Month: August 2020

Who Cares?

This issue of Missio Dei is about a spiritual legacy. Clyde Austin’s life confronts us with important questions, not the least of which is, Who cares? His story poses that question differently than the isolated missionary hears it, of course. The indifference of the rhetorical Who cares? still rings loudly in the ears of many struggling servants of the kingdom. So the question is indeed important, not on the lips of careless congregations but when senders truly ask themselves: Who cares? Who will?

The church might easily underestimate the importance of contemporary missionary care. Its emergence is so recent that one could imagine (wrongly) that missionaries have managed quite well without it for centuries. Not so long ago, however, William Carey’s life reiterated the Isaianic Who will go?—another enquiry1 the church had considered unnecessary. Just so, only a matter of decades ago, the avant garde of missionary care began posing questions that would move the church beyond caring about missions to caring about missionaries, from whether to send to how. Such faithful questions are a significant part of what Clyde Austin leaves us.

Yet, I call Austin’s legacy spiritual because it does more than merely pose important questions; it beckons the church to become the kind of caregivers who discover new questions and seek new answers. Here we have a vision of careful missions—not cautious but truly full of care. The ethics of sending, the virtue embodied in prudent practices of caregiving, the solicitude of sincere partnership: these give substance to the claim that missions is not simply the sacrifice of the sent but also the spiritual service of the sender. Who cares? The spiritual formation of the church in mission is at stake in the answer. Accordingly, I commend the present contributions to the reader and proceed to ponder some questions yet unasked.

Questions Unasked

What more might we say theologically about member care—or better, what care practices might grow out of a farther-reaching theology of mission? Conversely, what theology has, in fact, nourished current practices? If these appear to be a theologian’s rather than a practitioner’s questions, then we come yet again to that false dichotomy the church must steadfastly reject until our saying and doing are finally whole. In service of that resolution, I pose two ecclesiological questions.

Who are the missionaries that need care?

Altogether, this journal issue offers a snapshot of missionary care in Christian Churches/Churches of Christ and Churches of Christ (a cappella). It provides neither a sequence of shots nor a variety of vantage points; it is not even a panoramic picture. But it does give a glimpse of the subject matter from one angle. What we can observe in that single shot is a lacuna: domestic missions. According to C. Philip Slate’s article, working with the Exodus Movement (a US church-planting initiative) was an important part of Clyde Austin’s transition to professional member care. Yet, the possibility that domestic missions might require member care analogous to that of foreign missions lingers unaddressed as, in keeping with Austin’s own shift of focus to intercultural studies and cross-cultural reentry, member care seems to have concentrated almost exclusively on the special needs of foreign missionaries. Or so our snapshot would suggest.

The practical motivation for this focus is easy to understand: the especially challenging dynamics of crossing cultures, living in isolation from support systems, raising third culture kids, and reentering one’s culture of origin merit all the care that the present articles portray. Nonetheless, there may also be theological motivations for member care that challenge us to broaden the scope of the church’s practice. If missionary care is “simply the application of the biblical ‘one-another’ concepts to the context of missionary life,”2 a definition Dottie Schulz affirms in her article, then the theological meaning of missionary should indeed bear heavily upon the application of missionary care. In fact, the notion that missionary care is just an application of biblical one-another concepts so closely connects it with the normal practices of Christian community that it pulls the eye beyond the limits of domestic missions3 toward the ecclesiological claims of the missional church movement. Perhaps the whole church is sent as God’s missionary people and therefore relies upon mutual care. Perhaps so-called missionary care is simply Christian relationship with those disconnected from the community by physical distance—the geographical extension of normal Christian communal behavior, with special applications for special circumstances. And perhaps these ideas reveal that mutual care in the typical local congregation is actually too poor to sustain a missional lifestyle among all its members. It could be that the level (if not the specifics) of missionary care advocated in this journal issue, brought home to once sending and now sent congregations, is a missing piece of the Western church’s missional turn.

Moreover, it may be that missionary care has, of necessity, clarified the muddle that missions language recently became. (On that score, it should not surprise us that a practical discipline has managed what the theoretical discussion could not.) The local church is missional by nature, but it still fails to treat itself as such, which naturally makes the claim dubious. In order to resolve the ambiguity of our terminology, we must look to the concrete practices of sending—what Sonny Guild calls “seamless, comprehensive missionary care.” By equipping, commissioning, and caring for all those we would theologically describe as members of God’s missional people, with the same initiative and excellence we have learned to employ in the care of foreign missionaries, we begin to make sense of our language. Missionary care has much to teach us about what it means to be a missionary by virtue of the way the church practically treats missionaries.

What is the relationship of member care experts to churches?

The present contributions are written by member care professionals. Their expertise is the substance of the excellence we have learned to employ. For all its continuity with the normal practices of Christian community, missionary care at its best involves skills and insight that cannot be found in most local congregations. On one hand, a publication that disseminates knowledge about member care is, in its populist way, addressing that deficit. On the other, the same act of publication highlights the need to share resources strategically. Both of these—populism and strategic cooperation—touch directly upon the shared ecclesiological history of the two Stone-Campbell traditions that the authors represent. More specifically, strategic cooperation in missions was one of the key points of contention between the two.

The expertise of missionary care professionals was not, of course, in view during the late nineteenth century. The special skills involved in cross-cultural training, psychological screening, stress and trauma counseling, and reentry debriefing (to name only a handful of specialized care practices) now cast a different light on the question of organized cooperation. Clearly some mode of “networking resources” is necessary if every congregation is to provide comprehensive care to the missionaries it sends.4 Our missions experiences over the last hundred and fifty years, not least the urgent need for the care practices that have developed, have prompted us to look past old questions and ask new ones.

What, then, is the relationship of member care experts to the local church? This particular question was unimaginable only a short time ago in any tradition. It is admittedly not an unprecedented question, because numerous sorts of expertise have prompted similar reflection. Still, missionary care does create a new context for exploring these concerns. Specialized screening of prospective foreign missionaries, for example, raises questions about determining whom the Spirit would send. Is screening a determinative process by itself, or does it inform a congregational process of spiritual discernment? This is a practical question that deserves a theological answer. Similarly, should pastoral care of missionaries and missionary self-care be rooted in the spiritual practices of a Christian community? Can spiritual care be provided apart from community? And in any case, how do the roles of spiritual directors and shepherds relate to the work of member care specialists?

These questions are just examples. Every church tradition, whether its member care experts work within congregational or parachurch models, is obliged to continue seeking answers to the new questions that our participation in God’s mission generates. My hope is that the articles featured here will not only strengthen our current practices but enliven our imaginations, in order to contemplate what comes next in missionary care. God bless our enquiry. Soli Deo gloria.

The author presents a biographical sketch of Clyde N. Austin’s work and enduring influence in the field of missionary care. Austin’s legacy encompasses the academy, the leading practitioners of member care whom he mentored, the missionaries who continue to benefit from his work, and the organizations that he inspired to excellence in missionary care.

Introduction

During his middle- and high- school years Clyde N. Austin lived in a small, inconspicuous town in southeast Texas. Through his education and faith development, however, he earned an international reputation. In missionary circles he is known for his work in missionary care. In United States embassies, the headquarters of numerous non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and international businesses he is known for his work on cross-cultural reentry. More than any other person he was responsible for bringing into North American Churches of Christ more orderly and extensive processes of screening missionaries, providing care for them on the field, and facilitating their reentry into their home country.

Though born in Karnes City, TX, in 1931, Clyde grew up in and graduated from high school in nearby Kenedy in 1949. Because that town had witnessed many gunfights in the past, by the early 1900s Kenedy was called “Six Shooter Junction.” During World War II, when Clyde was in his early teens, his hometown hosted an alien detention camp for Germans, Italians, and Japanese deported from Latin America, and for several Japanese who were long-time residents in the USA. In 1944 it became a POW camp that was closed the following year. In short, Kenedy was hardly known as a seedbed for producing people who become known worldwide. During his early years Austin was shaped and formed by the Kenedy school system, his family, and the small congregation (started in c. 1890) of the Church of Christ he attended with his mother and older sister.

Clyde studied at Abilene Christian College (ACC) and graduated in 1953. Subsequently, he earned both MS and PhD degrees in psychology and returned to his alma mater for a 41-year relationship. From the 1960s through the 1990s Austin’s interests and work gradually shifted from personnel services to gerontology to evangelism and missionary care. He helped missionaries with pre-field screening, maintenance on the field, and reentry to the original culture; wrote articles and books on these subjects; founded a chair of psychology and intercultural studies; and played an important role in the development of Missions Resource Network (MRN). Dr. Austin died on March 7, 2014, at age 82, and a memorial service was conducted for him a month later, on April 5. Though he was a classroom teacher, an active churchman, and a director of research, the focus of this essay is on the contributions he made to missionary care among Churches of Christ and, more broadly, to understanding the phenomenon of cross-cultural reentry.

Education and Early Career

While at ACC Austin served as president of the Students’ Association, was elected to Who’s Who among American University and College Students, and graduated magna cum laude. There he met Sheila Hunter, a classmate from Dodge City, KS, whom he married in her hometown in July 1951. She became his coworker in service to missionaries. They had four children (Jan, Marcia, Joanne, and Stephen), all of whom have served in missions in one way or another. Steve spent an extended period of time out of the country (Argentina, 1990–97).

After graduation from ACC the Austins moved to Boulder, CO, where Clyde earned a master’s degree in Personnel Service from the University of Colorado (1954). They moved then to San Antonio where he taught biology, science, and history (1954–55) at North East High School.1 During the Korean War Clyde served an army assignment (1955–56), and while at Ft. Hood, TX, he preached at the nearby Copperas Cove Church of Christ. Over the next several years he continued to preach for small-town churches. He returned to his alma mater in 1956 as an instructor of psychology, served as Director of Placement (1957–59) and Director of Admissions and Placement (1961–69). During those years he utilized his position and expertise to assist the Exodus Movement within the USA.2 Except for an eighteen-month absence in Argentina and another to work on his doctorate, Austin’s work with ACU spanned 41 years.3 At one time his friend Seth Cowan said to him, “Don’t you know you could make a lot more money in industry than in teaching here since your degree is in industrial psychology?” Austin replied tersely, “I plan to teach here at ACU.” His decisiveness “marked the end of our conversation” on that subject, Cowan said.4 Though his PhD from the University of Houston was in the field of Industrial Psychology, early in his career he developed an interest in gerontology and did postdoctoral work in that field at the University of Southern California. He gave a presentation on the subject in the 1963 ACC lectures.5 Already in the 1960s, however, Clyde gradually developed an interest in the application of psychology to the initial screening and ongoing care of missionaries, matters that were to grip him the balance of his life.

Moving from Gerontology to Missions/Intercultural Studies

There was no decisive moment at which Austin became passionately concerned about missions and intercultural studies. As with many missionaries, Austin’s interests and commitments developed from several influences over a period of time. It is clear that he took his faith seriously early in life and sustained it. Royce Money, ACU Chancellor, stated that “While he was an excellent psychologist and classroom teacher, Clyde was always a missionary at heart. . . . He was a humble and talented servant of the Lord whose reach went far beyond his presence.”6

Although Austin had a general interest in evangelization, several experiences increased his growing concern about cross-cultural missionary work. For example, in the early 1960s, while doing his doctoral work at the University of Houston, Clyde and Sheila worshiped with Howard and Jane Norton at the McGregor Park Church of Christ. The Nortons were part of a large mission team then planning their move to São Paulo, Brazil, in 1961. Through their long friendship Austin’s interest in various dimensions of cross-cultural evangelization was significantly informed and sharpened. Further, Austin had contact with missionary candidates as he worked with Paul Faulkner in conducting small groups in ACC’s Summer Seminar in Missions as early as 1968.7

Austin gained further insight through his work with the Exodus Movement groups. A church in Fort Worth began to make plans in 1962 to mobilize a group of Christians to move to Bay Short, Long Island, NY, in 1963 to plant a church while supporting themselves.8 That was the first of several such movements during the 1960s and 70s. Austin stated, “I was personnel director for Exodus Bay Shore, Exodus New Jersey, Target ’66 (Connecticut), and Megalopolis (Delaware). I conducted information sessions for the person who was personnel director for Exodus Burlington. Other groups sought information from the ACC Admissions and Placement Office.”9 Austin became deeply involved in that work; he did much more than organize occupation fairs. In 1970 Roy McCown wrote Austin a letter from Warrington, PA, enquiring about the possibility of his assisting a church there in an Exodus program. McCown stated that when he was in touch with the church in Newark, DL, about the movement that had taken place there, “They assured me that the success of the effort was about 110% due to the efforts of Clyde Austin.” It is hard to estimate the extent to which involvement with the Exodus groups sharpened Austin’s interest in evangelism, but it was unquestionably an important aspect of his transition to a focus on missions and missionary care.

The Exodus Movement in the 1960s involved domestic evangelism, but Austin increasingly developed interest in international evangelism. During the late 1960s he would routinely have lunch with colleagues at ACC and the College Church (now University Church of Christ in Abilene). Among them were Ed Brown (former missionary to Japan), Roy Willingham, Lowell Perry, and others, all members of the College Church. Perry had returned in 1967 from a two-year residence in Brazil in connection with an effort to purchase radio stations. During that time he interacted with and was impressed by the large mission team that had gone from ACC to São Paulo in 1961. While vacationing in Montevideo, Uruguay, the Perrys met Pablo Lasaga who, along with five others, had been brought to Christ through the work of D. M. Hadwin and family during 1952–54.10 Lasaga had taken training in hotel administration in Buenos Aires and spoke to the Perrys about the need for evangelizing in that huge city. The Perry family took the hydrofoil to Buenos Aires for a visit and became convinced that an evangelistic effort was needed there like the one in São Paulo. Thus, when the Perrys returned to Abilene, Lowell had a commitment to help develop a mission team for Buenos Aires.11 Austin, who had experience working with groups going to the northeastern part of the USA, became keenly interested in the proposal for Argentina. His interest in that possibility went beyond the lunches, and he pursued the matter vigorously. Earline Perry commented, “The Austins were in our home so often that our children thought we were related to them.”12 Out of those discussions Austin decided he would seek employment in Buenos Aires in order to acquire the information a mission team would need to move there and live for an extended period.

Austin obtained employment as the guidance counselor for the Asociación Escuelas Lincoln, a bilingual private school in Buenos Aires, and moved his family there in June 1970. During those eighteen months in Buenos Aires, Austin investigated housing and other living needs, along with checking on government requirements for expatriates and church groups.13 They learned much from friends in other missionary groups in Argentina, notably Jim and Georgia Teel of the Southern Baptist Church. The Austins returned to Abilene in December 1971. Living cross-culturally sensitized Clyde to the importance of appropriate preparation, the needs of missionary children, and other factors involved in working outside one’s native culture.

The College Church in Abilene, where Austin, Willingham, Perry, and Brown were members, decided to send a team to Buenos Aires. Austin worked with the original team members, all supported by the College Church: Ted and Ellen Presley, George and Bertha Roggendorff, Dick and Barbara Treat, and two singles, Joel Banks and Yolanda Andrade. They arrived in Buenos Aires on December 25, 1972.14 Others joined the team a little later: the Jacob Vincents, Reese Mitchells, Jay Abels, and a single worker, Marilyn McBroom.15 Steve Allison, first a student of Austin’s, then a colleague, and now his successor in Psychology and Intercultural Studies at ACU, concluded that Austin’s interaction with the 1972 team further sensitized him to the needs of cross-cultural workers.16

As time passed Austin began dealing with students who had been trained at ACC, went out to serve, and then returned. He began both screening and debriefing young missionaries. Several years later Austin showed Allison a file containing 45 cases of missionaries who had experienced serious mental health issues in cross-cultural work.17 Austin’s mounting concern for missionaries and their problems prodded him to discover what other groups had learned through their experiences in sending out and bringing back cross-cultural workers. His determination to help the situation led to his further education, both formally and informally, in areas where he felt his background in psychology could be brought to bear on the whole range of cross-cultural workers’ needs. Furthermore, he knew of no one else in Churches of Christ who was doing the kind of work he envisioned.18 Austin knew he had to take his psychological training into additional dimensions of service.

Others had already done work in both screening and evaluating missionaries. In 1973, psychology professor C. R. Thayer pointed out that “the use of psychological test scores for the selection of missionaries is of at least four decades’ standing.”19 Additionally, the famous American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions had done a follow-up study in 1957 of 200 of their missionary candidates.20 The Southern Baptists had used psychology in their screening of missionary candidates since 1937. This information, however, seems to have been unknown (and certainly not used) among Churches of Christ in North America. Thus Austin began his quest for information and further training.

Continuing Education

Initially, Austin contacted a number of groups that were sending personnel to other cultures to work. He contacted officials who dealt with military families and the Lyndquists at Link Care in California.21 He went to Provo, UT, to see what the Mormons were doing as they deployed (mostly young) people throughout the world.22 Austin visited the Assemblies of God. He sought information from the Wycliffe Bible Translators, who by then already had a significant history of sending out and returning many cross-cultural workers.23 He found particular help from Laura Mae Gardner, who served with both Wycliffe Bible Translators and the Summer Institute of Linguistics as the Special Assistant to the Vice President for Personnel and as International Personnel Consultant and Trainer.

In 1979 Rochelle Lechleiter asked for Austin’s assistance with her team, because she knew of his earlier work with Exodus groups. In a letter to her he explained that he, Sheila, and two of their children were spending the summer in “Philly” where he was doing “post-doctoral study in family therapy.” He continued:

In part, my further study has been prompted by our [ACU’s] new graduate program in family studies and family therapy. Also, Sheila and I have been profoundly affected by the sizeable number of missionary families with mental health difficulties. In the Church of Christ there is a growing number of people trained to do individual psychotherapy. However, few of us are adequately trained to work with entire families.24

His studies were in the Hahnemann Medical College and the Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute, both in what Hawley describes as “a hotbed of development during the early days of family therapy.”25 Austin could see the need for working with families, since a number of the problems he observed among missionaries involved family relationships, not just individual problems.

As early as the 1970s Austin began researching the psychological assessment of missionary candidates. He learned that the Southern Baptists had been using some form of assessment since 1937, so he made contact with Bill O’Brien, then Executive Vice-President of the Southern Baptist Foreign Missions Board in Richmond, VA.26 Additionally, in the early 1980s Austin began attending the meetings of the Mental Health and Missions conference in Indiana, as well as the international meetings regarding missionary kids.27 Thus, through both reading available materials and interacting with many people experienced in sending out cross-cultural workers, Austin developed his own expertise and became a valuable resource person in his own right.

Mentoring and Helping Others

Clyde Austin was a serious researcher, but he also interacted willingly with students and inquirers. The collection of his papers in ACU’s Brown Library Archives (14 boxes) consists of many tabulated articles. Researchers have come from many educational institutions and churches to use these materials, even while Austin was still teaching.

Steve Allison, who returned to ACU to teach in 1984, reported that Austin gradually brought him into activities that involved either screening and working with mission teams or doing evaluations. At times he asked Allison to do testing. Clyde “modeled for me the way to stand along with students” as they developed over the years, said Allison.28 He is now Austin’s successor in the Department of Psychology and holds the Robert and Mary Ann Hall Chair of Psychology and Intercultural Studies that Austin founded.

Tommy and Dottie Schulz returned to York College to teach following their missionary service in the Netherlands. In time both Tommy and Dottie enrolled in PhD programs at the University of Nebraska, focusing on reentry issues for families. They traveled to Lubbock Christian University to attend the World Mission Workshop for college and university students and there they got to know Austin. He began to work with both of them and encouraged them as they continued their studies. Later, when Austin was planning to attend the international conference on missionary kids he invited Dottie to attend. Tommy had died of cancer, but Austin had called upon Dottie, then with her PhD, to help with several projects through the years. When the American Baptists asked Austin to debrief and counsel some of their missionaries who had been evacuated from both Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) and later Haiti, he asked Schulz to accompany him to work with the women.29 Schulz now works with Missions Resource Network.

