A Faith that Lasts: Introduction

If we look at ‘how the world works’ right now, it’s clear that things aren’t actually working. Our economic systems are benefiting fewer and fewer people, our education systems are focused on making ‘good workers’ more than good, informed, and critical-thinking citizens, our community organizations are emptying out even in the midst of a loneliness epidemic, and, most importantly, we find ourselves on the brink of an unmitigated climate disaster of our own making. More and more, we need to find solutions that are sustainable, adaptable, and resilient. These words can too often be little more than progressive jargon and meaningless buzzwords, but I mean them literally: We need solutions that will make it possible for life to be sustained into the future, which are able to change with the times, not to be cool, but in order to survive, and which are able to withstand and come back from setbacks and disasters. To get to my point about this, I think much of this applies just as much to spirituality and the world of faith as it does to economics, agriculture, or politics. The past half-century has seen the hollowing out of much of Christianity in the West, leaving our ‘old line’ churches empty and overwhelmed with infrastructure and bureaucracy that no longer serve us, and to a large extent ceding the floor to our tradition’s more extreme voices. People are exhausted, unwilling to support institutions on life support, and deeply suspicious of authorities that have all too often betrayed justice and truth for the sake of appearances. And yet our spiritual needs remain. People in the West are not any less spiritual than in previous generations; we’re just, for a variety of complex reasons, increasingly alone and isolated in pursuing sour spiritual needs. The status quo is clearly broken. In our life of faith as much as in our ecology, we need to find solutions that are sustainable, adaptable, and resilient, to build our faith as individuals and communities for the long haul.

In the face of the overwhelming Modernist juggernaut in agriculture and economics, over the past half century, one particularly promising alternative approach has been permaculture, a small-scale ecological and agricultural discipline that has sought to work with the natural world and its systems, rather than against it. And since it was first developed its principles have been successfully applied to realms as diverse as economics, personal development, agriculture, and design. As I’ve read more and more about it over the past few years, the more resonance I have seen between its approach and the world of spirituality, both individual and collective. And so I thought that it would be interesting to begin this Fall season by seeing how permaculture principles might be applied to Christian life and practice. This is a similar idea to how I’ve previously looked at how Integral thought and Indigenous wisdom might inform and critique Christianity. The goal, as always, is not to change the essential teachings of the faith, but to see how these external ideas might inform and shape how we understand those teachings in our turbulent century. In this case: How can we build a faith, and communities of faith, that are built to last?

This is what I’ll be exploring here over the next few weeks. Each post will introduce one principle from permaculture, explore how it fits (or challenges) Christian teaching, and then see how it might be applied in both our personal life of faith and in our churches and communities.