pounds of cover crop seed per year. The company that is a kind of a sister company to them is moving somewhere around 10-15 million, and our company is moving 2-3 million. More and more farmers are recognizing the value of utilizing cover crops. From my perspective, if we can help farmers to be more profitable and do it in a very responsible way at the same time, then we’ve accomplished something outstanding for that family farm but also at the same time been good stewards of what God’s given us.

And I believe if it’s not going to be profitable for the farmer then the farmer’s going to be put into a situation where he’s going to have to say, “Well, I want to be a good steward, but…” And frankly I get a lot of those comments. There are a lot of times we do things that don’t pay, but this is one that I see a lot of people saying, “Well, if I’m not going to get my money back I’m not going to do it.” Which tells me that there are still a lot of farmers that aren’t understanding the stewardship issue yet.

What have you learned about God, people, and God’s earth from promoting cover crops and testing them?

DR: We have corn plants and soybean plants that when they hit a zone of compaction will take their roots horizontally. We have a little radish plant that might be the size of a pencil lead or an annual rye grass plant that is two inches tall or crimson clover that’s three inches tall that will get through that compaction zone. So in God’s Creation He has created different species of plants that have different characteristics that we can utilize that will help us to be able to best utilize our cash crops. God is not a God who deteriorates but is a God who renews. He has given us opportunities through his Son Christ to have a relationship with Him and a renewed spirit, a new life, and renewed hope. He has also given us, on the agricultural side, different species of different plants that help to better renew our soils and to better replenish our soils.

God, at least the God I see through Scripture, is one who always provides new hope, new life, new renewal, and man, because of sin, is one who deteriorates. That to me is a major theological foundation for us to understand that as we are stewards of what God has given us. He has given us the opportunity to renew some things that we have deteriorated, and some of those species of cover crops allow us to do that.

It’s interesting that Christians like Joel Salatin, Gabe Brown, and yourself are having a positive impact promoting sustainable farming practices.

DR: I think there are more. I know some other folks that are strong believers that are doing things on a local basis. Some of us are called to be, and I don’t know if I want to use this phrase, the Billy Grahams of the cover crop world. There’s no question that God has blessed Gabe and myself and Joel and a variety of other folks who are believers to be able to verbalize and communicate well and communicate with integrity. But there are a lot of Christians who do things on their local and regional basis.

I want to make sure I tell you about Zambia. A real good friend of mine that I worked with a lot took his family to Zambia. He is now an agricultural missionary. They are running a farm to feed the community, and they sell produce off of this farm and make money for the community. It’s been a fabulous ministry not only from an agricultural perspective but also for sharing Christ with this community. I got an email from him a couple of days ago, and he was thanking me for teaching him as much as I did about cover crops and for my blog and for my YouTube videos.

They are using cover crops in Zambia to be able to build their soil health.   He said their farming yields and soil have improved tremendously since they started using cover crops. That made me say, “OK, God, this has been worth it over these 10 years now.” It was really interesting to me to hear a brother in Christ halfway around the world who is using training he got when he was in Fort Wayne, Indiana, to now be able to use those practices to help witness for Christ about not only soil health but spiritual health. What a blessing.   When I got that email from him I got goose bumps.

What you do for a living, what I do for a living, for me it’s Colossians 3:17. “And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” Everything we do is for Christ.

Do your wife and your children get as excited about cover crops as you do?

DR: My wife does. In fact, I’ve called her the cover crop queen on my blog, because we have some relatively sandy and relatively poor soil on our property and she is always urging me to do something different. In fact, late last fall when I thought it was way, way too late to plant cover crops, she said, “Do you have any samples of seed?” And I said, “Well, yeah.” And she goes, “Well, I’m going to go out and plant cover crops.” The ground was nearly frozen. I’m like, “Honey, this just isn’t going to work.” She’s like, ”Well, remember when we planted radishes a few years ago when it was too late, and we ended up with a real nice radish crop in the spring? And how many earthworms were in my flowerbed?” “Yes,” I said. “Well,” she said, “we’re going to do that again.” So she planted cover crops really late, and now we have a really beautiful crop of hairy vetch that’s survived the winter and is looking beautiful in our flowerbeds, and it is producing nitrogen.