Bob Waldron, former missionary to Guatemala and first head of Missions Resource Network, had a long association with Austin. Waldron said that “apart from my mother Clyde was the most important mentor in my life.”30 As Austin was developing his own expertise he often brought Waldron into the activities. Another resource person for missionary care with MRN is Dale Hawley. He wrote of Clyde that “He is my link to missions. I wouldn’t be involved with mission teams were it not for Clyde’s gracious invitations (and sometimes gentle pushes) to get me involved.”31

Austin also offered encouragement internationally. Australians Susan and Derrick Selby currently work in Mwanza, Tanzania, as medical missionaries. Susan assists a psychiatrist and her husband teaches anesthesiology at the Bugando Medical Centre in Mwanza. There they met a couple of ACU-trained missionaries, Aaron and Marisa Bailey. When the Baileys mentioned that they knew Austin, Selby was delighted and related to them how Austin had been a great help to her just through e-mail. Prior to involvement with medical missions Susan was a family physician and medical tutor in Adelaide. One of her tasks was to “coordinate medical care in my state (South Australia) for missionaries with the largest Protestant mission in Australia (CMS).” Through that work she “realized quite early that I was out of my depth with their psychological issues on reentry. I started doing some research and came across Clyde Austin’s work.” She was encouraged by one of her colleagues, Sheila Clark, to enter a master’s program in that area of study. After a year of study her supervisor suggested she do PhD work. She felt very inadequate to the task since she lacked research experience and would be able to work on the project only part-time. Finally her supervisor, Clark, urged her to send an e-mail message to Austin. Selby was intimidated by the thought. She felt out of her depth and “in need of an Aaron”; if her project were to be done it would “have to be powered by the Father, Son and Holy Spirit completely.” She “finally plucked up enough courage to email Dr. Austin.” “Unfortunately I think I no longer have his reply,” she wrote, but it was “amazing.”

He thanked me for my concern and interest in undertaking this research. It was as if I was doing a tremendous favour for him! At that point he would have been one of the most prominent people in this area. He was very encouraging and it was the signal I needed to proceed. Without his encouragement nothing would have happened.32

Selby felt she had been helped by God’s gift of encouragement found in Austin. “So this is a wonderful story,” she wrote, “about Dr. Austin’s power of encouragement through one email.”33

Austin’s relationship with Continent of Great Cities (now Great Cities Ministries) was a crucial link for his interest in international work. That ministry, directed by Ellis Long, began in September 1976 and was housed on campus in the Center for Missions Education at Abilene Christian University.34 In its first six years, it helped prepare and place six multi-family mission teams in Brazil’s largest cities.35 Meanwhile, Long and Austin, classmates during their college days at ACC, rekindled their friendship and often conversed about ways to improve the missions outreach of Churches of Christ. By that time Austin was gaining considerable knowledge about the need for pre-field assessment of missionaries, but he had not yet actually engaged in assessing missionaries. Long, on the other hand, was struggling with missionaries and teams who were experiencing serious psychological and moral issues—conditions that might have been prevented with pre-field assessments. So the two friends and colleagues decided in 1980 to initiate pre-field screening with the ten-family team preparing for Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Waldron reported that some years later he and Gary Sorrells, then co-directors of Great Cities Ministries, were sitting in a South American airport with “time on our hands” and began to reflect on their experiences with Great Cities missionaries. Before inaugurating psychological screening they knew of several very serious problems among some of those who had been sent out; but that after the front-end screenings and evaluations the number of problems dropped dramatically. Indeed, they were not aware of a single serious issue. They were grateful to God for Austin’s pursuing what he knew was right.36

As Austin gained further information, insight, and expertise he was eager to bring others into the work. At one point Waldron and Sorrells, knowing of Clyde’s contact with the Southern Baptist Board of Missions in Richmond, VA, asked Clyde to take a group of people to Richmond to see what they were doing.37 Clyde put together a group of seventeen opinion leaders and “movers and shakers,” people he felt would benefit from such a trip. Among those people were Ian Fair (Dean of the College of Biblical Studies at ACU and former missionary), Dale Brown and Jack McGraw (elders of the Golf Course Road church in Midland, TX), Gary Sorrells and Bob Waldron (Continent of Great Cities), Seth Cowan (physician friend of Clyde Austin), Keith Robinson (former missionary to Italy and preacher at Austin St. in Garland, TX), Charles Marler (Journalism dept. at ACU, previously active in the Exodus Movement), Victor Allen and Glyn Withrow (elders at Austin St.), Roy Willingham (elder of College church in Abilene), and others. The trip was a means of giving thoughtful people a broader vision of what needed to be done with and for the missionary force in Churches of Christ.

Clyde Austin and the Roots of Missions Resource Network

After serving in Guatemala, Bob Waldron began teaching missions at the Bear Valley Bible Institute in Denver (1978–86). With the help of Gary Sorrells and Ellis Long of Great Cities Ministries, he had developed a team of missionary candidates planning to go to Curitiba, Brazil. Long and Sorrells asked Clyde and Sheila Austin to travel to Denver in 1984 to administer pre-field screening work with the group. During that visit the Austins stayed with the Waldrons and the two couples discovered they had much in common. They spent many hours discussing the needs and opportunities in global missions, including Waldron’s efforts to begin the McCaleb Institute for Missions Education, “a ministry to better equip local churches for effective and faithful missions outreach.”38 That visit to Denver resulted in “a lifelong partnership in advancing world missions.”39

Prior to the Denver trip, Austin had processed enough documents, consulted enough resource persons, visited enough evangelical missions agencies, and attended enough professional conferences that he saw huge gaps in both missionary care and the planning, administration, and execution of global evangelization by Churches of Christ with which he was familiar. Convinced that more was needed than the typical, good training then provided by the missions department at ACU, Harding School of Theology, and other schools associated with Churches of Christ, “he developed an overall strategic plan that included subdivisions for church equipping, missionary care, recruiting and church planting for each geographic region of the world fashioned after Great Cities Ministries,” an approach he felt would enable churches to be better stewards of their international outreach.40 He believed Waldon’s McCaleb Institute could fill the church-equipping slot.

Austin had the capacity to see and develop both the big picture and the details necessary to fill it out. When Austin returned home from Denver he was convinced Abilene would be a good place to inaugurate such a plan. Thus, he shared his vision with Bill Teague, then president of ACU. One of Teague’s early responses, at Austin’s urging, was to invite Bob Waldron to bring his church equipping ministry to Abilene, serve as its director, and be a missionary-in-residence.

Waldron moved to Abilene in 1986 and renewed his relationship with Austin, Sorrells, and Long. In 1988 Waldron became co-director of Great Cities Ministries. By this time Royce Money was President of ACU, and through the work of Austin and Continent of Great Cities, and especially through the time Money had spent with missionaries in Brazil, he became convinced that more needed to be done both to serve the needs of missionaries and to help churches in their global efforts. In October 1994 he convened the first of five (1994–98) Missions Strategy Conferences that were attended by more than 150 church leaders. The outcome of those meetings was the formation of a stand-alone ministry called Missions Resource Network (MRN) with Waldron as its executive director and Austin as board chairman.41

Historically, Churches of Christ have rejected the use of formal missionary societies on the grounds that they tended to supplant and even control local churches.42 So, how could such an entity as MRN not only affirm the validity of the local church but enhance and accent its church-sponsored work as well? Money, with his background in church history, guarded against a missionary society, but felt there was a place for an entity that could both affirm and enhance the work of the local church without controlling, otherwise harming, or hindering it in any way. Thus the entity was called Missions Resource Network, and it was intended to be just that: an organization that would facilitate a network of resources and resource persons who would serve churches in their missions endeavors. It would be for the churches a handmaiden that assists churches while neither hiring, supporting, nor maintaining missionaries.

The full story of MRN needs to be documented. In many respects, MRN was the triumph of Austin’s years of probing, researching, developing, and practicing the kind of things that are important—even essential—for the overall equipping of and caring for missionaries. His work was not intended to supplant or substitute for adequate academic training (which he heartily affirmed) in cross-cultural message formation, encountering different worldviews, evangelizing, deliberate forming and maturing of churches, developing indigenous leaders, and so on. Rather, it was to assure that those persons who seek to execute those tasks are emotionally qualified for and sufficiently sustained in their important work.

Cross-Cultural Reentry

It is likely that Clyde Austin is best known worldwide for his work in cross-cultural reentry. Prior to his work in that field, insufficient attention had been given to reentry phenomena. As L. Robert Kohls stated in 1986, “There must be at least two or three times as much written on culture shock as there has been on reverse culture shock.”43 It is difficult to detect exactly when Austin recognized the special problems that often occur when workers for different kinds of organizations reenter their original culture. He did an annotated bibliography on the subject in 1983, and in 1986 produced a reader on reentry.44 A significant feature of the reader, and the factor that made it of worldwide interest, is that it crossed institutional divides. In addition to works on missionary reentry, the readings dealt with people in government service, medical and other workers for non-governmental organizations, military personnel, and workers in industry. The reader is in most US embassies throughout the world. It is to the benefit of both the workers and their sending agents for the returnees to readjust with minimal difficulty. Austin’s book of readings is an invaluable resource for that purpose. God alone knows the ultimate rippling effect of Austin’s work on cross-cultural reentry.

The Hall Chair of Intercultural Studies

Another enduring creation of Austin’s is the Robert and Mary Hall Chair of Psychology and Intercultural Studies at ACU. In the early 1990s Austin decided to create a position at ACU that would “guarantee a more permanent interface between psychology and missionary endeavors.”45 He sought and received the help of ACU’s president and others. Accordingly, in 1995, he founded and was the first occupant of the Robert and Mary Ann Hall Chair of Psychology and Intercultural Studies, a position he held until his retirement in 1997. Hall had been Austin’s roommate when the two were undergraduates at ACC, and since Hall was a significant benefactor of the Chair Austin named it after him and his wife. That legacy continues as an enduring contribution Austin made to missionary welfare.

Conclusion

The boy who grew up in Kenedy, TX, “Six Shooter Junction,” became a man of stature, known worldwide especially for his work in cross-cultural reentry. His expertise in missionary care and cross-cultural reentry brought him notoriety and respect in both Churches of Christ and in the evangelical world. It must have been a satisfaction to Austin, who remained lucid until the end,46 to see his influence continuing through his students, the work of MRN, the Hall Chair of Psychology and Intercultural Studies, and his writings47 to an ever-increasing number of churches and individuals who are benefiting along the whole gamut of missionary care. Like Abel, “through his faith, though he died, he still speaks” (Heb 11:4c; ESV).

C. Philip Slate is a missions consultant for Churches of Christ worldwide and an adjunct teacher at Harding School of Theology. He holds a DMiss from Fuller Theological Seminary and has authored and co-authored numerous popular and scholarly works. Dr. Slate was a missionary in Great Britain for over a decade. He has also served as the dean of Harding School of Theology and subsequently as chair of the department of missions at Abilene Christian University.

Bibliography

20th Century Christian 25, no. 6 (June 1963).

Austin, Clyde N. “ ‘The Best Is Yet to Be:’ The Christian in His Last Years.” In Abilene Christian College Bible Lectures, 221–29. Abilene, TX: ACC Student Exchange, 1963.

________. Cross-Cultural Reentry: An Annotated Bibliography. Abilene, TX: Abilene Christian University, 1983.

________. “The Missionary Family, the Sponsoring Church, and the Christian Psychologist.” In Perspectives on Worldwide Evangelization, ed. C. Philip Slate, 67–92. Searcy, AR: Resource Publications, 1988.

Austin, Clyde N., ed. Cross-Cultural Reentry: A Book of Readings. Abilene, TX: Abilene Christian University, 1986.

Austin Papers. Brown Library Archives. Abilene Christian University. Abilene, TX.

Hadfield, Ron. “ACU Remembers: Dr. Clyde Austin.” ACU Today: The Alumni Magazine of Abilene Christian University, March 12, 2014. http://blogs.acu.edu/acutoday/2014/03/12/acu-remembers-dr-clyde-austin.

Kohls, L. Robert. Foreword to Cross-Cultural Reentry: A Book of Readings, by Clyde Austin, xix-xxi. Abilene, TX: Abilene Christian University, 1986.

Smith, P. Kent. “Exodus Movement of the 1960s.” In The Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement, ed. Douglas Foster, et al., 324–25. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004.

Sorrells, Gary. Make Your Vision Go Viral: Taking Christ to Great Cities—A Proven 5-Step Plan that Really Works. Bedford, TX: Creative Enterprises Studio, 2013.

Thayer, C. R. “The Relationship between Clinical Judgments of Missionary Fitness and Subsequent Ratings of Actual Field Adjustment.” Review of Religious Research 14, no. 2 (Winter 1973): 112–16.

Treat, J. W. “Latin America.” The Harvest Field: 1958 Edition, ed. Howard L. Schug, J. W. Treat, and Robert L. Johnson, 106–7. Athens, AL: C. E. I. Publishing Co., 1958.

Waldron, Bob. “An Urban Strategy for Montevideo, Uruguay.” Paper presented at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois, November 1989.

West, Earl Irvin. The Search for the Ancient Order: A History of the Restoration Movement. Vol. 2. 1866–1906. Indianapolis, IN: Religious Book Service, 1950.

Wilson, Roy. “Qualifications—Emotional Screening.” In Abilene Christian College Bible Lectures, 189–201. Abilene, TX: ACC Bookstore, 1971.

This essay extends a commissioning home into our watersheds as a way of replacement and repentance of the rootlessness affecting North American Christians today. The author traces this rootlessness to the Christendom church and certain destructive theologies that sanctioned colonialism. “Watershed discipleship,” as set forth by theologian Ched Myers, offers a constructive framework for mission within a paradigm of repentance for sins perpetuated by colonial theologies.

During a college internship program, I lived with an Ikalahan-Kalanguya host family in the Sierra Madre Mountains of northern Luzon, the Philippines. I often accompanied my host mother to tend her family’s subsistence farm, where she grew many varieties of sweet potatoes, peanuts, beans, squash, garlic, and ginger. My host father worked as a pastor and community forester, maintaining the dipterocarp, pine, and cloud forests and protecting the people’s traditional “Ancestral Domain” against illegal loggers and other intrusions.

Legal recognition of the Ancestral Domain, also called the Kalahan Forest Reserve, resulted from a secure land tenure agreement, the very first of its kind, between the government of the Philippines and the Ikalahan-Kalanguya people in the 1970s.1 A watershed centrally defines the approximately 36,000-acre Ancestral Domain.2 Flowing into the Magat River, the watershed serves as a sanctuary to more than 150 endangered species of plants and animals.3 The people have decided collectively to protect their watershed, which means that those who live near the sources of water cannot expand their farms, raise livestock intensively, or use chemical pesticides on the land. As a society, they have limited their own potential growth for the sake of the wellbeing of the whole watershed, including those who live downstream.4

My host mother, Aunti Noemi, told me that when her parent’s generation converted to Christianity in the 1960s, they decided to expand their faith instead of their gardens.5 She contrasted their decision with that of the communities outside of the Ancestral Domain who have denuded their once-forested slopes to make room for mono-crop farms for distant markets. This kind of farming has created drastic erosion and mudslides, and local people attribute an increase in cancer in those areas to the heavy use of synthetic chemical inputs.

United Church of Christ missionaries in the Philippines lived and shared a deeply incarnational gospel with the Ikalahan-Kalanguya; importantly, they affirmed and learned from indigenous cultural and ecological values. The Christian gospel resonated with certain Ikalahan-Kalanguya concepts like li-teng that led them to care for their watershed. The Hebrew word shalom is the nearest equivalent to li-teng, a deeply ecological word signifying abundant life for all.6 Because the Good News strengthened certain indigenous cultural and ecological practices, the Ikalahan-Kalanguya have become a model throughout Southeast Asia for their community-based forest management, indigenous educational programs, and their ongoing systems of restorative justice through the tongtongan, or council of elders.

During my six months living with the Ikahlan-Kalanguya, I became increasingly aware of a significant gap in my own life. By age twenty-one, I had already moved ten times, having grown up in a missionary family turned highly mobile family. I became accustomed to the intermingled pain of leaving friends and place and the tingle of excitement at traveling somewhere new. I envisioned myself working overseas someday, living the exhilarating life of a global nomad. No place held any claim over me. I had no desire to limit my life to one place until living within the Ikalahan-Kalanguya Ancestral Domain. There, the people’s love for their particular home opened my eyes and exposed the placeless dreams that scripted my own life goals.

Historically, the Spanish, Americans, and Japanese have all colonized or occupied the Philippines. Over the years, the Ikalahan-Kalanguya people have resisted—in addition to illegal logging—land grabbers, plans for exclusive golf courses set forth by wealthy politicians in Manila, cell phone company satellite towers, and most recently, Australian mining companies.7 Love for the naduntog nakayang, the high mountain forest where the clouds settle in mist around the trees, compelled their resistance.8 Their home was worth defending with their lives. I had to ask myself, what place on earth would I ever put my life on the line for? Sadly, I did not know the answer.

Before I left the Philippines, my host family held a prayer service attended by local elders and friends from my time there. The pastor stood to give me a commissioning: he prayed that I would return home to the US to apply what I had learned with them. This simple and profound “co-missioning” changed my life. It initiated my journey of recognizing my own dangerous rootlessness, and turned me toward home.

Commissioned toward Home

Returning from the Philippines, I felt disturbed by the fact that my own sense of home seemed as distant from me as a foreign land. My own condition, I believe, is not unique, but perhaps reflects the preeminent social-spiritual malady facing North American Christians today. This condition poses a real threat to the church’s cross-cultural witness and mission.

Cross-cultural mission historically has been the “life-blood of the church,” and is necessary for its ongoing transformation.9 Mission from and to all places radically de-centers Christianity from Christendom, and from any one cultural or social group instating their own form of Christianity as a totalizing gospel for all.10 Alan Kreider writes, “After Christendom, missionary sending no longer follows imperial patterns; it no longer goes from Christendom to heathendom; it is, as Samuel Escobar has put it, from everywhere to everyone.”11 However, if the missionary has no sense of belonging to any particular place, mission from everywhere becomes mission from nowhere.

Rootlessness threatens the good news of cross-cultural mission. This rootlessness, observed in the pattern of colonial cross-cultural encounters, defined not only much of Christian mission, but also political conquest, early anthropology, and international commerce to this day. Indigenous people have theorized that what drives this colonizing characteristic for either the nineteenth-century missionary or the twenty-first-century businessperson is the “original trauma” of European displacement and alienation from the land in the colonial era.12 In short, because of this colonial trauma, mission from those who have no sense of home can become a displaced and displacing mission. How can those who do not know a home ever understand or stand with other people’s struggles to defend and protect their homes?13 How can we share and embody a gospel of incarnation if we ourselves have never lived “incarnationally” in any one place?

Christian mission as missio Dei, God’s mission in the world, is not necessarily long-distance or cross-cultural. Alan Kreider writes that the word “missionary,” with its cross-cultural and long-distance connotations, “restricts and limits” our understanding of the missio Dei that sends all Christians into our own lives as witnesses to the Good News of reconciliation in Christ.14 The field of home missions has often applied the logic of long-distance, cross-cultural mission to church work domestically, seeking to share the gospel in ways ranging from short-term mission trips to forming relationships with other cultural groups in a given area. These expressions of mission have emphasized human reconciliation to God in Christ. Yet the fullness of God’s reconciliation also extends to all of creation. As Colossians 1:19–20 says, “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Christ], and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.”15

How might the idea of home missions be expanded to encompass this biblical vision of reconciliation of all things in Christ, a vision that necessarily entails facing our own need for reconciliation with our home places? What if, in awareness of historic colonial patterns of displacement, we expanded the traditional meaning of “home missions” as also a “mission home”?

A renewed conception of home mission as a “mission home” necessitates a commitment to a geographically defined place, an understanding of the impacts of sin there, a discernment of the ways God is at work in that place, and how we may join in God’s work for the reconciliation of all things through discipleship of Jesus. For the sake of this essay, I will define home place ecologically as the watershed to which we belong and where our discipleship can be rooted. This watershed may or may not be where we were born or even have lived for most of our lives. The point is that we all live in a place, and so any place, whether in North America or abroad, can be considered a starting place for our mission home.

I believe that the geographic reality of a watershed can provide helpful boundaries for our commitment to home mission as mission home. Whether or not we know it, our lives as humans, along with the lives of all other biota, are inextricably dependent upon watersheds. Mission home into our watershed involves becoming reconciled to a home place. In order to fully commit to our watershed as home mission, however, we must face the sins of the past and present with clear sight, and take on the active work of repentance for the far-reaching devastations of the Christendom theologies that deny any place as home.

