The goal of this series is to see how the principles of permaculture, the discipline of living, working, and creating sustainably within one’s environment, might interact with Christian faith to help us, as individuals and as communities, find ways of living faithfully for the long haul, without burning out, flaming out, or getting snuffed out. The first principle I’d like to explore is Observation, which is both the most straightforward and likely the most difficult of them all.
This principle says that good design must “use protracted and thoughtful observation rather than prolonged and thoughtless action.” We must “observe the site and its elements in all seasons” and “design for specific sites, clients, and cultures” (Hemenway).* On the surface this seems like an obvious idea, but we don’t tend to be good at it in our culture. We’ve been trained to value action and to expect we can do anything anywhere and are then surprised when a favourite plant won’t grow in our garden or our neighborhood floods once a decade when a nearby river overflows its banks. If we want to build to last, we have to, in the words of Bill Mollison, “work with nature, not against.” If we want to be able to build in our environment, whether a house, a garden, or a life, we first need to know how that environment works.
If we apply this principle to our life of faith, it means first of all, being patient with it and with ourselves, being willing to sit and watch for an uncomfortably long time without acting, at least at first. Once we have built something that fits, we can tinker and tweak to our heart’s content, but first we have to observe and wait, so we can at least have a hope of understanding the system we’re changing. The idea of systems will come up throughout the rest of the series (and especially the next post), but it’s really at the heart of what I’m talking about here: Recognizing that the individual components of our life or communities never stand alone, but are parts of a complex whole. Observation helps us to understand both the parts and their many and complex interactions and interconnections.
On an individual level, the most obvious way observation can work is to put a pause on making changes to our life of faith — study, prayer, sacred practices, acts of service, community and liturgical life, and so on — and simply note what we see: What gives us the most joy? What feels easy? When do I feel God’s presence? When am I more likely to feel God’s ‘absence’? What feels hard? What are the pain points? Which of the hard or painful things are damaging, and what are simply a part of a learning curve? Who are the people and what are the communities that are part of the ‘system’ of my faith? Within this system, what are the givens that cannot be changed and what aspects are in my control and can be changed? Observing all of this, not just over the course of a day or two but over a period of a few months, gives us the data we need for the next steps; we can’t change what we don’t understand.
On a community level, I’m reminded of a rule my dad had when he served as an Anglican priest: Don’t make any changes in the first program year. This is, as it happens, pretty much identical to a maxim of permaculture: “Observe your land for one year before making substantial changes.” The rationale for this should be obvious, but is well articulated by Tim Sonder, from Edible Evanston, a permaculture-principled community group in Evanston, Illinois. He writes: “This [one year observation period] gives you time to observe microclimates, the path of the sun, different types of soil in your plot, rainfall, neighbor impacts, and so on. When every action is a response to what you are actively observing, your efforts become more effective and there is less need to undo mistakes.” This is particularly helpful in communities, because even more than in our own lives, the life of our community is a complex system, made up of individuals, teams, cliques, and ‘supra-systems’ like traditions, denominations, communions, and ecumenical organizations, cultures, neighbourhoods, cities, and countries. Before we act, it would be wise to understand the ways they all interact within a given community.
No matter what level we’re working with, by observing how the system works, carefully and with curiosity, we gain a better sense of what it is we’re dealing with. Most importantly, this means that our assumptions and expectations will be challenged. Once we’ve done our first set of observations, we can dig deeper. There are many different approaches we can take to this, but two that I’ve found particularly useful are: “The Five Whys” and “Weinberg’s Three Questions.” The Five Whys originated at Toyota and simply asks ‘why?’ five times, as in the example below:
Observation: I struggle to attend church consistently
Why? Because I’m in different routines on Sunday morning.
Why? Because the things I’m doing seem more beneficial than going to church.
Why? Because church feels like going through the motions
Why? Because it doesn’t feel like a real Christian community to me.
Why? Because when I engage with people there, they don’t seem all that interested in being disciples of Jesus.
In this way, the Five Whys help to identify the real problem. The surface issue in the example above is church attendance, but that could have many different causes: transportation, sleep patterns, competing commitments, lack of care about the life of faith, and so on. If we misattribute the cause of the issues in our lives, any action we take to resolve them will be misguided and ultimately unhelpful. So, in the example above, if the individual were to assume their problem with church attendance were about transportation and arranged a ride with a friend, that might solve the problem of church attendance, but would likely create a new problem of deep frustration and even loneliness in attending church, since the real issue is actually more about wanting to find a group of people wanting to dig deeper in their shared faith and become better disciples than it is about getting to church. By properly understanding the real problem, the individual would be better able to find what they were looking for, either by searching for other churches that shared this value, or cultivating a friend group to fulfill this need whether inside our outside formal church structures.
The other model, Weinberg’s Three Questions come from Gerard M. Weinberg’s classic 1975 text, Introduction to General Systems Thinking. There he identifies three systems-thinking questions:
- Why am I seeing what I’m seeing?
- Why do things stay the same?
- Why do things change?
These questions are less helpful in digging town to root causes (only the first question is about this), but more helpful in addressing the problem of change, since they explore not only why things are as they are, but the factors that inhibit and promote change. Again, the answers will vary depending on the situation and the person — and that’s precisely the point. Going back to the quote from Toby Hebenway, within a permaculture mentality, we “design for specific sites, clients, and cultures.” It rejects one-size-fits-all solutions right off the bat. What works in one situation or for one person may or may not work for someone else working with a different set of givens, inhibitors, and motivating factors.
While there’s little overt teaching in the New Testament about this sort of observation and the specificity of action it promotes, we do see examples of it at work in the form of Paul’s Epistles. In each of these letters, Paul shaped his message to address the specific problems in the community to which he was writing. To the Romans his message was primarily one about unity and leveling the playing field between Gentile and Jewish Christians. To the Corinthians it was about proper conduct in community. To the Ephesians it was about questions of power and the subversion thereof. And so on. In order to find the right solution, he needed to observe and understand the problem correctly. And the same is true for us in our own lives and in our own communities.
In the next post, I’ll talk more about systems and how thinking in systems can help us to better understand the life of faith. But for now, I encourage you in the coming days, weeks, and months, to take a close look at your life and simply observe with curiosity and an open heart. You might be surprised by what you see!
* Please see the Bibliography for this series for information on the sources.
Matthew Root 
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