All of my children recognize the value of stewardship, whether that be stewardship of our soil or taking care of our brothers and sisters or of taking care of the needy. We want to make sure our children see that giving is better than receiving. Again, it’s all about Colossians 3:17.

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On Video: Our Father’s World

Nathan Aaberg —  November 23, 2014 — Leave a comment

In 2013 the 15,000-member Northland Church and Emmy-award winning filmmaker Bob Giguere teamed up to produce a video called Our Father’s World.  I encourage you to take the time to view it.  There is much inspiration and insight.

Here are a few things that struck me:

1.  We learn that Bill Hybels of Willow Creek Community Church apologized that it took him 33 years to give a sermon about the importance of caring for God’s earth.  When was the last time you heard a sermon about this topic?

2.  The video contains a very strong vein of thought that the poor are the most vulnerable to the consequences of the degradation of God’s earth.

3.  A note that was heard once but then not picked up again was Matthew Sleeth’s comment that “sacrificial action” is required in the care of God’s earth. This is a profound and challenging insight.  Another speaker,  Dr. Sandy Richter of Wesley Biblical Seminary, notes that being Christian is inherently a countercultural calling but that Christians too often are so embedded in the culture that we the don’t live out what God actually desires.  Ironically, in this same video you’ll note that Bill Hybels seems worried that his message might make SUV owners in the audience uncomfortable.

4.  Tony Campolo puts his finger on something important when he calls attention to the fact that because Christians abdicated leadership on the issue of the environment some time ago there’s an instinctive suspicion of concern for the environment because the issue is now associated with New Age adherents.

5.  I particularly liked the section in which the pastor of Vineyard Boise talked about how some of his parishioners challenged him with the question of how they should vote – for the party that cares about the unborn or for the party that cares about how God’s earth is stewarded.

6.  Did you notice that in this nearly half-hour video wildlife and animals in general are hardly seen or mentioned? The phrase “the elephant in the room” never seemed more appropriate!  You don’t hear about how wildlife are under siege around the world and that habitat is being lost at a tremendous rate.  You don’t hear about God knowing every bird in the mountains and how those birds are disappearing.  You don’t hear that the extinction of species is the ultimate sign that we are failing at good stewardship of this earth.  You don’t hear about how poorly animals are sometimes treated in agricultural production.

7.  Did you notice that voluntary recycling and reduction of energy use are the default ideas for how we take action?  Those are important changes of habit but they do not go far enough in two different ways.  First, we have an impact on God’s world beyond waste and energy use.  One of the most important is what we eat.  Our food choices and our nation’s food policies have tremendous impact on the land, water, and animals that are ultimately God’s. This needs to be wrestled with, but this video doesn’t even touch it, except for a brief mention of thinking about where your coffee comes from.  Second, there’s a failure of logic when the proposed solution to a problem is not at the scale of the problem.  Small individual actions by individual churches and individual churches will not be enough to counter the tide of forces that are depleting and degrading God’s earth.

Finally, it is interesting that if you go to Northland Church’s website you really have to dig (look under Media &  Blogs then click on Blogs and then look for the link in the right column for Creation Care) to find any mention of the importance of caring for Creation.

And it is even more telling that the Purpose/Mission/Vision/Belief section does not address how we treat God’s earth at all.  (And to be fair, after years of looking at church websites, Northland is completely conventional in this way.)

Please don’t get me wrong.  I am very encouraged that a video like this would be produced with the idea of inspiring more people and churches to be good stewards.  It is a reminder that the radical idea that this earth matters is actually an orthodox, Biblically-based one.  It is a sign that perhaps there are seeds of change in mainstream churches. And I do understand that for Christians that have not thought about these issues before from this perspective, hitting them with too much too soon might be counterproductive.

But what we need and what we need quickly is for an active, action-oriented concern for the vitality and flourishing of all of God’s earth to become part of the spiritual DNA of every church and Christian.

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