Christendom, the Doctrine of Discovery, and Watershed Conquest

Theologian Ched Myers sees Christendom as actively underwriting three harmful theological errors at the root of the crisis of placelessness:

1. A docetism that privileges spiritual matters over social and ecological ones.
2. The presumption of human domination over creation.
3. A theology and politics of presumed “divinely granted” entitlement to land and resources.16

These three main dangerous theologies undergird missionary, colonialist, anthropological, and economically driven projects of exploitation of both people and land. Below I explore the destructive outcomes of one of these theologies, specifically the theology and politics of entitlement encapsulated in what is called the “Doctrine of Discovery.”

The Doctrine of Discovery and its resulting “watershed conquest” provide an exceptionally relevant case study of the tragic outworking of Christendom theologies. Any work toward reconciliation as mission must take into account these exploitative theologies, and begin with repentance as metanoia. Metanoia, translated from Greek as repentance (e.g., Mark 1:4), carries a connotation of changing both mind and action. Thus, repenting of the theologies of placelessness that persist today means recognizing their error, and actively changing direction by seeing a place as home.

Within the Christendom paradigm, mission and colonialism were interdependent forces. David Bosch writes that the word “mission” is “historically linked indissolubly with the colonial era and with the idea of a magisterial commissioning.”17 The mission and dominion of the Christendom church accompanied, furthered, and was furthered by the dominion of Empire. The fifteenth-century church’s Doctrine of Discovery, known as the “law of Christendom,” exemplifies how political and religious conquests were sealed together.18 The Doctrine of Discovery is defined as, “The logic of fifteenth-century Christendom that endowed European conquerors with self-assumed divine title over all ‘discovered’ land and peoples.”19 Through “discovery,” then, land and people were subjugated and their resources served the church and crown.

During the fifteenth century, the Vatican issued numerous papal bulls, official religious decrees that document the “genesis of competing claims by Christian monarchies and states in Europe to a right of conquest, sovereignty, and dominance over non-Christian peoples, along with their lands, territories, and resources during the so-called Age of Discovery.”20 Two papal bulls in particular, Dum diversas (1452) and Romanus pontifex (1455), provided the legal and religious justification for the conquest and subjugation of both indigenous peoples and lands. In fact, Dum diversas explicitly declared the need to convert not only indigenous peoples but also, crucially, the need to convert the land.21 Through conquest and robbery, the forced conversion and “salvation” of people and land were bound up together.

Through the Doctrine of Discovery, the death-dealing theology of entitlement was preserved and enshrined through doctrine and law, and continues today. I will focus on its impacts in the US, though this Doctrine legally legitimated the destruction of land and peoples worldwide. Law professor Robert J. Miller has shown how the Doctrine of Discovery provided justification for the very establishment of the United States. It is directly connected to Manifest Destiny and the “principle of contiguity” that claimed major territories as if they were unoccupied or undefended. The Doctrine of Discovery appears in government documents providing legal basis for the annexation into the US territory of Texas, Colorado, Arizona, Florida, New Mexico, and other states.22 In the 1823 Supreme Court case Johnson v. M’Intosh, the US Senate actually cited the 1493 papal bull Inter caetera as justification for dominion.23 Through the Doctrine of Discovery, the US government repeatedly denied Native Americans full title to their land, making it easier for their impoverishing displacement and loss of land.24 As recently as 2005, legal cases involving Native American land loss can be traced to the Doctrine of Discovery.25 Therefore, the Doctrine of Discovery shapes not only our church history as Christians, but also what it means to be a US citizen today, since the doctrines and theologies of Christendom have been encoded in our nation’s laws.

The Doctrine of Discovery’s “principle of contiguity” is a classic case of entitlement theologies expressed politically, through which watersheds became part and parcel of the conquest of the United States. The principle of contiguity used the geographic scope of large watersheds to expand the scope of colonialism. Robert J. Miller summarizes contiguity as follows:

Under Discovery, Europeans claimed a significant amount of land contiguous to and surrounding their actual discoveries and settlements in the New World. . . . Moreover, contiguity held that the discovery of the mouth of a river gave the discovering country a claim over all the lands drained by that river; even if that was thousands of miles of territory. For example, refer to the boundaries of the Louisiana Territory and Oregon country as defined by the United States.26

Contiguity explains why Lewis and Clark raced to discover the mouth of the Columbia River. Rather than the expedition of the heroic, morally neutral explorers I learned about in public education, theirs was a race to take the Northwest.27 Through contiguity, the discovery of the mouth of a river created a claim over the entire drainage system of the river and adjacent coast.28 At the heart of the practice of the Doctrine of Discovery, then, was watershed conquest, as exemplified in the seizure of the Louisiana Territory (the entire western drainage system of the Mississippi) and also Oregon country (the drainage system of the Columbia River).29

What does the Doctrine of Discovery and its resulting watershed conquest have to do with us as North American Christians in mission today? I would argue that Christendom’s theological and legal frameworks continue to hinder our moral vision, blinding us to the importance of place. Especially for those of us who have benefitted historically from European conquest, land seizure, and settlement, it is difficult to see the value of land and primacy of home to other peoples. For cross-cultural and long-distance missionaries, we may unknowingly carry with us theologies of displacement that colonial-era Christendom grafted into Christianity, and upon which the US was founded.

I believe that the legacy and continued impacts of the theologies that sanctioned watershed conquest may be healed by watershed discipleship, a home mission into our watersheds and a way of living out the gospel of reconciliation there. The rest of this essay will set forth two hallmarks of watershed discipleship, repentance and re-placement.

Repentance as Missional Paradigm Shift

Many Christian denominations and faith groups have publically issued statements of repentance of the Doctrine of Discovery and have rightly lamented its effects on indigenous people and the land.30 These confessions of repentance and repudiation point the way forward for other denominations to see how Christendom theologies continue to hinder true reconciliation, and to practice the witness of painful truth-telling. An understanding of repentance as a paradigm for mission greatly aids this most necessary ecclesial process of metanoia.

Missiologist David J. Bosch draws from Hans Küng’s study of theological paradigm shifts to describe significant transitions in the church’s understanding of mission throughout Christian history. He describes the contemporary church in mission as facing a paradigm shift characterized by the loss of Christianity’s dominant position in the world, a “profound feeling of ambiguity” about the Enlightenment god of Progress, an emerging ecological worldview coupled with the necessity of working for peace with justice, and an ecumenical posture toward other faiths that challenges the superiority of Christianity, among other factors.31

In recent decades, the paradigm of reconciliation as mission has gained significant traction in response to the above changes listed by Bosch. The emphasis on reconciliation is certainly a crucial response to the missio Dei, and a corrective to future-oriented salvation narratives of mission. Matthew D. Lundberg writes:

William R. Burrows reminds us that reconciliation is actually an ancient paradigm for mission that is receiving much-needed renewal today since it improves significantly upon the de facto images of “conversion” and “expansion” that characterized most mission efforts during the past five centuries—centuries that overlap, significantly, with the age of conquest, colonization, and varied forms of imperialism.32

Lundberg sees reconciliation as the “ultimate” call of the church-in-mission, yet naïve and impossible without the “penultimate” thing of repentance.33 In order to move toward the fullness of reconciliation offered in Christ, the North American church must embrace a posture of repentance. Lundberg names the legacies of colonialism and racism as examples involving Christian culpability that require a paradigm of repentance:

In these kinds of situations where the church is not a neutral bystander but is in some way guilty of wrongdoing, the church certainly cannot demand or insist upon reconciliation. It can only take up the stance of honest and wholehearted repentance, albeit a repentance that flows from the church’s belief in God’s foundational act of reconciliation in Jesus… such a paradigm of repentance not only enables the broader and ultimate reconciling dynamic of the gospel to remain in view, but it does so in a way that is appropriate to the church’s responsibility for at least some of the world’s ills.34

The paradigm of repentance requires the church to seek not only confession of wrongdoing, but to work toward right relationship with the land and its peoples past and present. This is not a separatist project; full repentance entails a socio-political commitment to the kind of reconciliation that attends to reparations of what has been lost and stolen. Myers writes, “To concede that we are part of the problem is a crucial hedge against both self-righteousness and escapism. But it is not enough: We must also imagine how we can be part of the resolution, the healing and the reconstruction.”35

Repentance, then, as much as it is a turning away from the ways of death and sin promulgated by the Christendom church, must also involve a turning toward. To paraphrase Kathleen Dean Moore, every time we say no to a way of destruction, we say yes to something much more beautiful and life sustaining.36 We need a way to live out both an emphatic No! to what we turn away from, and a productive Yes! to the way of life we turn toward. I propose that the Yes! proclaimed through the framework of watershed discipleship can help to constructively shape a paradigm of repentance.

Watershed Discipleship as Home Mission

Watershed discipleship is an antidote to the deep sense of placelessness lying behind the Doctrine of Discovery and watershed conquest. Watershed discipleship, as set forth by Ched Myers and other animators of this vision, is a way of re-placement.37 Its framework invites Christians to re-place our theology, our readings of Scripture, and our spiritual practices in our bioregions, defined by their source of life in the watershed.

Watershed discipleship calls disciples of Jesus to also become disciples of our particular places. The watershed, what permaculturalist Brock Dolman calls “the basin of relations,” encompasses ecological, social and political realities and relationships. One might imagine a watershed as a bathtub holding the cities, land, people, animals, and the rest of creation where a particular body of water drains.38 This geographically-bound vision points to a way of seeing a place as home, a way to more faithfully live the gospel in a particular place while remaining integrally connected to all other places. Contrary to popular understandings, a “local” focus does not cut people off from a global vision. Wendell Berry writes:

There is no such thing as a ‘global village.’ No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it. . . . We thus come again to the paradox that one can become whole only by the responsible acceptance of one’s partiality.39

Living and loving within limits, then, are the narrow way toward wholeness everywhere and for everyone.

Watershed discipleship prevents Samuel Escobar’s vision of mission from everywhere from reverting to a displaced and displacing mission from nowhere. In workshops and writings on watershed discipleship, Myers often paraphrases Baba Dioum, a Senegalese environmentalist, in the following dictum:

• We won’t save places we don’t love.
• We can’t love places we don’t know.
• And we don’t know places we haven’t learned.

We cannot be part of God’s work of salvation in this world without being part of the work of learning, knowing, and loving a home place. It goes without saying that we cannot claim and be claimed by a home place without long-term presence in a particular place.

Perhaps no biblical verb has been as significant for the history of mission as that of “go” in the Great Commission of Matt 28:18–20. “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations” (Matt 28:19a). Mission has been understood in terms of this sending out and leaving home for the sake of spreading the gospel. In order to fully live into a missional paradigm of repentance, I believe watershed discipleship offers the North American church an opportunity to alternatively interpret the commission to “go” in light of our context of rootless mobility, alienation, and displacement.

Watershed discipleship provides a way of repentance through going into our own particular places, turning away from the transmission of a false gospel that denies rootedness and incarnation. Just as Jesus was immersed into his own watershed in the Jordan River (in a baptism of repentance), I believe we must go deeper into the oft-unknown land and waters of our home places, and become disciples of Jesus through learning, knowing, and loving our own watersheds.40

Conclusion

I began with a personal story of a commission home I received from indigenous brothers and sisters in the Philippines. For me, answering the question, what place would you give your life for? meant seeking home in a watershed closer to my birthplace in California. A return to one’s birthplace may not be the answer that others discern. As I was writing this essay, I received word from Ikalahan-Kalanguya friends that Pastor Delbert Rice, North American missionary and cultural anthropologist in the Philippines for over 60 years, had just passed away at his home in the Ancestral Domain.41

Pastor Rice was an example of a faithful witness who poured out his life for the li-teng— the shalom—of the Ikalahan-Kalanguya. He would often recall hikes with tribal elders, learning about the forests, wildlife, and the stories and songs about their place. His work with the elders in the 1970s led to the crucial establishment of the Kalahan Educational Foundation (KEF), which successfully challenged land-grabbers in league with the Marcos dictatorship. Even in his last years, Pastor Rice worked passionately with the KEF to strengthen organic agriculture in the region and to resist foreign mining companies that continue to take indigenous lands. He modeled watershed discipleship by re-placing himself deeply within the watershed of the Ancestral Domain. We have everything to learn about this kind of discipleship from Pastor Rice, as well as the people and place he gave his life for.

In conclusion, as I have attempted to live out my own commissioning, I have begun to realize the shared roots between my own individual lack of home place and the larger historic placeless theologies of Christendom. For Christendom’s Doctrine of Discovery, the exploitative conversions of the land and indigenous people were bound together. As church, we need a framework whose transformative potential adequately counters this understanding of conversion. We need a resurrection way more powerful than the death grip of colonialism, one that sees following Jesus into our home places as a way of liberation for all people and land.42

Could it be that watershed discipleship is the commissioning that North American Christians are called to receive and to practice today—that we are now being commissioned home in a final reversal of Christendom? For people whose history is marred by placeless theologies and the erasure of memory, is it possible to repent of the ways of watershed conquest through practicing watershed discipleship? Through the power of the One who will be with us “to the very end of the age” (Matt 28:20), I believe it is not only possible, it is our only way home.

Katerina Friesen currently lives in the St. Joseph River watershed where she is an MDiv student at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, IN.

Bibliography

Berry, Wendell. The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, ed. Norman Wirzba. Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2003.

Bosch, David J. Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission. American Society of Missiology Series 16. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991.

DeMocker, Mary. “If Your House Is on Fire: Kathleen Dean Moore on the Moral Urgency of Climate Change.” The Sun 444 (December 2012): 6. http://thesunmagazine.org/issues/444/if_your_house_is_on_fire.

Dolman, Brock. Basins of Relations: A Citizen’s Guide to Protecting and Restoring Our Watersheds. 2nd ed. Occidental, CA: Water Institute, 2008.

Dumlao, Artemio A. “Report: Mining Harms Nueva Vizcaya’s Resources.” The Philippine Star, September 23, 2013. http://philstar.com/nation/2013/09/23/1237254/report-mining-harms-nueva-vizcayas-resources.

Encyclopedia of American Indian History. 4 vols. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2008.

Encyclopedia of American Indian Issues Today. 2 vols. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2013.

Escobar, Samuel. The New Global Mission: The Gospel from Everywhere to Everyone. Christian Doctrine in Global Perspective. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003.

Finlayson, Rob. “In Memoriam Rev. Delbert Arthur Rice.” Agroforestry World. May 11, 2014. http://blog.worldagroforestry.org/index.php/2014/05/11/in-memoriam-rev-delbert-arthur-rice.

Frichner, Tonya Gonnella. “Impact on Indigenous Peoples of the International Legal Construct Known as the Doctrine of Discovery, which has Served as the Foundation of the Violation of Their Human Rights.” Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Preliminary study submitted to the UN Economic and Social Council, New York, February 3, 2010. http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/E.C.19.2010.13%20EN.pdf.

Howell, Brian M., and Jenell Williams Paris. Introducing Cultural Anthropology: A Christian Perspective. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010.

Kreider, Alan, and Eleanor Kreider. Worship and Mission after Christendom. Waterloo, ON: Herald Press, 2011.

Lundberg, Matthew D. “Repentance as a Paradigm for Christian Mission.” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 45, no. 2 (March 2010): 201–17.

Miller, Robert J. “The Doctrine of Discovery: The International Law of Colonialism.” Indigenous Peoples Forum on the Impact of the Doctrine of Discovery, March 30, 2012. http://doctrineofdiscoveryforum.blogspot.com/2012/03/doctrine-of-discovery-international-law.html.

________. Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis & Clark, and Manifest Destiny. Lincoln: Bison Books, 2008.

Miller, Robert J., Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt, and Tracey Lindberg. Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Myers, Ched. “From ‘Creation Care’ to ‘Watershed Discipleship’: Re-Placing Ecological Theology and Practice.” Conrad Grebel Review 32, no. 3 (Fall 2014): forthcoming.

________. Who Will Roll Away the Stone? Discipleship Queries for First World Christians. Mary­knoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994.

Newcomb, Steve. “The Doctrine of Discovery.” Video of presentation, The Indigenous Peoples Forum on the Doctrine of Discovery, The Arizona State Capitol House of Representatives, Phoenix, AZ, March 23, 2012. https://youtube.com/watch?v=QZBKbNhfh-c.

The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). “What is the Doctrine of Discovery? Why Should it Be Repudiated? Factsheet.” New York Yearly Meeting, 2012. http://nyym.org/?q=doc_of_disc_factsheet.

Roxas, Elizabeth. “The Ikalahan: Sustaining Lives, Sustaining Life.” Asia Good Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) Practice Project. The Philippines: Environmental Broadcast Circle Association, 2006. http://www.agepp.net/files/agepp_philippines1_ikalahan_fullversion_en.pdf.

Walls, Andrews F. The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996.

Woodley, Randy. Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision. Prophetic Christianity. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012.

World Council of Churches. “Statement on the Doctrine of Discovery and its Enduring Impact on Indigenous Peoples.” WCC Executive Committee, Bossey, Switzerland, February 17, 2012. http://www.oikoumene.org/en/resources/documents/executive-committee/2012-02/statement-on-the-doctrine-of-discovery-and-its-enduring-impact-on-indigenous-peoples.

How can bioregionalism cultivate an enviro-missional imagination? Watershed discipleship is a local bioregional response to ecological crisis, but the watershed may also be extended into a theological framework that addresses the destruction of the uninhabited spaces of air and water called the global commons. Because industrialized humanity suffers from placelessness (ignorance about its global context), it cannot trace the effects of the waste it dumps in the places beyond the horizon, so it forgets about them. Placelessness leads to societal amnesia. By imaginatively integrating scientific, mythic, and philosophical concepts, this essay develops a bioregional response to the problem of the global commons. The author argues for local myths that are informed by global ecological systems and founded on a relational worldview that resists the societal amnesia induced by industrialization and cost-benefit analysis.

Something black rose from behind them, like a smudge at first, then widening, becoming deeper. The smudge became a cloud; and the cloud divided again into five other clouds, spreading north, east, south and west; and then they were not clouds at all but birds.

from The Birds by Daphne du Maurier

The apocalyptic film The Birds, by Alfred Hitchcock, reveals a deep-seated fear of what is beyond the horizon. Adapted from Daphne du Maurier’s short story, the film takes place on the edge of terrestrial habitation. In Hitchcock’s film, the birds come from beyond the horizon. Over the course of the film, thousands of diverse species show up on the doorstep of human civilization, hungry for human blood. In the film as well as the short story, the birds peck the human eyes as a symbolic attack from forces that come from beyond visual perception. As creatures of the wind, birds have the unique evolutionary capacity to travel beyond the world of terrestrial, two-legged humans. Tapping into an ancient fear not of birds but of natural apocalypse, Hitchcock re-mythologized chaotic natural processes that seem to communicate vengeance.1 Like the First Testament’s plagues, the story describes nature preying upon human civilization. The Birds is rooted in a real event that occurred in Santa Cruz, California, during the summer of 1961.2 Hitchcock researched the event during the initial design phase of his film. Hundreds of sooty shearwaters crashed into windshields, windows, and buildings; thousands of dead shearwaters covered streets. Needless to say, the birds did not fly around tearing the eyeballs out of people.

With one of the longest migratory patterns among birds, shearwaters cover up to 39,000 miles annually.3 As a non-sedentary species, shearwaters are creatures from beyond the horizon. The orientation of their life history revolves around travel patterns between breeding and feeding grounds. The 1961 event in Santa Cruz remained a mystery, but many suggested the strange mass fatality was rooted within the chaotic seas. Scientists have hypothesized that the shearwaters had been poisoned by a substance called domoic acid that recently has had detrimental effects on humans.

These malevolent effects came to light in 1987 when a mysterious food poisoning outbreak hit Canada. Epidemiologists traced the ingested food to blue mussels harvested in the eastern waters of Prince Edward Island.4 Officials were confused by the unusual symptoms such as short-term memory loss, confusion, and death in some cases. Over the next few years, discovering the substance and origin of the poison proved to be an ecological murder mystery with many twists and turns. In the end, investigators found domoic acid to be the cause. Today the symptoms are called “amnesic shellfish poisoning” (ASP). Within a category of related eco-toxic substances, ASP can come from eating shellfish at key moments in the movement of energy in oceanic trophic systems. Succinctly stated, domoic acid and other similar toxins are expressed in dinoflagellates and diatoms. The allelopathic poisons serve a similar function that poisons serve in terrestrial plants—defense against predation. As filter feeders, shellfish are not affected by the poisons but store the compounds. Consequently, the concentration is magnified. Known as bioaccumulation, toxins often become concentrated in fat stores that, when ingested, have detrimental effects on the predator. The behavior of shearwaters in Santa Cruz can be explained by an overdose of domoic acid.

Dinoflagellates and other plankton are located at the base of a massive oceanic food web. Moving from the oceanic deep to the surface during various life cycles, plankton populations and species diversity are fundamentally determined by available nutrients within the system. During massive phytoplankton blooms, allelopathic toxins become concentrated, killing various types of predators including fish that swim through the blooms. Further, the toxins often become airborne as the wind disturbs the surface of the ocean and blows microscopic plankton into the air with the sea spray. During such unique events, coastal residents often suffer with intense allergy attacks from the wind-borne poisons.

Recently, changes in phytoplankton assemblies—both specie variety and population size—have been observed. The chaotic system of specie assembly, allelopathic expression, and massive phytoplankton blooms has only recently been statistically linked to global warming and nutrient loading from terrestrial agriculture. Many dangerous blooms occur just off the coast of areas where anthropogenic nutrient-loaded waters are dumped into the seas. Interestingly, the nutrients are the excess of city waste or chemical fertilizers.5

Hitchcock’s film and the 1987 discovery of the ASP outbreak serve as a kind of realized natural apocalypse. The film mythologizes, while the ASP outbreak parabolizes. The psychological thriller mythologizes a fear from beyond the horizon, while the ASP outbreak traces the cause and effects of industrialization on the placeless human global commons, particularly sea and air. The ASP outbreak describes the realization of a modern perspective on the global commons—a worldview which establishes the failure of industrial humanity to care for the uninhabited spaces that constitute the global commons. The effects of such a relationship with the global commons loop back from the mythic horizon and enculturate a profound memory loss in industrial cultures. This vision elucidates the need to cultivate a missional imagination robust enough to react to industrial myopia and cultivate ecological activism that verbalizes indigenous reconciliation with the primordial that dwells beyond the horizon. Bioregionalism is one fertile field for cultivating this relational re-imagining of the global commons that can value indigenous theology rooted in local ecology. The concern governing my entire exploration will be how bioregionalism, as both a philosophy and social activism, can provide a linguistic structure for an indigenous enviro-missional imagination. Considering the profound impact the corporate individual has on the global commons, any bioregional movement must concern itself with more than simply the local watershed. To that end, I will integrate mystical, theological, and ecological perspectives of the global commons that I hope will goad literate people into a renewed perspective on the great uninhabited spaces. The global commons are more than the fisheries of the great upwellings and more expansive than the polluted airs surrounding urban areas. Rather, the global commons are ecological verbalizations of the primordial. How does one protect the air? How do communities transfer environmental angst into action? How do bioregional activists defend expansive uninhabited spaces? The first step is to foster a bioregional cosmology.

The Extended Phenotype of the Industrial Human

Nutrient overload (eutrophication) is the main cause of the worldwide increase of harmful algal blooms (HABs). Furthermore, research confirms HABs’ increase is humanly generated (anthropogenic): due to the agricultural and waste management practices of modern habitation.6 Eutrophication is a peculiar effect of human behavior rooted in the placeless cultures of industrial capitalism and globalization. This behavior is both an extreme localism (a kind of hermeticism) and also a placelessness (exhibiting an ignorance of context). The flush of a toilet from a residence or the flush of fertilizer from a corn field are beyond the responsibility of the individual. Fecal matter and fertilizer move beyond the horizon to the mythical beyond; ignoring what is carried away by water, modern humanity only considers materials that are quantifiable within political, city-state boundaries. Further, by the arbitrary creation of borders and property, humanity loses a sense of responsibility for connected global processes. Eutrophication is a symptom of global industrialization, which ignores the consequences of human productivity within a larger world. I want to argue that eutrophication and other results of human (un)inhabitation are a kind of extended phenotype of the industrial human.

Evolution is measured only when scientists define the unit of selection. Selection since Darwin has been defined according to fitness of the individual as a unit. In 1982, Richard Dawkins coined the term “extended phenotype” to describe a different unit of selection—genes.

The phenotypic effects of a gene are tools by which it levers itself into the next generation, and these tools may “extend” far outside the body in which the gene sits, even reaching deep into the nervous systems of other organisms.7

According to this perspective, the battle of fitness occurs inside the individual organism instead of between individuals. The self-replicating gene, argued Dawkins, is a kind of archetype8 that expresses its visual phenotype as behavior or morphology. Instead of the organism fighting for dominance, the body of the organism is a tool for genetic propagation. In this sense various alleles represent the competitive field of Darwinian dominance.9 The result of the genetic battle is the momentary extension of a specific allele within an organism and providing the fittest phenotype. In essence, the phenotype is the visual extension into the macro-world of a micro-dictated pattern. For Dawkins’s extended phenotype, the extension does not stop at the borders of the individual; phenotypes can extend into the larger world outside the individual. This extension can be expressed in other organisms, including completely different species.10 Often the phenotypic extension alters the behavior of other organisms beyond the carrier of the gene. Beyond this, the extension does not stop with the biotic, but can extend out to the abiotic environment and shape the structure of habitats.

Further, since organisms represent successful combinations of coordinating genes, some have suggested the individual organism is a kind of macro-composite phenotype.11 The composite phenotype represents a cursory boundary in which genes reach a coexistence with other genes; the organism represents a miniature stable ecosystem. In the end, the ultimate quest for the origin of speciation appears to be a circular mirage in which the genetic archetype emanates but also returns. As the arche emanates outward, it interacts with other factors until a composite phenotype is expressed. Many such phenotypes express niche construction in which the environment is changed. Earthworms, beavers, and humans are lucid examples of species that construct niches out of abiotic materials.12 Proponents of niche construction, however, suggest the extended phenotype can extend back upon itself. As the phenotype extends into the environment, the world turns inside out; the internal arche reveals itself as enveloping the outside. Yet as the enfolding occurs, the environment conditions the inhabitant and provides pressure on genetic selection.13

The extended phenotype can help interpret modern human activity. Lacking only empirical evidence to determine the extent of genetic evolution, geneticists have evidence to show how human culture has a profound impact on genetic selection and its related phenotypes. One of the best examples with ample research is the allele of lactose tolerance. Present in only human populations which have had a historic tradition of dairy farming, lactose tolerance was expressed only after the practice of dairy farming was initiated. As a technology of production, domestication and animal husbandry represent a composite phenotypic package that provides the niche for dairy production. Dairy culture, as a stable tradition transmitted to future generations, represents a habitation or niche cultivated from a composite, extended human phenotype. However, the extension of the phenotype boomerangs back into the human as pressure selection for the lactose tolerant allele. As the ecologist Kevin Laland explains, “The selective environments of organisms are not independent of organisms but are themselves partly products of the prior niche-constructing activities of organisms.”14

How does the extended phenotype help explain the ecological quagmire of global industrialization? As masters of production, humans are the ultimate niche engineers. In view of the capacity to shape the environment around us, environmental determinism is untenable. Thus, like the skewed model of linear evolution only originating within the gene, human culture is not simply determined by the environment. For some, the archetypal coding of culture seems to replicate within the mind. However, the cyclical extension of the phenotype back upon itself provides a more nuanced way to understand human behavior. Culture is both a product of the arche within the mind and a byproduct of the chaotic repercussions of niche construction.

Specifically, the speed, quantity, and scope of modern human behavior characterize the niche of globalized industry.15 When production is quickened and quantified for non-regional consumption, a cultural niche is produced. Like any other organism, humans produce resources for habitation; the construction of niche represents a new organization of environmental materials and spaces. The non-regional gaze of industry fixes upon the consistent, rapid, profligate production necessary to feed infinite desire. Consequently, as a hallmark of globalization, time and space are compacted. Resources created over millions of years are decimated within seconds, and artifacts of human production are extricated from tradition to be artifacts without time. As time implodes, the overabundance of industrialization homogenizes space by flattening landscape into a non-referential nowhere. Johannesburg and Nashville are the same place. Not only can I travel there in the blink of an eye, but I can easily confuse both places as the same place. Summarily, the niche of industrialization is a kind of expansive, liminal, and timeless nowhere. Ecologically described, the industrial human niche is a phenotypic extension marked by over-production and indicating a species near extinction.16 The replicating industrial arche is exploding into the world and mixing with a complex planetary system to create a niche that has profound effects on human fitness.

Returning to the story of ASP, industrial production replicates locally, but flows beyond the horizon to a place we know not—the desert oceans. Furthermore, industrial production moves into the uninhabited global commons to sit on the face of the deep. Mining and defecating within the unbounded commons, the extended phenotype of modern cultures cultivates a niche in the beyond. The human niche has exploded into the uninhabited world; shock-waves have stirred the face of the deep. As it explodes into the global commons, humanity cannot trace the effects. In this sense, global industrialization has cultivated a niche for humanity that selects for amnesia. In a timeless, placeless existence, the allele for human memory is profoundly weakened. As overproduction extends into the global commons, the primordial space develops allelopathic toxins of amnesia. This amnesia is both obfuscation and myopia. Like an overloaded field of fertilizer, the wastes of industrialization journey to the place beyond the habited—beyond the horizon. The pathway and its effects are obfuscated due to the chaotic complexity of global air and water. Yet, global air and water are not only the wasteland for industrial defecation but also the source of continued production.17 Like any niche, the environment provides the structure both for energy that leaves the organism and energy that an organism consumes. Humanity cannot trace the effects; and so, obfuscation becomes the germ of a mental myopia that results in societal amnesia.

The Global Commons

By emphasizing the watershed, bioregionalism rightly reorients human perception. Individuals must not only take responsibility for the field they own but for the location of their field within a flow of energy. Whether an individual lives in the uplands of a catchment area or the fluvial flatlands, energy moves from sky to sea and back again. Further, bioregionalism suggests nation-states are inadequate to provide sustainable living. Human life must be placed within a larger watershed than a district, county, or state. Nevertheless, bioregionalism identifies an ecological boundary. Indeed, these frontiers are real and applicable, but the placeless processes of water and air, and wandering lifestyles such as the sooty shearwater’s, require an extension of bioregionalism into a global, mythic space.

International corporations have already defied the boundaries of nation-state and operate in the global airs and waters of planet earth; industrial economies operate on global scales. The quantification of city waste and industrial agriculture are examples of a pervading ethic within placeless globalization. The global commons are uninhabited spaces where industrial economies dump excesses as well as mine abundances. The global commons are different than the terrestrial commons of lake and pasture. Regulated commons have definable boundaries, inhabitants, and access. On the other hand, global commons do not have clear boundaries, do not have human habitation, and do not have non-technological access. From an ecological perspective, the global commons are at once massive reservoirs of energy and conveyor belts of energy. From a cultural perspective, the global commons are at once mythic spaces beyond human boundaries and wild spaces beyond human control. Integrating the two perspectives, the global commons are the locus for ecological cosmology, where chaos and memory are rooted.

Reading Luce Irigaray

Boundaries are very important to bioregionalism as an interdisciplinary movement that uses geography to spatialize space. In fact, the delineation of an ecological border is what provides the first indications of place. For example, Robert Thayer defines the first characteristic of a bioregion as “a physiographically unique place, a geographically legitimate concept, an identifiable region, and an operative spatial unit.”18 The description of place inevitably requires differentiation over against other landscapes, concepts, and ecologies. To cultivate robust, sustainable human communities, it is imperative to identify place. Nevertheless, there can be a forgetfulness or amnesia of the constituents from which place is constructed. Following the suggestion that the global water cycle is a kind of placeless process, Luce Irigaray provides a critique of Western philosophy that can aid in relocating the global commons within Western culture. Irigaray argues Western philosophy has a type of amnesia that marginalizes the birthplace of life. According to Irigaray, Martin Heidegger’s meditation on the relationship of Being to place is a kind of repression. Heidegger suggests man creates the world through logos; the verbal construction of place is the dwelling of Being. We live in what we create. Heidegger uses the concept of a bridge to reveal this in-dwelling:

The bridge . . . does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. The bridge designedly causes them to lie across from each other. One side is set off against the other by the bridge. . . . With the banks, the bridge brings to the stream the one and the other expanse of the landscape lying behind them. It brings stream and bank and land into each other’s neighborhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream.19

Consequently, the building of a bridge is a concept in which humanity-dwelling-in-the-world names, describes, and brings into relation its environment. However, Irigaray argues Heidegger forgets from which the bridge, the bank, and the stream are constructed:

Built on the void, the bridge joined two banks that, prior to its construction, were not: the bridge made two banks. And further: the bridge, a solidly established passageway, joins two voids that, prior to its construction, were not: the bridge made the void. How not suspend that toward which it goes, that toward which it returns, in a serene awaiting.20

It is the logos, the rational spoken word that first divides the void, the deep, or the chaotic placeless substrate that founds the bridge. Irigaray suggests Western philosophy creates a dwelling at the expense of what cannot be conceptualized. For her, the placeless substrate is fluidity, process, and passage; the dominant metaphor used to concretize the placeless dwelling from which Being lives is air. The air defies boundaries but surrounds and enfolds Being. It is the womb from which life is birthed. Consequently, place is not where boundaries are established, but where boundaries are removed; place is fuzzy. The fluidity of place requires an acceptance of permeability and porosity. Sex and pregnancy provide biological examples of this kind of place:

The fetus is a continuum with the body it is in. . . . It passes from a certain kind of continuity to another through the mediation of fluids: blood, milk. . . .

There are times when the relation of place in the sexual act gives rise to a transgression of the envelop, to a porousness, a perception of the other, a fluidity.21

Irigaray reminds us that the bioregion is enfolded by a larger placeless, uninhabited space. Swirling through the trees, passing through my body, and condensing from another dimension, the global commons are the chaotic waters and hovering spirit.22 The global commons are the ecological unbounded place of cosmology. Later, we will see how this formless space is the beyond-the-horizon location of an imaginal world intersecting the beyond with the line of our perception. For now, I hope to maximize the development of the global commons as the uterus of all bioregions. Global atmosphere and ocean are non-linguistic elements with a fecundity of dwelling spaces. All verbal dwellings, geographical conceptions, and logocentric units are reductions of a larger reality that cannot be named. Whether regions are defined as bioregions or nation-states, these dwellings are already built up from a frothy void. The global commons must be re-mythologized as the primordial elements of water and air. Without a primordial cosmology, uniquely enfleshed in various bioregions, all forms of terrestrial dwelling will be overturned by the primordial froth. Irigaray suggests the need for a relational approach to the primordial in contrast to the logo-centric domination of the void. By remembering the global commons through primordial cosmology, humanity is brought into relation. As society forgets the primordial, the creatures of the deep stir. Stated differently, the extended phenotype of Western globalized culture will wash downstream into the deep where niche construction will quickly precipitate a crash; the Leviathan will play.

The Leviathan and Global Commons

Recently, process theology, chaos theory, and postmodern theopoetics23 have engaged the rich texts and subtexts of ancient Hebrew primordial myths. For my purposes, I want to focus on the Leviathan text of Job 41. The voice that Job has been goading to speak finally speaks in chapter 41. The voice whistles from a whirlwind. Couched as a deluge of questions, the voice asks if Job is aware of the mythic beast called Leviathan:

No one is so fierce as to dare to stir it up. Who can stand before it? Who can confront it and be safe? . . .When it raises itself up the gods are afraid; at the crashing they are beside themselves. . . . It makes the deep boil like a pot. (Job 41:10–11, 25, 31)24

For my purposes, Job is not a book about explaining injustice, but a discursive meditation of losing the mythical cosmology of a world in relation to others.25 The content of God’s response is cosmological, refusing to explain the meaning of the world according to human interests. The voice of God emanates from the same turbulence that shook the roof down upon Job’s children. When the voice responds, it does not provide answer to the question, “Why me?” Rather, the voice overpowers Job. Strictly speaking, Job experiences an epiphany, or in Catherine Keller and Timothy Beal’s language, a “tehophany.” Job is enveloped into chaos. The voice from the air reminds Job of the multiple intelligences beyond the horizon within the deep. The Leviathan is a personification of chaos and the primordial unbounded tehom of Genesis 1.26 Both Keller and Beal see the divine voice from the whirling air as an extreme vision of the divine—not as the master of chaos, but within chaos.

The gods are fearful in the face of the Leviathan. The man-made gods of creation ex nihilo, the gods who tower over creation whipping it into submission, cower at the bubbling surface of the deep. These industrial gods who only view creation through domination are surprised at the self-organizing voice that speaks from the deep; the voice—from the whirlwind that synchronizes into syllables, the message that blooms from billions of independent sun-catching organisms, and the face perceived from the steam of the boiling deep—emanates from a primordial place. The untamed Leviathan from primordial space and time is the material which the Spirit of God hovers over in Genesis and the substance of Job’s tehophany. The synchronicity of worldly elements is a kind of “material mysticism”27 that rips into the industrial world of humanity. Job lives on the surface of reality—as all organisms must do—crying, biting, and retching for survival. Yet, his reality drops into the deep when the voice whistles out of the air. From the same chaotic destruction, a voice of fecundity reseeds a new world. Importantly, the reseeding of new life only begins when Job drowns in a cosmology he does not understand. The violence and oxygenation of the bubbling waters around the Leviathan provide a “chaosmos” that is both self-annihilation and regeneration.28

A chaosmos provides a fruitful context for developing a relational perspective to the world. The objectification of the cosmos is a hallmark of industrialization. Broken into non-regenerative pieces, modern civilization takes the face and the voice out of the world. Cosmological personalities provide the structure to hear the voice that emanates out of self-organizing, self-synchronizing sentience. In Job, the dialogue of the Tempter with the Lord undergirds a perception of the universe that suggests chaotic forces are in dialogue. I would suggest Job loses his capacity to hear the primordial voices as his world is destroyed. The majority of the book is a dialogue with non-primordial sentient beings. He rails against the God of heaven to goad God into a response. Unaware of the dialogue in the air, Job is forced to scream back into the atmospheric abyss. When Job passes through the period of waiting, he accepts the possibility of self-annihilation. Though Job is capable of killing God through curse, he refuses to die as an individual-without-relation. When the voice comes, it offers a renewed world-in-relation via the Leviathan. Being in relation to the tehom, Job is both horrified and soothed. The Leviathan is a lover that regenerates through self-annihilation. I will return to the idea of self-annihilation later. At this stage in the paper, I merely want to argue that Job is brought back into relation with the primordial personalities that destroyed his world. In fact, as the story ends, the reader is told that the Lord-of-the-whirlwind regenerates more abundance for Job. The reader leaves Job at a feast in which his friends offer sympathy for the “evil the Lord had done to him.” We can only assume the scars of the event die with Job. Though Job’s friends provide an easy linear causation back to the Lord, the reader is left with a primordial presence that is at once the face of the Tempter, the heavenly Lord, and the Leviathan. What will bubble up from the deep next is impossible to know. But how do ancient primordial characters relate to our modern problems?

Cost/Benefit Analysis and the Global Commons

A relational worldview is the fuel for myth cultivation. The industrial civilization of objectification will not approach sustainable coexistence on earth because sustainability is living in relation to other beings. The relationship with the global commons must be approached through cosmological mythic structures. The Leviathan entices us and horrifies us. But when the world is objectified, perceptual cataracts develop and we lose sight of the face that rises to the surface. Today, environmental policy-making uses cost/benefit analysis, which is based on the idea that complex wholes can be broken into quantifiable parts.29 Ecosystems and even human life can be counted and fit into a quantifiable economic system. The counting cardinals of modern capitalism demonstrate how blinded industrial society has become to the excess that bubbles out of systems. The excess is part of all holistic systems and a trademark of a chaosmos. Though scientists can count average nutrient overflow from agriculture fields, they cannot count the chaotic relationship nutrients have to a primordial world. We cannot count objects if they are in relation to the primordial. Put differently, we cannot count that which is related to eternity. Cost/benefit analysis is simply a floating island that appears to provide a solid foundation for assessment and risk analysis. Yet the waters are bubbling from the deep on which it floats.

Mundus Imaginalis and the Global Commons

If bioregionalism will offer a more sustainable relationship to the sentience around us, we must develop a mythos beyond regionalism that cultivates relationship to the primordial. From a more philosophical-literary language, the global industrialization of life systems into quantifiable parts represents the objectification of processes, fluidity, and quality. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard re-mythologized the great global tropes of earth, air, water, and fire. He suggested that an adjective is at the center of the universe not a noun. Objects are merely embodiments of qualities. According to David Miller, a close reader of Bachelard, modern thought forced the substantive into concrete substance.30 In a move towards quantification, “adjectives came to be absorbed into nouns.”31 Nevertheless, at the bottom of the world the philosopher does not find a concrete object but a process, a quality, or a dancing spirit that verbalizes and adjectivizes.

Consequently, if we combine Irigaray’s thought with Bachelard’s, the primordial, unbounded, uninhabited nowhere of the global commons is more properly verbalizations and descriptions of a larger life. This life presents a face to humanity. Like Irigaray’s primordial void, we cannot speak of the ocean as a place, but as a process. The oceans and air vibrate relationality into the cosmos. The Leviathan formulates and verbalizes from the deep.

However, Bachelard offers one final nuance of adjectives that will help us connect the global commons to the work of myth-making from diverse bioregions. Bachelard’s concept of verticality refers to a specific function of adjectives that embody epiphany. Key embodiments of verticality in the world provide a relational connection to humanity that both “soars up” and “stretches” down.32 As Richard Kearney notes, Bachelard’s verticality was a unification of contradictory elements.33 The stretching of space into a vertical expanse instructively images the connectivity and unfinished relationship of the contradictory elements. This is especially instructive for affirming the global commons as the space of primordial tehophany. Job is both enticed and horrified by the Leviathan. There is feasting and also empathy for the evil done. Laughter and horror provide the epiphanic event when the face of the deep personifies onto the human landscape.

For Bachelard, the coupled contradiction compacted ordinary time, disrupted ordinary thought, and pushed the energy and tension into a verticality of height and depth. He claimed the “epiphanic instant” preeminently occurred in the peculiar adjectival speech of poetry. More specifically, the poetic is a kind of imagination that both induces and is induced by the epiphanic instant. Though Bachelard used the literary poem as the vehicle for the imagination to epiphanize, I do not think it follows that we must isolate poetry and bias the cosmological imagination to one specific literary structure. As an ancient oral form, poetry is rooted in narrative dialogue as rhapsodies such as Homer’s so adequately show. But what is the cosmological imagination? Is human imagination merely an escape from reality?

Henry Corbin and the Mundus Imaginalis

We now approach the organ for the human capacity to image mythic archetype—the capacity of imagination. From such diverse thinkers as anthropologist David Graeber and cultural ecologist David Abram, the imagination is a rich subject for exploring the relationship of human thought and ideation with the environmental embodiment of human perception.34 However, for my purposes, I will only briefly elucidate the “mundus imaginalis” of Henry Corbin and the Iranian Islamic mystics.

David Miller has provided an insightful connection between Bachelard’s work and the expansive work of the theosopher Henry Corbin vis-à-vis verticality.35 I will borrow this connection to use the mundus imaginalis as a tool for cultivating a mythic relational posture toward the global commons.

As Corbin notes in a book on Islamic philosophy:

Because it has not had to confront the problems raised by what we call the “historical consciousness,” philosophical thought in Islam moves in two counter yet complementary directions: issuing from the Origin (mabda’), and returning (ma’ad) to the Origin, issue and return both taking place in a vertical dimension. Forms are thought of as being in space rather than in time. Our thinkers perceive the world not as “evolving” in a horizontal and rectilinear direction, but as ascending: the past is not behind us but “beneath our feet.”36

The extended phenotype and the ecological niche effects that return to the archetypal center sit more comfortably in a spatial framework than simply a linear evolutionary model. As we dive deeper into the microcosm, we find a shadow of the macrocosm. A scholar of Iranian Islamic mysticism, Corbin aligns verticality with the ancient esoteric traditions of Islamic mysticism that re-imagined Zoroastrian angelology and Platonic/neo-Platonic thought. Ushered into stages of ascent and descent, verticality defines the space where the mundus imaginalis operates. The imaginal world of Corbin and the ancient theosophers is an intermediary space between sensation and intellect. Without reducing the imaginal world into the fictional imaginary, this intermediary space provides the perception of the ecstatic vision. In the imaginal world, Moses hears the voice from the burning bush, Jacob sees a ladder extending into heaven, and Job hears the voice from the whirlwind.37 An expert on Corbin’s thought, Tom Cheetham explains the imaginal world as giving

access to an intermediate realm of subtle bodies, of real presences, situated between the sensible world and the intelligible. . . . On Corbin’s view all the dualisms of the modern world stem from the loss of the mundus imaginalis: matter is cut off from spirit, sensation from intellection, subject from object, inner from outer, myth from history, the individual from the divine.38

Between the dualisms of Western consciousness, a void exists. The dualism either causes the imaginal to be fantasy and imaginary or the imaginal is a kind of faculty for artists who do not really live in reality anyway. For the ancient Persian theosophers, the mundus imaginalis, or the ‘alam al-mithal, was grounded in a complex cosmology that related to a complex progression that ascended to the divine. This cosmology was expressed as verticality. In a non-mythical sense, the mundus imaginalis is the faculty of the poet who perceives the adjective/adverb that embodies the world. The imaginal is the bridge that snaps discrete components into metaphor and provides the face or person of the world. For Corbin, unless the mundus imaginalis has

a cosmology whose schema can include, as does the one that belongs to our traditional philosophers, the plurality of universes in ascensional order, our Imagination will remain unbalanced, its recurrent conjunctions with the will to power will be an endless source of horrors. We will be continually searching for a new discipline of the Imagination, and we will have great difficulty in finding it as long as we persist in seeing in it only a certain way of keeping our distance with regard to what we call the real, and in order to exert an influence on that real.39

As Cheetham plainly states, the active Imagination must be seen as a faculty that emanates from beyond the human.40 Otherwise, the secularization of today will label the active Imagination as fantasy. The space where imaginative perception congeals from sensation and intellection must be from a primordial beyond. For the Persian Islamic mystics, the ‘alam al-mithal originated from the divine. For bioregionalism, I believe we must connect the sense of the divine with the beyond of the horizon, with the uninhabited global commons where the Leviathan plays in excess. The excess that reverberates and re-extends back into the genetic archetype cannot be calculated or quantified but is the emergent voice of the primordial Leviathan.

For Corbin, the mundus imaginalis is not a morally charged faculty. Like the vertical polarity unifying contradiction, the mundus imaginalis constructs the perception in which we are horrified and elated.41 The active Imagination is the vehicle by which we can hear the voice that whistles from the whirlwind. However, Corbin adamantly argues that without a cosmology that pushes the origin of the imaginal into a supra-consciousness, it will collapse into a one-dimensional secularized world ready to be quantified. For this reason, the tehophanic event signals a moment of decision. The Leviathan threatens to stretch the individual into two. Like Job when the voice emanates from the whirlwind and the deep bubbles forth the Leviathan, we are given a pivotal moment to respond: “On one there is the Death of God and the birth of a Promethean, rapacious, and monstrous Humanity. On the other, Resurrection and the poverty of a life in sympathy with beings.”42

The mundus imaginalis is not an Islamic sensibility. Though Corbin stresses the importance of how the imaginal worked with the mystical cosmology of Iranian Sufism, it does not require a Muslim worldview. We may take a final suggestion from Corbin to place the active Imagination into a context in which it can be used by diverse religious traditions including local Christian theologies. Here I quote Corbin’s use of the Iranian philosopher Ibn ‘Arabi:

“Each being,” says Ibn ‘Arabi, “has as his God only his particular Lord, he cannot possibly have the Whole.”

Here we have a kind of kathenotheism verified in the context of a mystic experience; the Divine Being is not fragmented, but wholly present in each instance, individualized in each theophany.43

Without allowing a specific religious tradition to dominate the divine, Corbin suggests a traditioned theophany that emanates from the esoteric deep. In this sense, we need people from multiple religious traditions to reach into the primordial stories of their own traditions and the primordial space of the global commons and actively perceive what is bubbling in the face of the deep.

For my purposes, Corbin provides a pliable mysticism that avoids exoteric fundamentalism necessary for a bioregional discipleship. Indeed, Job exemplifies the positive use of the mundus imaginalis when he faces the divine presence that emanates from the primordial air; the book closes with Job resurrected and experiencing a “poverty of life in sympathy with beings.” Job’s friends gather around him in sympathy for the “evil the Lord had done to him.” From the whirlwind that killed his family, Job hears the voice of God. Reconciliation is not achieved by the addition of new barns and children. Rather, Job is brought back into a relationship with the primordial deep. God’s voice whistles from this void, and Job’s ability to hear God from the chaos resituates Job in a world infused with the divine presence. Job’s reconciliation is cosmic and results in sympathy with other beings.

Further, Corbin’s mysticism provides space for valuing the indigenous traditions found in unique watersheds. The simple acknowledgement of religious pluralism does not require a collapse into relativism, but a deeper commitment to the tradition in conversation with a larger global commons ecology. Religious traditions are watersheds which mythologize about the primordial global commons.

Rebirthing Orality: Storied Myth

Over the preceding pages, I have tried to read various scholars to suggest the global commons are the ecological intersection where the divine boils over from primordial void into human imagination. We have a deep-seated fear of and wonder at the primordial fluidity of air and sea. Reading Job, I have suggested the divine voice emanates from the chaotic swirling air (whirlwind) or bubbling deep (Leviathan). Job provides location for ecological epiphany and consequently provides the geography of cosmological Imagination. Analogically, Job’s anthropocentrism is mirrored in the industrialized relationship with creation. As a relationship of dominance and extraction, modern humanity lives alone in a material world devoid of divine presence. In effect for industrial society, the material world swirls around a singular sentience—humanity. Nevertheless, the actions of modern society have profound ecological effects; the primordial deep is stirred. If the industrial human can be characterized as a peculiar composite phenotype, we may wonder how the phenotype is extended into the world. By tracing ecotoxicological results via hindsight, I have symbolized amnesic shellfish poisoning as the result of the extended phenotype of industrial humanity. Consequently, the industrial allele of modern civilization returns from the global commons as amnesia. Different than terrestrial commons, the global commons demand a decentering of human concerns. I believe we will not discover our role as creatures of the earth until we experience the tehophanic event bubbling from the primordial global commons. Until we perceive a larger sentience within the global commons, we will fail to live sustainably in a world of finite resources. Myth gives a face to the resident chaos in the global commons. The mythic traditions woven out of the diverse watersheds can be cosmogonic myths that put industrialized humanity in relationship with the primordial.

As renewed myth, the task must be an oral activism and not a literate conference, publication, or tweet, because the amnesia induced by our global industrial complex is aggravated by literacy dependency. Though literate culture provides incredible resources for the storage of knowledge, it also profoundly affects the social and mental processes of humanity.44 In particular, literacy objectifies memory, externalizes remembrance, and severs the relational nature of knowledge. For myth-making to provide a social backbone that can foster a bioregional cosmology, the process must be oral.

However, language is not a thing but an event.45 Language and its discrete words are sounds rooted in bodily gestural speech.46 In this sense, cosmogonic myths are narrated conversations with both human and more-than-human sentient beings about the beyond-the-human-horizon. These myths are rooted in the oral event of epiphany and refined through social extension. The abstraction and objectification of language onto the page have depersonalized and demythologized the cosmos. As an event, all verbalizations of cosmogonic myth are a singular annunciation that compacts time into a vertical space within the context. The oral myth is not repeated but created anew as it is shared, discussed, and reformatted within the present moment and communal space.

For the ancient Greeks, the act of remembering was itself a mythic returning to the primordial waters. The Muses were the mythic personality of memory and remembrance. To re-member the world, the poet needed help to voice the story. Consequently, though memory was external to the poet, it was personified and required participation with sentience. As Ivan Illich says, “Each utterance was like a piece of driftwood the speaker fished from a river, something cast off in the beyond that had just then washed up onto the beaches of his mind.”47 These waters were the embodiment of one of the Titans—Mnemosyne; she held all the memories of the dead within her primordial waters. Yet the impact of literacy cemented memory onto the page.48 Plato had a complicated relationship with writing, and the shift from a primary to secondary orality can be discerned within his writing. For example, in his epistemological work, Theaetetus, Plato uses a literate metaphor to consider how knowledge is remembered. He puts the suggestion in the words of Socrates:

Please assume, then, for the sake of argument, that there is in our souls a block of wax.
. . . Let us, then, say that this is the gift of Mnemosyne (Memory), the mother of the Mousai (Muses), and that whenever we wish to remember anything we see or hear or think of in our own minds, we hold this wax under the perceptions and thoughts and imprint them upon it, just as we make impressions from seal rings. . . .49

The participatory nature of knowledge and perception is largely lost when we lose the necessity to ask the Muses for remembrance and concretize knowledge onto the page. Plato begins to technologize memory onto a page within his mind. From such a metaphor, it would seem history inevitably reduced participatory memory onto an external page. Nonetheless, the word is not a sign, but the gesticulated verbalization of the body of the world. The literate conferences Western culture promulgates will be largely uneventful until the oral word is released back into the primordial air and water. Only then will the word become event and usher from the whirlwind. In this light, many indigenous peoples who maintain a tight connection to oral tradition must be at the center of a bioregional activism that will be robust enough to engage with the problems of the global commons.

Conclusion

God-via-Leviathan is in the excess—the overflow and the boiling over of reality. The Leviathan slashes instantly and rips open a verticality that carries us into a tehophany. The moment does not evolve into being but snaps into being. The sentient processes of global systems bubble over in fecundity. From the chaotic deep, billions of sentient beings boil into a primordial bloom. The ecological vertical “epiphanic instant” comes from beyond the horizon, from the deep, and from above. The verticality drives us to imagine as we are stretched along the vertical axis of height and depth. Our toes are driven into the basalt bottoms of the sea while our arms are dragged into the sky abyss. Like a cosmic whirling dervish, the stretched posture opens being to the imaginal world. Only a stretched, cosmic mythology can provide the structure for reconciliation to the Leviathan whose home is beyond the horizon. The Leviathan sleeps in the allelopathic abundance of microbial fecundity. Linear time does not run horizontally, but up and down in a hydrological cycle involving a departure and return—an evaporation and precipitation. As terrestrial inhabitants, we are in relationship to the global commons of air and water. Air and water are substantive verbalizations of the cosmos and not substances we can cut apart and count. Only a relational posture to these global commons will provide a regenerative culture for diverse bioregions.

I believe this excursive investigation provides numerous resources for missiological renewal. First, the divine presence described through Leviathan and whirlwind suggest a wild God that is in relation with sentient beings beyond human. Consequently, reconciliation is a cosmic goal and not simply about human redemption. Humanity is redeemed as creation is redeemed. Further, though God may not be conflated with the Leviathan, God is within the primordial void. As God speaks from the whirlwind and intimately knows the Leviathan, so to be in relation with the global commons is to be in communication with God. Second, the investigation hints toward a kind of mystical missiology that can be ecologically grounded. Often God’s mission is conflated to an anthropocentric soteriology. Like Job, reconciliation resituates humanity within the cosmos. Corbin, Bachelard, and Irigaray provide ways for a more relational posture to the material world and a more accessible ecological mysticism. Through the mundus imaginalis, a postmodern missiology can experience grounded epiphany. This is important for relating the diverse experiences of people and the traditions in which they inhabit. Third, a missional activism should give more attention to contextualized cosmogony. Oral myths which bring society into relation with the primordial provide not only an activism for creation care but foster a sustainable relationship with watershed and local economy.

Kyle Holton worked for nine years in northern Mozambique among the Yao helping initiate a natural resource community center called Malo Ga Kujilana. In 2012 he and his family returned to the States. Kyle is a high school teacher in Little Rock, Arkansas. He has an MA in Intercultural Studies and an MS in Environmental Science.

Bibliography

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Pantheon Books, 1996.

Ackerman, Frank, and Lisa Heinzerling. Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing. New York: New Press, 2004.

Anderson, Donald M., Vera L. Trainer, Joann M. Burkholder, Gabriel A. Vargo, David W. Townsend, J. E. Jack Rensel, Michael L. Parsons, Raphael M. Kudela, Cynthia A. Heil, Christopher J. Gobler, Patricia M. Glibert, and William P. Cochlan. “Harmful Algal Blooms and Eutrophication: Examining Linkages from Selected Coastal Regions of the United States,” Harmful Algae 8, no. 1 (2008): 39–53.

Beal, Timothy. “Mimetic Monsters: The Genesis of Horror in the Face of the Deep.” Postscripts 4, no. 1 (2008): 85–93.

________. Religion and Its Monsters. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Caputo, John D. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event. Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.

Cheetham, Tom. Green Man, Earth Angel: The Prophetic Tradition and the Battle for the Soul of the World. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005.

________. The World Turned Inside Out: Henry Corbin and Islamic Mysticism. SUNY Series in Western Esoteric Traditions. Woodstock, Connecticut: First Spring Journal Books, 2003.

Corbin, Henry. History of Islamic Philosophy. London: Kegan Paul International, 1993.

Dawkins, Richard. The Extended Phenotype: The Gene as the Unit of Selection. Oxford: Freeman, 1982.

Faulkner, Joanne. “Amnesia at the Beginning of Time: Irigaray’s Reading of Heidegger in the Forgetting of Air.” Contretemps 2 (May 2001): 124–41, http://sydney.edu.au/contretemps/2may2001/faulkner.pdf.

Graeber, David. Revolutions in Reverse. London: Minor Compositions, 2011.

Hoover, Kelli, Michael Grove, Matthew Gardner, David Hughes, James McNeil, and James Slavicek. “A Gene for an Extended Phenotype.” Science 333, no. 6048 (September 2011): 1401. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6048/1401.abstract.

Illich, Ivan. H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness: Reflections on the Historicity of “Stuff.” Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1985.

Kearney, Richard. “Bachelard and the Epiphanic Instant.” Philosophy Today 52 Supplement (2008): 38, https://www2.bc.edu/~kearneyr/pdf_articles/pl86279.pdf.

Keller, Catherine. Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming. London: Routledge, 2003.

Laland, Kevin N. “Extending the Extended Phenotype.” Biology and Philosophy 19 (2004): 313–25, http://lalandlab.st-andrews.ac.uk/niche/pdf/Publication84.pdf.

Laland, Kevin N., and Kim Sterelny. “Perspective: Seven Reasons (not) to Neglect Niche Construction.” Evolution 60, no. 9 (September 2006): 1752

Laland, Kevin N., John Odling-Smee, and Sean Myles. “How Culture Shaped the Human Genome: Bringing Genetics and the Human Sciences Together,” Nature 11, no. 2 (February 2010): 137–48. http://nature.com/nrg/journal/v11/n2/abs/nrg2734.html.

Levenson, Jon. Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Miller, David. “The Body Is No Body.” In Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality, Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquia, ed. Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller, 137–46. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010.

Ong, Walter. “Before Textuality: Orality and Interpretation.” Oral Tradition 3, no. 3 (1988): 259–69.

________. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New Accents. London: Methuen, 1982.

Phillips, Jonathan. “Soils as Extended Composite Phenotypes.” Geoderma 149, no. 1–2 (February 2009): 143–51.

Quilliam, Michael A., and Jeffrey L. C. Wright. “The Amnesic Shellfish Poisoning Mystery.” Analytical Chemistry 61, no. 18 (September 1989): 1053A–60A. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ac00193a002.

Stephens, Tim. “Study Documents Marathon Migrations of Sooty Shearwaters.” UC Santa Cruz Currents Online 11, no. 4 (August 2006): http://currents.ucsc.edu/06-07/08-14/shearwaters.asp.

Thayer, Robert L. LifePlace: Bioregional Thought and Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Trabing, Wally. “Seabird Invasion Hits Coastal Homes.” Santa Cruz Sentinel, August 18, 1961. http://santacruzpl.org/history/articles/183.

It was -20 degrees Fahrenheit at 5:00AM on 11 February, 2014. By 8:00AM it was down to -24 degrees, the lowest of the winter here at Joyfield Farm, North Manchester, Indiana. This was the second of three so-called polar vortex weather patterns that were unusual events for our region of the country. It was reminiscent of the extreme weather brought by the severe drought of 2012. As organic market gardeners, that summer had been very difficult. Later that same day, Dave Pritchett asked me to consider writing a reflection piece for the journal Missio Dei.

Those events were the on-the-edge stimuli that started my mind moving in the direction of this reflective piece. Who are we as disciples, those choosing to follow Jesus in this rapidly changing, even chaotic, world? Where do we find ourselves, and what is the place in which we shape our following of Jesus? Is there a specific identity that best defines our activity? I want to move through these questions in a reverse order.

Is there a specific identity that best defines our activity?

Eel River

The Eel River is a tributary of the Wabash River, which becomes the boundary between Indiana and Illinois. The Wabash enters the Ohio River at the southwestern extreme of Indiana. Then the Ohio becomes part of the Mississippi River, which drains just over one-third of the total United States area. The earlier inhabitants of this region along the Eel River called it Kenapocomoco. This river was the dividing line between the Miami and Potawatomi peoples who inhabited the area when Europeans invaded.

The Potawatomi and Miami both left this land under military pressure from the expanding United States. The forced clearance of the Potawatomi from northeastern Indiana to Oklahoma under military escort in 1838 was known as the Trail of Death. Reminiscent of the more well-known Trail of Tears, which was the forced evacuation of the Cherokee from the southeastern United States, the Trail of Death was actually even worse.

Eel River is also the name of the congregation where my wife, Arlene, and I hold our church membership—the Eel River Community Church of the Brethren. It began on the north side of the Eel River, formerly Potawatomi land, in 1838. New members joined the congregation through an immersion baptism of consenting adults in the waters near the church that flowed into the Eel.

That baptism came from the biblical understanding of the brothers and sisters that each congregant should be buried to self and raised to new life in the symbolic dunking three times forward into flowing waters. A Pennsylvania elder went further when he explained to me, “Baptism was carried out with the new member facing upstream, symbolic of living against the tide of society the rest of her or his life when one follows as a disciple of Jesus.”

Though our congregation is presently composed of folks living in three different counties, three different small towns, and focused in two different school districts, the Eel River drainage encompasses all of the members. That drainage provides a unity not found in other geographical units. Since many in the congregation have a focus in horticulture, the common weather and terrain conditions provide a unique common identity for the members.

Where do we find ourselves and what is the place in which we shape our following of Jesus?

Watershed

The Eel River and the rivers into which its waters merge all move toward the south. Just about twenty-one miles north of the Eel River Community Church of the Brethren is the continental divide that splits the falling water that goes north through the St. Lawrence Seaway to the Atlantic Ocean from the water that flows south through the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. So we live in the Gulf of Mexico Watershed, one of the five major watersheds of the North American continent. The others are the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic Oceans, and the Hudson Bay.

For the purposes of this article, let us use a smaller geography and select primarily the Eel River and its environs. That will allow us to focus more tightly on the region that includes the Eel River Community Church of the Brethren.

Interestingly, almost parallel to the Eel River and just south of us is Teays River Valley, an underground aquifer of ancient water that carries glacial melt from the time of the last ice age. Those glacial waters have a few connecting points to the Eel River. But pumping the aquifer for major agricultural irrigation resembles the mining of resources because the aquifer waters are not replaced. For example, the Ogallala Aquifer in Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma is depleted about two-thirds from its original volume because of unsustainable irrigation practices.

When settlers moved into this Eel River watershed region it was heavily forested. Huge trees made traffic by buggy or ox cart impossible. People could pass only on foot between the hardwood trees. When travelers carried any significant load they moved on waterways and passed through settlements built along those river banks.

But the Brethren were farmers and their style of farming required open ground. Brethren settlers felled trees for houses; they girdled trees and then burned them for planting crops and clearing land to graze animals. Today the canopy is gone, except for a scattering of new growth trees.

Who are we as disciples, those choosing to follow Jesus in this rapidly changing, even chaotic, world?

Discipleship

Discipleship for Christians is primarily about following in the footsteps of Jesus. Discipleship is voluntary but may come through what the individual feels is a call from Jesus’ Spirit. For Brethren, it comes primarily in the context of the community of sisters and brothers.

The beginnings of the Church of the Brethren were in Germany in the year 1708. The seven young men and women who gathered along the Eder River to baptize each other were strongly influenced by the Anabaptist and the Pietist movements. An adult voluntary decision to join the church, a commitment of accountability to sisters and brothers, a practice of Bible study and prayer life, a choice to be peacemakers in a world focused on war, a clear separation of church and state, and an embodied life of discipleship and justice in Jesus’ Way are threads of this disciplined following of Jesus.

Discipleship relies on spiritual feeding and regular challenges to our acceptance of a status quo that builds injustice. Spiritual disciplines need to be chosen that help us live against the tide of a society that ignores the injustices that feed our own power and wealth. Disciples need to sip water from the underground aquifers of ancient wisdom and times of testing.

Discipleship is a clarity of living in the face of choices because the community is clear that is how Jesus would choose to live. Discipleship is not about a choice of doctrine or a special place to worship and practice one’s devotions. It is about what the follower of Jesus does. It is a focus on how God’s reign manifests itself here on earth rather than an emphasis on whether the believer gets to heaven. It is an effort to live consistently with Jesus’ prayer, “Thy kingdom come here on earth as in heaven.” God’s reign starts here and now and then will be fleshed out most fully in God’s time and space. Disciples recognize their dependence on God’s power for their daily walk and rely on God’s initiative in the formation of this reign.

Synapses

What are the ways these pieces fit together? I will attempt to hold the connections long enough for the reader to examine my theses and shape them for the benefit of a different space and people. They are not poured in concrete. I have found them helpful but perhaps you can use them as a launch pad for different and better ideas in your own church community.

(1) Watershed discipleship here in the Eel River basin needs to start with some kind of reconciliation with the First Nation peoples. Maybe it requires moving out and returning the land to the remnant of the original inhabitants. Just as in Palestine/Israel it seems that any sustainable decision on land will require a shared land with shared political control or a split two-nation political entity, and that is most likely in this setting, too.

True, the Brethren were not part of the military effort that evicted the Potawatomi and Miami but they were clearly beneficiaries of that forced expulsion. How can injustice be corrected after more than 175 years?

An important step might be for us as settlers to assume a style of life that allows sustainability for seven generations, a principle often used as a guideline by Native peoples.1 How do our present decisions impact the lives of those who will come to this place in seven generations? Clearly our lives of consumption and waste cannot be sustained by the planet or our watershed for anywhere near seven generations!

Our lifestyle drives toward an apocalypse of humanity’s making. The maximization of profit over justice ignores environmental and human concerns. Our depletion of mineral resources leaves nothing for future generations. We waste pure water to the last drop. Our eating practices drive us to obesity and ill health. The radioactive and toxic wastes we leave in our path will lay down extensive cancer fields that will outlive the human race. The pollution of the air will leave no air for humans to breathe. The culmination is war, which combines the above sins against God and humanity with the assumption that whatever we can do we should do. So we choose gas chambers, nuclear weapons, rape as the tool of war, depleted uranium weapons, suicide bombings, and drones.

But these sins pale in the face of the apostasy that assumes our apocalypse can usurp or fulfill God’s Apocalypse. We even define the disaster we have made of the earth as God’s judgment, God’s apocalyptic intervention, because of the sins of the other humans who are not like us. We put ourselves in the place of God by choosing uncreation in the face of God’s good creation.

In a more faithful following, the journey can begin with a small step. Downward mobility rather than upward mobility can encompass an intentional choice for a dramatically lower income level. For over forty years Arlene and I have kept our income below the taxable level so as not to pay taxes for war. This also forces for us a lower level of material consumption, perhaps a level of living that doesn’t need so much to be defended by war. Downward mobility can also include major steps toward humility and vulnerability. In the context of church community and accountability to brothers and sisters, both neighbors and enemies, downward mobility might control any lust for power and egocentric perversions of relationships. Choosing humility and vulnerability as Jesus did enables us to find Jesus in the least of these.

(2) A movement toward watershed discipleship here in the Eel River basin should be a movement away from empire toward regional responsibility. For Jesus and the early church, that was healing the wounds caused by empire economics—a system which squeezed the wealth out of Palestine solely for the benefit of the political elite. Jesus and the early church led a refocus toward those on the bottom of the economic and political spectrum, the outcasts, women, children, Samaritans, and poor, instead of an elevation and honoring of those on the top. It was an equalizing of money and power not a maximization of the economic and power divide between poor and rich. It was a dramatic and intentional move toward voluntary slavery (see the foot washing scene in John 13) as opposed to the making of slaves for another’s personal benefit. This change was initiated not by the top of the divide but by those on the bottom of the divide.

These steps are not easy. How can we move ourselves into their reality? Imagine a youth group or congregation choosing to “walk a mile in another’s moccasins.” Perhaps doing so by walking a day or a week as a lonely elder abandoned by family, as a vegan or vegetarian trying to eat lower on the food chain, as a returned Afghan vet impacted by post-traumatic stress while operating in a front line Ranger unit, as a gay/lesbian youth grappling with ostracism in high school, or as a homeless person, jobless or underemployed and struggling to support a family. Would this “role play” provide the stark realism that Jesus’ actions and words toward outcasts did for his disciples and followers throughout the New Testament?

(3) Regional responsibility also moves us as disciples to envision an economy that serves the neighbors that are right around us. The Eel River watershed and its agricultural economy as it is presently structured is controlled by decisions made in board rooms hundreds or thousands of miles from here. The prices for crops grown here on local farms are prices set by multinational grain companies who care nothing about real people in the Eel River region. Inputs for crops, like fertilizer and herbicides, are priced to serve the corporation rather than the farmer.

How does that change? Farmers’ markets start to bring locally grown food back to the customers. The growers set their prices, often discover organic ways that bypass fertilizer and herbicide companies, and experiment with crops that could be easily grown by farmers who have seemingly become dependent on bank loans and outside multinationals to survive.

A locally-focused economy begins to recycle each dollar many times in the community before it leaves town rather than leaving town the instant it is spent at a McDonalds fast food chain or Walmart Superstore. If that dollar is spent instead with locally oriented establishments the benefit accrues to local businesses and families. Then it won’t be the corporate executives that reap the big bonuses for squeezing low paid employees, relying on public inputs to run the company and leaving those local neighborhoods to clean up any messes.

Our local North Manchester Farmers’ Market is an experiment in birthing new economic ventures and an attractive place that draws customers committed to investing their monies to sustain this local economy. It is but one example of an effort to recycle each dollar many times before it leaves town, for each recycling adds to the local economic stability and sustainability.

Conclusion

Most congregations find themselves in a certain watershed, with a specific history and grappling with environmental and economic issues that threaten to overwhelm their abilities. Watershed discipleship offers new ways to reexamine following Jesus. It brings rich resources to bear on that effort by relying on the sisters and brothers who make up each congregation. It offers accountability with those who lived in our space before us and may even provide a better insight for reading the Scriptures and interpreting Jesus’ words.

This reflection is an offering to stimulate imagination for other disciples in their walk with Jesus. Though it may not fit your situation exactly I hope it does offer ideas that you can expand to best fit your denominational and congregational setting. I encourage you to be part of expanding this framework for the choices in Christian discipleship. Blessings of peace to you!

Cliff Kindy is an organic market gardener with wife, Arlene, on Joyfield Farm where they live with three other families. For the past thirty years Cliff has been active with Christian Peacemaker Teams using tools of nonviolence to increase the peace and justice in many of the conflict sites of our world. Cliff and Arlene decided to keep their income low enough to not pay any taxes for war since they married in 1971 and chose not ot have a car for the first twelve years of their married life even as they raised two daughters. They enjoy hosting interns who work with them in the garden and grapple with discipleship issues for these times.

In July 2013, Todd Wynward sat down with author and activist Ched Myers to discuss the concept of watershed discipleship and dream about building an alliance among faith-rooted groups engaged in localized, bioregional living. Below are Todd’s reflections.

Might watershed discipleship be the good news that we so desperately need to rouse us from our paralysis?

I don’t have an easy relationship with institutional Christianity. All too often, organized religion ends up supporting the warlike tendencies, ravenous greed, and socioeconomic inequities from which Jesus sought to liberate us. In our missionary zeal to share our affluent North American version of Christianity, we spread a lot of bad habits along with good news. Our religion, tied so closely to American militarism and capitalism, has lost much of its ability to be prophetic or transformative in today’s world. Most modern secular progressives view Christianity as a laughable superstition, if not downright dangerous and destructive.

Perhaps the truly urgent “mission” today is not to save others but to save ourselves. Perhaps it is our culture and our religion that need converting. As a North American steeped in a culture of affluenza, I have to agree with Ched Myers’s stark analysis of our current condition: modern Western society lies drugged in an “ecocidal slumber.” We’re fully aware our actions are causing the corrosion of earth’s basic life-sustaining systems. We know we could make better choices. Yet we lay paralyzed, trapped by our compulsive habits and comfortable lifestyles.

Ched holds up a strange hope to our postmodern paralysis: the Bible. He asserts that “the prophetic traditions indigenous to both testaments may alone be capable of rousing us” from our addictive malaise.

The Bible—our best spur toward urgent action?

It’s an unconventional hope for modern progressives who—for good reason—run away from anything claiming to be “Bible-based.” Yet Ched contends the Bible might be the best tool available to get modern America to drop the iPad and get off the couch.

It’s an interesting proposition. Do ancient scriptures hold enough social critique to radicalize slumbering evangelicals AND enough social credibility to galvanize cynical progressives? Perhaps. Ched thinks so. He describes the power of the prophetic strands that weave through the Bible: The reflective poems, warning tales, grand sagas, and radical histories of Scripture summon us to remember our origins and the ways of our ancestors, invite us to imagine and work for a restorative future, and call us to liberate and heal ourselves and our home places.

Reform of habits—such as recycling, eating locally, and shopping responsibly—is important, Ched affirms, but to become the people we need to be to face our environmental crisis, we’ll need to do much more: we’ll need to practice transformed living through watershed discipleship.

Watershed discipleship? It’s an odd, almost jarring term, invoking and synthesizing two domains rarely joined in our imaginations: one scientific, the other religious. Yet I’m becoming convinced it is exactly this kind of unitive consciousness—both data-driven and deeply spiritual—that is needed if we are to play any significant role in our planet’s healing.

I agree wholeheartedly with Ched that those seek to practice watershed discipleship must embrace the motto: “We will not save a place we do not love; we cannot love a place we do not know.” Knowing a particular place—experiencing its characteristics and being molded by its constraints, its bounty, and its boundaries—is essential to watershed discipleship. It is the “re-placed” identity we as a species must vitally embody if we are to rouse from ecocidal slumber.

So what is watershed discipleship, exactly? As a fledgling movement emerges, it’s clear that no one knows quite yet. It’s the kind of “guiding framework” that could motivate us to move mountains of malaise and despair, but it needs some clarity. Watershed discipleship remains a work-in-progress, an intriguing and powerful concept only discovered and defined as we live it out in our places each day. To be a disciple within my watershed is a concept I understand; to be a disciple of my watershed is a concept I want to explore.

Region As Rabbi

Watershed discipleship, when lived out in daily practice, actively resists our culture of affluenza and converts us to Sabbath living. Sabbath living, as Ched writes, is the antithesis of conspicuous consumption; rather, it is about gift and limits: “the grace of receiving that which the Creator gives, and the responsibility not to take too much, nor to mistake the gift for a possession.”1

Is this what Jesus meant when he said the meek shall inherit the earth (Matt 5:5)? The ancient Hebrew for meek is ⁽ ānāw—meaning the humble, those who do not grasp and hoard, those who do not think too highly of their own importance and needs. Is Jesus saying these are the ones who can coexist and live within the blessing of creation, while the haughty and the grasping are unable?

Through the lens of watershed discipleship, another of Jesus’ well-known sayings takes on new meaning: “Consider the lilies of the field” (Matt 6:25). Jesus seems to be saying, “Examine how the lilies thrive where they are planted; model your life upon what they teach you.” Be a student of God’s creation that thrives in your watershed. See your region as your rabbi.

Seeing your watershed differently leads to acting in your watershed differently. As I learn to re-inhabit the place I live, I’m seeing my region as my rabbi in three specific ways.

Watershed as Sustainer, Teacher, and Corrector

Try on this idea: All of my food needs, my watershed can provide. Sounds crazy? It does to me. I mean, I know most human societies for all of history were sustained by their watersheds, but those were primitive people, primitive times, right? What about my Italian parmesan and my Florida orange juice? What about my olive oil and coconut milk?

Can all the items my family loves be sourced in my bioregion? Of course not. But this line of inquiry leads me to pursue two questions. First: How much of what we desire can be sourced from our watershed? In the high deserts of New Mexico where I live, the answer is bleak. For my family to obtain what we like eating, I’d have to drive hundreds of miles before I found the first orange tree or avocado orchard. This leads me to a second question: To what extent can we become creatures who thrive within the limits of our bioregion? In other words, to what extent can we adapt?

Wait—me, adapt my wants to my watershed? As an entitled American consumer steeped in egocentric values, this suggestion is not only absurd; it is scandalous. I’m trained to buy whatever I want whenever I want, without a second thought to planetary consequences. To be asked to limit my lifestyle, to curb my appetites, fills a part of me with indignant fury and fear. “I’m an American!” I want to roar.

Yet my watershed, my rabbi, corrects my spoiled behavior. Just like in any master refines and re-forms an immature or out-of-shape disciple, my rabbi corrects me as part of my training. This is a kind of conversion, metanoia, or transformation of worldview and habits that early followers of Jesus underwent. They were taught to walk away from the self-advancing values of Empire and instead care for the poor, love their neighbors, and anticipate a modest bounty of daily bread. These age-old precepts were central to the teachings of Jesus; they are equally central to the teachings of my watershed. They cause me to look anew at the two troubling and transformative questions raised earlier: What can my watershed provide? How can I adapt my wants?

A few years ago, some neighbors and I decided to have some fun with these questions. Instead of bemoaning the arid sparseness of northern New Mexico’s high country, we began to explore what kinds of food sources could thrive in our dry mountain environment. At the same time, with a perverse joy, we began to break from Empire-based thinking and explore whether we could learn to be happy with what our watershed provided. My ranching friend, Daniel, has managed small herds to see which livestock could thrive with minimal inputs while being maximally useful to us. What has he found? Goats and sheep, we want to keep. They adapt well to our bioregion, are fairly easy to manage, and provide milk, cheese, meat, kefir, and yogurt. But yaks? Not so much. After five years of experimentation and hard work, Daniel concluded that they’re substantially more trouble than they’re worth. As for vegetables and fruits, we’ve found success with plenty of the usual fare—carrots, onions, beets, tomatoes, zucchini, apples, plums, and greens galore. Also, under the guidance of my mentor gardener Seth, I’ve adapted my habits and taste buds to foods that can thrive in my region. I now appreciate hand-ground cornmeal, new types of beans, high-altitude quinoa, plum preserves, wild amaranth and lamb’s quarters, sorrel, kale chips, broccoli leaves, and unfamilar varieties of squash and potatoes.

I’m finding that many of my current life practices—habits formed unconsciously growing up within a culture of excess—have no part in the life of a watershed disciple, nor of a serious Jesus follower. Even as I adapt, however, a large part of me wants to remain an unconscious and self-absorbed consumer, a well-trained cog of empire. Are you feeling it too? We both know it’s easier to remain a spoiled child instead of becoming a responsible adult. Yet in this “watershed” moment of history—with our existence in the balance—it’s clear the earth itself is calling affluent North Americans to do something old-fashioned: repent, turn around. To exist within the limits of our watersheds, we’ll need to release our attitudes of entitlement and re-program our voracious appetites.

Toward A Bioregional Food Covenant

What concrete steps can we take to thrive within the bounty—and the boundaries—of our bioregions? If we are to survive much longer as a species, many of us infected with unbounded affluenza need to make this question central to our lives. As David Orr writes: “It makes far better sense to reshape ourselves to fit a finite planet than to attempt to reshape the planet to our infinite wants.”2

My wife and I have done a bit to reshape ourselves to our region: we live in a yurt in the Sangre de Cristo mountains near Taos, New Mexico. We milk goats, shear sheep, plant trees, catch water, and try to grow a lot of our food in the high desert. My wife and I each have more than two decades of experience as wilderness educators, river guides, and camp directors. Both of us have spent more than a thousand days—three years of our lives—in open country and in wilderness, sleeping under the stars. More than once we have been called feral. Recently, a citified visitor from Philadelphia giggled in awe when she entered our small dwelling, and immediately started snapping photos. She simply couldn’t believe we use a composting toilet and carry water to our yurt by hand in buckets, like millions of people across the world.

Before you get too impressed, let’s be clear: we’re pretenders. My family still has laptops and a cappuccino maker, cell phones and Netflix. We daily take our son to soccer practice in a Prius and monthly drive a hundred miles to shop at the nearest Trader Joe’s. Even though we homestead in the high country, we’re still entangled in Empire.

What’s a concrete step we can take to begin localizing our appetites? Here’s a practical idea that might incite a movement: a 25/75/100 Bioregional Food Covenant. To join, an individual would make this pledge: “By the year 2025, I will source 75% of my food from within 100 miles.” The specific numbers I’ve chosen are, by nature, arbitrary; yet if a 25/75/100 covenant can be attained in our challenging high desert climate here in northern New Mexico, then likely it’s a covenant that could be made by most Americans.

Can a modest personal vow like this make a big difference? In light of the massive global crises we face, an individual vow may seem ludicrous. But think again: if a critical mass is reached, a humble vow like this could change how humans live on our planet. Let us count the ways:

It enriches local economies. Thousands of families committing locally for the long term establishes new demand and new markets, creating an incubator for regional companies to grow, sell, and distribute good food within their communities. Hard-earned cash becomes “slow money,” circulating longer within the region, causing more healthy cycles of exchange for local goods and services. Right now, there are few local growers and very little local food available in America, because most of us don’t demand it.

It corrects our crazy consumption. Sourcing much of our food locally means adapting to our watershed, letting it instruct us how to be. It means learning to live within healthy natural limits. It means no longer being able to buy whatever I want whenever I want from wherever I want, without a second thought to planetary consequences.

It improves individual health. Kale or Krispy Kreme? This may not be a fair comparison, but the point is this: when communities encourage one another to eat food produced off the land, better health is likely to develop. Affordable access to farm-fresh food is a promising antidote to many of modern society’s illnesses.

It reduces petroleum, packaging, and pollution. Currently, the majority of mega-chain food travels a thousand miles or more to reach your local grocery store. Massive amounts of petroleum are used to improve soil, grow, process, store, preserve, package, and deliver food that could be grown and transported within a few miles of home. Reduced travel and storage means reduced packaging and pollution.

It encourages active citizenship. Once we commit to eat from our bioregion, we naturally care much more about its health—about the quality of the water, soil, and air around us. We see the beautiful complexity of the interconnected living systems required to produce good food. We start organizing in creative and clarifying ways like the New Mexico Coalition for Community Rights. This organization encourages regional groups to adopt Community Bills of Rights, asserting that corporations are not above people, and declaring that all citizens of a watershed have an inalienable right to clean air and clean water.

It boosts “community resilience”—the ability of one’s home region to thrive in the face of change and shocks from the outside, as articulated by Transition Network founder Rob Hopkins.3 A bioregional food covenant would build local capacity and infrastructure, reduce dependency upon external providers, promote sustainability, and increase biological diversity in one’s region.

The 25/75/100 Bioregional Food Covenant is a practical idea that might incite a movement. What might our nation look like if a groundswell of communities across the country took on this covenant and patiently worked with their farmers and sellers to obtain 75% of their food from their own region by 2025?

Watershed discipleship, based on the prophetic tradition, is a promising hope for rousing the culture; a bioregional food covenant, based on Watershed Discipleship values, is a promising action that might just convert the culture. It might just be the thing to rouse us from our paralysis. It might just be the antidote affluent Americans need, as a first step on the path of watershed discipleship.

Todd Wynward is a Mennonite who lives with his family in Taos, NM. He has been engaged in experiential education and social change movements for twenty years, and has spent more than a thousand nights outdoors. He is the founder of a wilderness-based public charter school, leads backpacking and river trips for adult seekers, and is an animating force behind TiLT, an intentional co-housing community. Patheos.com calls his novel The Secrets of Leaven “a delicious mystery . . . exploring deep questions.” His blog, Undomesticated, can be found at http://leavenrising.com.

Ross Hastings. Missional God, Missional Church: Hope for Re-evangelizing the West. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2012. 333pp. $24.00.

“Mission is the mother of theology.” These words, penned by Martin Kähler, have provided a framework for missions for the past century. Yet, in his new book Missional God, Missional Church, Ross Hastings argues that mission and theology are corollary, for “theology (specifically that of participation) is the mother of mission” (249).

Hastings serves as an associate professor of pastoral theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. Hastings’s work serves as a missional theology for the role of the church in the mission of God. The foundation of Hastings’s book is John 20:19–23, which he terms “the Greatest Commission” (81). He locks on a few key points from the text, showing how the church is commissioned by Jesus and empowered by the Holy Spirit to disseminate peace and forgiveness in the world, fully participating in the missio trinitatis. For Hastings, the mission of the church is directly related to the mission of God. He argues that mission is at the heart of the trinitarian community and that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit can best be described as “Sender, Sent, and Sending” (77). Thus, the very character of God is wrapped up in God’s mission to the world, and the church participates fully in this mission. This mission is not just one of the activities of the church among many, but rather this mission “constitutes its very essence” (78).

As a result, Hastings hopes to inspire the church to approach its gathering and its world in a different way. His thesis is that the church should be a missional community that reflects the trinitarian nature of God by bringing shalom to one another and to the world. Hastings draws upon the Eastern Orthodox idea of perichoresis, the mutual indwelling of God, in his understanding of the church. Christians are fully indwelled by the Spirit, and through fellowship and communion Christians can indirectly indwell one another. This mutual indwelling empowers ministry to one another and to the world. The church, as persons-in-communion through the Spirit, participates in the life, love, and mission of the Trinity when it experiences shalom with one another and extends that shalom to others.

Too often, however, the Western church falls short of this ideal. For Hastings, the Western church has lost its distinctiveness. The church has become too enculturated by the world, and as a result cannot effectively inculturate the gospel in ways that make it distinctive yet attractive. Thus, Hastings seeks to inspire the church to a different way of life than was typical of Christendom. Our conduct, purpose, and identity must change to reflect the character of the triune God. He writes, “Reevangelizing the West first means reevangelizing Western Christians with the good news of who God really is in order that we might reflect who he really is, and not projections of our psyches” (107). The Western church can only hope to re-evangelize its culture if it begins to reflect the trinitarian nature of God, lives in openness to human relationships, lives and works incarnationally, and reflects the oneness of the Trinity. Hastings calls the Western church to be a countercultural, relevant entity in our post-Christendom Western society.

Hastings echoes the contemporary call for the church to be missional in nature. He commissions the church to be both deep and wide in its theology and practice: deep in its theological practices and reflection, and wide in its outreach to the world, drawing people to God and into the community. For Hastings, the church is at its best when it reflects the missional nature of the Trinity through its worship, reflection, and practices, both within the Christian community and within the world at large.

Like much of the missional church material, Hastings’s book is excellent theologically but lacking in practical application. Hastings intends to provide a theological foundation for the discussion of the role of the church in contemporary society. Ultimately, however, the book could provide more of a catalyst for individual reflection. A series of questions at the end of each chapter, or a summary “so what” chapter at the end that seeks practical integration of the theories with the context of the reader would have been a helpful addition. Even a series of contemporary examples of churches applying missional theology into their everyday practices would allow the reader to imagine the practical application of Hastings’s book in their own church setting.

The book is nonetheless a wonderful addition to the missional church discussion. It would function well as a primer on missional theology in an academic setting relating to systematic theology, missiology, or missional ecclesiology.

Daniel McGraw

Community Life Minister

West University Church of Christ

Houston, TX, USA

Would you risk being baptized in your local river or pond? In many places—such as northeastern Indiana where I used to live—immersing oneself in a local body of water now means exposure to a bath of chemicals and coliform bacteria, particularly after a rain, and at certain times of the year when crops are being sprayed. Most bodies of water in the United States have a fishing advisory that tells consumers how many fish can safely be eaten before health may be adversely affected by the toxic load the fish carry. In less “developed” countries across the world, where there are no environmental regulations, rivers function as a moving trash heap, carrying garbage and dead fish downriver from factories and villages. This failing health of our rivers and the watersheds that feed them is symptomatic of a greater global pathology wrought by industrial civilization.

The language of environmental catastrophe is apocalyptic: a garbage patch of plastics the size of Texas floats in the Pacific; a coal slurry spill into North Carolina’s Dan river evokes Isaiah’s vision of Edom’s streams turning to pitch. Meanwhile, a Coca-Cola plant in India’s Uttar Pradesh guzzles groundwater in return for spewing out toxins affecting local streams and soils.1 In early 2014, Freedom Industries was responsible for the leak of a hazardous coal washing chemical which left residents of nine West Virginia counties without potable water for five days, causing toxicity to the Elk river watershed.2 Every year, the world loses more and more topsoil to the sea due to industrial farming practices and deforestation.3 Details of the destruction are fastidiously collected. Peak oil, peak phosphorus, and peak water coalesce out of data points into pinnacles on scientists’ presentations. If the world has not already passed these peaks, it is surely on the cusp, they say.

This accumulating evidence suggests that humankind needs a drastic change in our way of life. Yet the looming catastrophes prophesied on the lips of our modern science sages fail to elicit change. We continue living like lemmings dangerously close to the looming cliffs of peak oil, peak water, and peak phosphorus. Perhaps we can no longer imagine a form of life without consumption based upon petrochemicals, industrial agriculture, and prepackaged food. We need a revolution of imagination. Yet, Bill Mollison, cofounder of the permaculture movement, reminds us of the “futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.”4 The change from toxic consumption to regenerative production must thus begin at the local level.

Disciples desperately need resources that will animate a church ready to stand against the tide of ecocidal petro-capitalism. This issue of Missio Dei Journal addresses this need for transformation by integrating ecological and theological concerns under the framework of “Watershed Discipleship.” Coined by theologian Ched Myers, Watershed Discipleship recognizes that environmental theology and ethics are often too disconnected from the everyday life of the faithful. Implicit to this paradigm is the understanding that the watershed—a geographic area drained into a body of water—is the primary unit of ecological systems, and thus the place where disciples can exert the most influence. Since water is fundamental to life, species within a given area are all connected by the flow of water through it. Thus, by invoking the watershed in our Christian discipleship, we acknowledge that our faith is bound to the land, plants, and creatures within it, as well as the water coursing through all of them. Our faith must follow the aquatic contours of the land, first, because we affirm the goodness of the earth, waters, and their creatures. To despoil the land is to spite the Creator—“there are no unsacred places,” writes Wendell Berry, “only sacred and desecrated places.”5 Second, we acknowledge that water issues are justice issues. Access to clean water is foundational to human health and wholeness, and increasingly a privilege of the wealthy.

Watershed Discipleship offers missiology a more holistic attention to context. If “mission is the mother of theology,” then place is the mother of mission—which is to say that mission occurs in particular regions, home to specific peoples and habitat to distinct flora and fauna. By re-placing discipleship in the foreground of the watershed, the church acknowledges that we both influence and are shaped by the specifics of our location. We are always followers of Jesus in a certain place. The climate, topography of the land, and the flow of water over it define that place. Daily losses of unrecoverable species and unique ecosystems caused by the gluttonous consumption of industrial civilization interrogate our idea of discipleship. If a missiology of “re-place-ment” is to mean something, it must cause us to reexamine the ways our livelihoods interact with the watersheds we inhabit.

Second, Watershed Discipleship provides new approaches to transform the ruin of global ecological systems wrought by industrial civilization. If watersheds are the fundamental unit of ecology, re-placement helps disciples perceive the level at which they can affect real change. Because we live during a watershed moment in history—a time when industrial civilization is at its peak and the actions taken by industrial societies in the coming years could affect the globe for centuries—we can act out of love for all the world by acting with integrity in our own unique places. By cleaning and protecting our watersheds, one at a time, we may reverse the steady poisoning of the world.

Finally, by placing ourselves under the tutelage of our own watersheds, we begin to know what it means to be “placed.” The solutions for making life work in an ecological context are already under our feet. The cactus survives drought by catching and storing enough rainwater to survive the dry season. Dryland human communities do the same with cisterns. Ephemeral vegetation thrives on the shady forest floor by leafing out before the overstory does, thereby catching enough sunlight to live through the shady summer. Animal communities depend on these ephemerals for nourishment in the sparse days before spring—historically, many humans have as well. How does the squirrel live through the long winter? Not by importing goods with fossil fuels, but by storing up enough during times of abundance. Followers of Jesus must consider again the “birds of the air,” and the “lilies of the field” (Matt 6:26–29). By doing so, we join the chorus of creation, with each species inhabiting its niche in the world. Understanding the topography and soil, how the birds and foxes make it through winter, or the times when the native flowers bloom—these things teach us what it means to live with integrity, fully integrated in place.

Water lies at the center of our Christian sign of baptism and our current ecological crises and, thus, deserves deeper theological treatment. This paper explores visions of “redemption as rehydration” in the prophetic literature, then it traces resonant themes into the Apocalypse’s “river of the water of life” (Rev 22:1). It next explores how water provides a “metaphorical map of God” and why hydrologic systems should be a key characteristic of how humans dwell in creation. The paper concludes with a call to watershed-based discipleship as a faithful response to Christian mission amidst our looming environmental catastrophes..

“El agua es la vida!” –New Mexican proverb

“The health of our waters is the principle measure of how we live on the land.” –Luna Leopold

The ancient Christian ritual of baptism articulates an ecological fact: without water there can be no life. We rightly speak of baptismal waters as the symbolic source of renewal in Christ—a metaphor predicated in part upon the deep biblical tradition concerning “living waters” I will explore below. Today, however, Christians can no longer responsibly invoke this venerable tradition without also acknowledging the ecological realities of our context, which include the systematic dehydration of the earth by industrial civilization.

Deepening and interlocking environmental crises stalk our history, including climate destruction, species extinction, and declining natural fertility. Among these, one of the most pressing is “peak water.” Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute describes this as the critical point, already reached in many areas of the world, where we have overtaxed the planet’s ability to absorb the consequences of our water use.1 Its global symptoms include widespread desertification, water insecurity, declining water quality, and the drift toward international water wars.2 The grim specter of peak water represents the dark opposite of baptism; it portends only death. It is a keystone “sign of our times” that reveals afresh the old gospel imperative to “turn around” as an historic ultimatum.

End-game ecological trends press Christians to re-read our tradition from the perspective of the groaning creation, as did Paul in Romans 8:21–22—including and especially our theology and practices of mission. Water is a strategic place to start. It is the resource we North Americans arguably most take for granted—a privileged and unsustainable conceit that must change. This paper will argue for re-centering faith and mission around “watershed discipleship” as a matter of social justice, ecological sustainability, and theological fidelity. This imperative proceeds both from ancient biblical visions and current realities of water scarcity.

Prophetic Visions of Redemption as Rehydration

The biblical story begins (Gen 1:2) and ends (Rev 22) in a “waterworld.” This represents a primal scriptural expression of basic ecological truth: water is the single most important component in the birth and continuation of life—we might say, the Alpha and Omega of creation. Water thus deserves more careful social, ecological, and theological attention than it has received in our churches.3

The first half of this paper will look at John the Revelator’s extraordinary eschatological vision of social and environmental restoration through a divine “rehydration” of the earth. John was clearly nurtured by a recurring strand in Hebrew prophetic literature, so let me begin by acknowledging this rich “imaginary” of an ancient desert people.4

It remains a well-kept secret in our churches that the tradition of prophetic judgment in the Hebrew Bible articulates divine salvation most often in terms of the renewal—not destruction—of the earth. In Isaiah, for example, the imperial civilizations that surrounded (and oppressed) Israel are indeed promised demolition by divine judgment; the land, however, is rehabilitated through “rewilding,” as undomesticated animals re-inhabit decaying cities (13:19–22) and wild birds roost in abandoned fortresses (34:8–15).5

One expression of redemption as the restoration of creation is found in prophetic visions of eschatological reforestation. Israel’s seers may have understood that the arid climate of their Palestinian homeland was not natural but rather the result of historic processes of desertification due to the relentless imperial economic exploitation of the land. Indeed, ecological archaeology has established that the ancient Mediterranean world was largely deforested by the time of the eighth-century prophets.6 This may explain their rage over the clear-cutting of highland hardwood forests (Zech 11:1ff.; Isa 14:3–8, 37:22–24; Solomon was also guilty: 1 Kgs 5:6ff.). They longed for Yahweh’s judgment that would save the threatened forests: “The cypresses exult over you, the cedars of Lebanon,” Isaiah inveighs against the king of Babylon, “saying, ‘Since you were laid low, no one comes to cut us down’ ” (Isa 14:8).7

The most well-known example of this motif is found in Isaiah 35, which begins with the promise that parched lands will once again host “the glory of Lebanon” (Isa 35:1ff.; i.e., the great cedar forests of the north). The poem goes on to promise not only an end to human physical disabilities (35:3–6a) but the healing of creation itself:

For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,

and streams in the desert;

the burning sand shall become a pool,

and the thirsty ground springs of water;

the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp,

the grass shall become reeds and rushes. (35:6b–7)

Restored habitat brings the return of wild animals (see also Isa 43:20). And all this renewal is made possible because water is flowing again everywhere.

Second Isaiah echoes the idea that both people (especially those marginalized by empire) and forests will be restored:

When the poor and needy seek water,

and there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst,

I the LORD will answer them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them.

I will open rivers on the bare heights,

and fountains in the midst of the valleys;

I will make the wilderness a pool of water,

and the dry land springs of water.

I will put in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive;

I will set in the desert the cypress, the plane and the pine together. (Isa 41:17–19.)

Just as Pharaoh’s army was drowned in the old Exodus story (Exod 14), here the travails of empire similarly disappear under water.

The promise of rehydration recurs in the proto-apocalyptic oracles of several later Israelite prophets. Joel prophesies that “all the watercourses of Judah shall flow with water, and a spring shall issue from the House of the Lord and shall water the Wadi of the Acacias” (Joel 4:18; njps). Zechariah portends: “In that day, fresh water shall flow from Jerusalem, part of it to the Eastern Sea and part to the Western Sea, throughout the summer and winter” (Zech 14:8; njps). But the most elaborate development of this motif is found in Ezek 47:1–12, the culmination of his lengthy description of eschatological Israel, its land and temple-city (Ezek 40–48).

The first part of the oracle narrates in refrain how water is flowing out of the temple toward the four directions (47:1–2). Then comes another refrain in which the rising tide is measured, from ankle, to knee, to waist-deep, to “a river that could not be crossed” (47:3–5). Implied here is the rehabilitation of the Gihon spring that (inconsistently) supplied water to Jerusalem.8 Ezekiel then imagines Palestine “greened” all the way to the Dead Sea (47:6–12). But unlike the flood of Genesis 7, Ezekiel’s surging river is life-giving, indicated by the explosion of fecundity that occurs within and beside it: “everything will live where the river goes” (v. 9).9 The vision culminates with an ever-bearing, perennial riparian forest, providing food and medicine (v. 12). This nod to the Garden of Eden story is later re-appropriated by John the Revelator, effectively bracketing (like the waterworld image) the biblical story.

Israel during the biblical period was a dry place indeed, with only a couple of major rivers, few perennial streams, and unreliable springs. So these extraordinary visions of redemption as rehydration bear witness to the fact that in Palestine, water lay at the heart of environmental sustainability, social justice, and divine concern.10

The River of the Water of Life

John of Patmos’s “river of the water of life” (Rev 22:1ff.) is patterned in part on Ezek 47. A careful examination of this image reveals a rich theological and ecological texture. First and foremost, this eschatological river stands in stark contrast to the realities of John’s late first-century CE readers. Those living in arid Mediterranean climate were familiar chiefly with the stagnant, torpid water found in small ponds, seasonal wells, catchment tanks, ritual baths, or clay pots. Domestic water quality was often poor (hence the advice of 1 Tim 5:23). John’s river, however, “shines like crystal” (lampron hōs krustallon; Rev 22:1; cf. 4:6). This is not a supernatural assertion but a poetic observation: pure water indeed appears crystalline when it is flowing freely (think of the dancing silver strands of a mountain stream). The phrase “river of the water of life” (potamon hudatos zoēs) connotes exactly that: the running, bubbling, lively water of a spring or brook.11 Experiences of such “living water,” as the Gospel of John puts it (hudōr zōn; John 4:10; 7:38), were rare indeed for this desert people. This signals a dramatic restoration of life to the land and those dwelling on it, just as the Hebrew prophets had envisioned.

John’s river, moreover, flows through “the middle of the great street of the city” (Rev 22:2; niv). The Greek term plateia connotes the main thoroughfare (or plaza) of a Hellenistic metropolis. Poignantly, earlier in the Apocalypse this plateia was the space of political violence, where the bodies of two prophets murdered by the imperial beast lay in public view for three and a half days as a spectacle of state terror (Rev 11:8–9). But now this street has become “pure gold, transparent as glass” (Rev 21:21).12 The New Jerusalem’s main street has dissolved into a river of life that washes away the blood of empire.13

There is another way in which this river symbolizes liberation from empire. Elsewhere in Revelation the water of life is depicted as a spring (pēgē). The martyrs who live “before the throne of God . . . will not hunger or thirst anymore, nor will the sun or any heat strike them; for the Lamb who is in the center of the throne will shepherd them and lead them to springs of living water” (zoēs pēgas hudatōn; Rev 7:15–17; author’s translation). This is a pointed recontextualization of Isa 49:10, an oracle of emancipation. Moreover, this spring is a “gift” (Rev 21:6; tēs pēgēs tou hudatos tēs zoēs dōrean); “Let the one who thirsts come forward, and . . . receive the gift of living water” (22:17; hudōr zoēs dōrean; author’s translation). Here is more midrash on the subversive vision of second Isaiah—“All who are thirsty, come for water, even if you have no money” (Isa 55:1; njps)—which was a rebuke of the currency-dependent commodity markets of empire and a reassertion of the gift economy of nature.14

Yet, these living waters are not springing up from the ground, but “proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb” (Rev 22:1; nkjv). This primal notion of Yhwh as a cosmic fount, too, is found in several places in the Hebrew Bible. “For with You is the spring of life,” sings the Psalmist (Ps 36:9; MT, mĕqôr ḥayîym; LXX, pēgē zoēs). And Jeremiah laments:

My people have committed two evils:

they have forsaken Me,

the fountain of living water (MT, mĕqôr mayim ḥayîym; LXX, pēgēn hudatos zoēs)

and dug out cisterns for themselves,

cracked cisterns that can hold no water (Jer 2:13).15

Lastly, as in Ezekiel 47, John’s freely and abundantly flowing river provides habitat for the tree of life, which yields spectacular fruits each month (Rev 22:2). Its twelve crops correspond to the central symbolic number of the Apocalypse (in which dōdeka appears 20 times). This figure also represents the restored nation of Israel, hearkening back to its roots in the tribal confederacy (a theme also explicitly addressed in Ezek 47:13–48:35). But for John of Patmos, this is an inclusive political vision. As in Ezekiel, the leaves of the tree are for healing, but here specifically for the nations, including presumably the “kings of the earth” who have been welcomed into the city (Rev 21:24). Even empire is healed in the end—but only when eclipsed by the ecology of life.

The Revelator has cosmically “transplanted” both tree and river from the primeval garden (Gen 2:9ff.) into the heart of the eschatological city. But the former has transfigured the latter: it is unrecognizable as an urban space—at least as defined by our civilization, which builds cities over and against nature. The New Jerusalem has been thoroughly “permaculturized,” a lush food forest taking the place of the hard urban jungle. And all because the world has been resaturated with the waters of life.

These prophetic visions represent profound articulations of social and environmental restorative justice from a people for whom dehydration was a daily reality. They speak equally sharply to today, in which our lands are again parched and compromised by imperial hubris. Hostage as we are to the specter of “peak water” and resource wars, we would do well to reconsider such old wisdom.

God’s Map: Theology and Geography

In a society characterized by (and dependent upon) the relentless commodification and privatization of the primary gift of life, how might we embrace the radical and compelling biblical hope that every thirst will be quenched? The task facing us is both theological and practical.

If all talk about God is necessarily metaphorical, then surely water is a primary theological trope, as suggested by the frequent biblical imagery identifying water tightly with the divine. Four essential characteristics of water certainly pertain also to the Creator.

First and foremost, as noted, there can be no life without water. It is the primary building block of creation, covering 71% of the earth’s surface and constituting on average 60% of the human body. It restores but cannot be destroyed—though if it is degraded it can lose its healing character.

Second, water is the only natural element that can exist in all three common states: liquid, solid, and gaseous. Moreover, in the hydrologic cycle it circulates from the heavens (condensation, precipitation) to earth and beneath (infiltration), to the sea and other large bodies of water (surface runoff, groundwater discharge), and finally back to the heavens (evaporation). These many forms represent a great circle of life—which one might argue also characterizes the circulation of the Spirit.16

Third, water manifests a spectrum of traits often attributed to the divine. It can be patient and accommodating, flowing around obstacles, yet also has the power to wear down the greatest physical structures (or burst them apart through expanding ice). Water makes hard things smooth over time; it is also an amazing solvent and thus is rightly used in purification. It can be still and gentle but also relentless and ferocious. Surface water has the capacity to carry but also to drown—immersion can lead either to life or to death (the Bible is full of examples of both).

Finally, water is a symbol of justice. It is most substantial and alive when fluid, but can turn morbid if stagnant. It wants to flow downward, seeking level, a poignant metaphor of divine concern for the “lowest.” Thus Amos famously appeals for “justice to flow down like a perennial stream” (Amos 5:24; author’s translation).17

Water thus provides a kind of metaphorical “map of God.” Conversely, it also figures fundamentally in God’s map of creation. To illustrate this, compare the two photographs below.

Above is an aerial photograph of the San Rafael Swell on the Colorado Plateau in Utah.18 It shows clearly that even in the most arid climate on the continent, the single most distinctive and defining feature is the way water flows. A theological reading of this universal geographical truism would conclude that water patterns are the chief design features of a creation that has not been re-engineered by human society.

In contrast, the image below is an aerial view of nearby Las Vegas, NV, whose patterns are typical of modern urban sprawl.19 What is evident from such an (over)built environment is not where water flows—that is almost impossible to discern—but rather where automobile traffic flows. It is virtually all artifice.

The profound differences between these two design patterns capture the essence of what is ecologically unsustainable about industrial civilization. If our defiance of nature (represented by the second image) has brought us to the brink of collapse, then a radical response is called for—that is, one that goes to the roots of how the earth was/is made (represented by the first image). We have lost our way as creatures of God’s biosphere, and only the map that is woven into creation can lead us home. That map is defined by water.

John Wesley Powell, the first non-native person to raft successfully down the Colorado River in the 1860s, gave us our first modern definition of a watershed:

It is that area of land, a bounded hydrologic system, within which all living things are inextricably linked by their common water course and where, as humans settled, simple logic demanded that they become part of the community.20

The fact is, wherever we reside—city, suburb, or rural area—our lives are deeply intertwined within such a “bounded hydrologic system.” Precipitation hits the ridges and either flows into our watershed or into a neighboring one, drained by a watercourse and its tributaries (even if buried under concrete).

The area covered in the water’s journey from its origination in the natural hydrological cycle to its end point in a particular body of water such as a pond, lake, or ocean is the watershed. Each one is made up of a unique mix of habitats that influence each other, including forests, wetlands, fields and meadows, rivers and lakes, farms and towns. The 2,110 watersheds in the continental US come in all sizes. The Mississippi Basin is the 3rd largest watershed in the world, draining 41% of the lower 48 states into the Gulf of Mexico. The Ventura River watershed where I live is a scant 227 square miles.

All life is watershed-placed without exception—and our ignorance about this fact is disastrous. Brock Dolman, a permaculturist and founder of Occidental Art and Ecology Center in Northern California, argues that “watersheds underlie all human endeavors and form the foundation for all future aspirations and survival.” Cupping his hands, he invokes the metaphor of a cradle, which he calls a “Basin of Relations,” in which every living organism is interconnected and dependent on the health of the whole. This form of “social, local, intentional community with other life forms and inanimate processes, like the fire cycle and the hydrological cycle,” he says, represents “the geographic scale of applied sustainability, which must be regenerative, because we desperately are in need of making up for lost time.”21

Watershed mapping is a practical tool for advancing our literacy in the actual landscapes that sustain us.22 It can help us re-imagine a world beyond maps that are social re-productions enshrining problematic historical legacies of colonization and exploitation, while rendering nature secondary (or altogether invisible). Kirkpatrick Sale’s definition of bioregionalism is helpful here:

Bio is from the Greek word for forms of life . . . and region is from the Latin regere, territory to be ruled. . . . They convey together a life-territory, a place defined by its life forms, its topography and its biota, rather than by human dictates; a region governed by nature, not legislature. And if the concept initially strikes us as strange, that may perhaps only be a measure of how distant we have become from the wisdom it conveys.23

Below is a recent watershed map of the US imagined by John Lavey.24 Political boundaries are often straight (no continental US state is without one), while watershed ones never are. Straight lines are the first order of abstraction, alienating us from the topographical and hydrological realities that sustain life. How might our political culture change if our most basic unit of governance was “nature rather than legislature”?

Toward Watershed Discipleship

In the environmental movement, bioregional thought and practice has spread widely and matured deeply over the last quarter century.25 Yet this school of thought has been almost entirely ignored by Christian theology and ethics until very recently.26 However, I am convinced that a watershed paradigm not only holds the key to our survival as a species; it can also inspire the next great renewal of the church—in light of, not in spite of, the looming ecological endgame.

What would it mean for Christians to center our identity in the topography of creation rather than in the political geography of dominant cultural ideation, grounding our discipleship practices in the watershed in which we reside, within which everything must be engaged in terms of environmental resiliency and social justice?

In our education and organizing at Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries we are proposing “watershed discipleship” as a framing idea, which seems to be resonating widely. The phrase is an intentional triple entendre.

1. It recognizes that we are in a watershed historical moment of crisis, which demands that environmental, social justice, and sustainability be integral to everything we do as Christians and as citizen inhabitants of specific places.
2. It acknowledges the inescapably bioregional locus of an incarnational following of Jesus: our discipleship and the life of the local church necessarily take place in a watershed context.
3. It suggests that we need to be disciples of our watersheds. In the New Testament, discipleship is a journey of learning from, following, and coming to trust the “rabbi”—which in this case is the “Book of Creation.” The challenge here, to paraphrase the argument made in 1968 by the Senegalese environmentalist Baba Dioum, is that
   • We won’t save places we don’t love.
   • We can’t love places we don’t know.
   • We don’t know places we haven’t learned.

From the beginning of human history, nothing was more crucial to the survival and flourishing of traditional societies than literacy in and symbiotic relationship with one’s watershed. It remains the case today—but we have a long way to go to reconstruct the intimacy required to know and save our places.

Obviously, understanding contextual Christian mission fundamentally in terms of healing our world by restoring the social and ecological health of our respective watersheds is a perspective still marginal in our churches. Yet, I believe ecclesial communities re-grounded in their watersheds can make an enormous contribution to the wider historic struggle to reverse the looming ecological catastrophe—and in the process, recover the “terrestrial soul” of a faith tradition that too often tends toward docetism.27 Christians are deeply culpable in the present crisis, but we also have ancient resources for the deep shifts needed.

Watershed discipleship is an expression of Christian mission because it seeks to partner with God’s mission of healing. The Apostle Paul claims that creation is “groaning in travail” waiting for the “children of God” to be fully “revealed,” in order that we might partner with the divine work of liberation and healing (Rom 8:19–24a).28 This suggests that our primary human vocation is not to re-engineer creation for exclusive human benefit—an impulse biblically identified with the fall in Genesis.29 Rather, the mission of the church is to help humans rediscover our proper place in, and to work for the healing and preservation of, the community of creation.30

Key to Creator’s ecological and eschatological redemption of creation is the renewing power of the water of life. This is previewed in Christian baptism, which in turn animates our mission to inhabit and incarnate that blessed hope in a thirsty world. Watershed discipleship can and should help define the shape of that mission in this historical moment of crisis.

Ched Myers is an activist theologian who has worked in social change movements for almost 40 years. His books include Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Orbis, [1988]2008) and, most recently, Our God Is Undocumented: Biblical Faith and Immigrant Justice (with Matthew Colwell; Orbis, 2012). He is a co-founder of the Watershed Discipleship Alliance (http://watersheddiscipleship.org) and works with Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries in southern California (http://bcm-net.org). His publications can be found at http://chedmyers.org.

Bibliography

Aberly, Douglas. Boundaries of Home: Mapping for Local Empowerment. Philadelphia: New Society, 1993.

Aboriginal Mapping Network. http://nativemaps.org.

Andruss, Van, Christopher Plant, Judith Plant, and Eleanor Wright, eds. Home! A Bioregional Reader. Philadelphia: New Society, 1990.

Barlow, Maude. Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water. New York: New Press, 2008.

Bell, Alexander. Peak Water: Civilisation and the World’s Water Crisis. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Luath, 2012.

Carr, Mike. Bioregionalism and Civil Society: Democratic Challenges to Corporate Globalism. Sustainability and the Environment Series. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2004.

Chellaney, Brahma. Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013.

Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Penguin, 2005.

Dolman, Brock. Basins of Relations: A Citizen’s Guide to Protecting and Restoring Our Watershed. 2nd ed. Occidental, CA: Water Institute, 2008.

Gleick, Peter H., ed. The World’s Water: The Biennial Report on Freshwater Resources. Vol. 8. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2014.

Hiebert, Theodore. The Yahwist’s Landscape: Nature and Religion in Early Israel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

If Americans Knew. “Water in Palestine.” http://ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/water.html.

Loeffler, Jack, and Celestia Loeffler, eds. Thinking Like a Watershed: Voices from the West. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012.

Myers, Ched. “The Cedar Has Fallen! The Prophetic Word vs. Imperial Clear-Cutting.” In Earth and Word: Classic Sermons on Saving the Planet, edited by David Rhoads, 211–23. New York: Continuum, 2007.

________. “From ‘Creation Care’ to ‘Watershed Discipleship’: Re-Placing Ecological Theology and Practice.” Conrad Grebel Review 32, no. 3 (Fall 2014): forthcoming.

________. “From Garden to Tower: Genesis 1–11 as a Critique of Civilization and an Invitation to Indigenous Re-Visioning.” In Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry: Conversations on Creation, Land Justice, and Life Together, edited by Steve Heinrichs, 109–21. Waterloo, ON: Herald Press, 2013.

________. Who Will Roll Away the Stone? Discipleship Queries for First World Christians. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994.

National Geographic Education. “Mapping the World’s Watersheds.” http://education.nationalgeographic.com/education/activity/mapping-watersheds/?ar_a=1.

Oosthoek, K. J. W. “The Role of Wood in World History.” Environmental History Resources. http://eh-resources.org/wood.html.

Peppard, Christiana. Just Water: Theology, Ethics and the Global Water Crisis. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2014.

Powell, J. W. The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons. New York: Dover, 1961.

Prandoni, Marita. “Know Your Lifeboat: An Interview with Permaculturist Brock Dolman.” Eco Zine. EcoHearth. November 10, 2011. http://ecohearth.com/eco-zine/eco-heroes/1088-know-your-lifeboat-an-interview-with-permaculturist-brock-dolman.html.

Sale, Kirkpatrick. Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1985.

Scott Cato, Mary. The Bioregional Economy: Land, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Snyder, Gary. A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics and Watersheds. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 1995.

Thayer, Robert L., ed. Lifeplace: Bioregional Thought and Practice. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003.

Woodley, Randy. Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision. Prophetic Christianity. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012.

A politics of the transfigured earth must pay attention to the ravens and lilies of the field, confessing the woven thread between human communities and the life and health of the earth. Jesus enacts the transfigured earth by pairing the renewal of society with a foreign leper healed in the Jordan watershed. This interpretation and numerous social movements offer ground for a bioregional imagination of reinhabitation: empowering people to live well together in places.

“Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you” –Wendell Berry1

The World and the Earth

On a July evening, I sat in a hotel outside the Damascus Gate of Jerusalem’s Old City. Mahmoud Abu Eid, a Palestinian Muslim and family friend, told his story to a group of American travelers. He talked about checkpoints and home demolitions, about color-coded ID cards that classified him as a resident alien with ephemeral rights. He talked about seven generations of his family who had lived in that city. “We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere,” lamented the poet Mahmoud Darwish. “We have a country of words. Speak Speak so we may know the end of / this travel.”2

An exasperated listener blurted out, “Why do you stay in Palestine with so much persecution?”

Mahmoud smiled and said, “Because we have no other choice. This is my place. I love this land. Jesus loved this land, even though he once cursed it. But he cursed the actions, not the land.”

Christian theologians often stumble over the contours of land and place. Like the exasperated American traveler, they struggle to understand someone like Mahmoud who expresses an intimate affection for where he is. Theologians recognize the importance of place in biblical stories, but they have invested far more intellectual energy into puzzling over the meaning of time. A teleological bias tempts Christians to denigrate the places of the world. Place is misconstrued when theologians treat all the world as if it were merely the stage for time, and perhaps even an outdated theater in this industrial world where progress waits for no one and no place. Time-obsessed narratives like historical progress, development, or Manifest Destiny justify destroying places for the sake of some predetermined future. This endless linear march fuels an insatiable desire until that next purchase, trip, or salvation, which are always in the future. As Vine Deloria says, “If time becomes our primary consideration, we never seem to arrive at the reality of our existence in places.”3 The rhythms and shapes of place are eroded, viewed as amorphous backdrops easily substituted by anywhere else.

Devaluing place—which also usually means its people—equates the world, a famous biblical motif for the powers and principalities, with the earth, the biodiversity of ecosystems and human communities. Engagement with “the world” then often assumes a devastating conflation, represented and reinforced by three prevalent political theologies: nostalgia for Christendom, baptizing the state, and resident alienation.

Nostalgia for Christendom pines for the bygone days when the church ruled the world and avows that it must once again have dominion. Radical Orthodoxy is an intellectually influential form of this trend which occasionally provides critiques of modern liberalism and capitalism but often stays silent about Christendom’s immeasurable sins, such as the endorsement of countless imperial campaigns that evicted indigenous people from their homelands. In this ideology, the cross is turned upside down and sharpened into a righteous sword.

Most political theologians are suspicious of rerouting all roads toward Rome. But their default is to baptize governments like the United States of America while ignoring or endorsing state violence to make the world safe for representative democracy and globalized capitalism. Christian realists, maintaining that right should use might and that politics are all about forceful power, acknowledge the shortcomings of modern societies, but they are the lesser evil. Institutional wealth built on slavery and ethnic cleansing, increasing economic inequity, and the wreckage of soil, forests, and water are regretted as unfortunate byproducts. The US may not have committed more crimes than other imperial nations, historian Ronald Wright notes, but “it forgets them more quickly and more thoroughly.”4 Political theologies of the state suffer from amnesia concerning its terrors and its historical alternatives.

The third major trend will have none of this. Instead, Christians are resident aliens, citizens of a heavenly colony in the world but not of it, refusing the authority and splendor of the world’s kingdoms to remain perpetual exiles among them. But its mantra to “let the church be the church” obscures that churches are located somewhere surrounded by, and dependent on, neighbors they did not choose. Resident alienation, perceived separation from where and with whom we reside, can appease displaced Europeans while subsequently relegating indigenous people and refugees to exile. One resident alienated scholar told me that he mourned for a Native American Christian friend who could not overcome his “Zionist connection to tribe and land” to see the church as an alternative, and truer, community. Identity as exiles in a land that always remains foreign preserves the devastating conflation between the world-as-power and the world-as-earth, like equating the United States of America with the ecosocial body of the continent.5 We will not care for places if we are always aliens to them.

All three theologies see coercive power as the mainstay of politics and share a distrust of diversity. And all three, in varying degrees and fashions, are anthropocentric: the world is human-constructed systems that we either control or from which we escape, effectively overlooking the dependence of these human systems on the life and health of the earth. Each accepts a dangerous reduction of the world’s places and the possibilities for living in them.

“If only people with our ideals had power,” says the revolutionary vanguard before the new dictatorship is installed.

“If only we had the right person in office,” say the political parties before their candidate escalates his predecessor’s policies.

“If only the church would be the church,” say the resident aliens as neoliberalism exploits space and time.

“If only we had a king to lead us like everyone else,” say the elders of Israel to the old prophet Samuel, who then informs them what kings, and eventually empires, do best: centralize wealth and power through militarism and economic stratification by expropriating the best lands and extracting surpluses (1 Sam 8). Empire functions through globalizing placelessness: ignoring boundaries and scale by erecting ever-expanding borders. Any place will do for empire, because all places are equally expendable.

Wendell Berry notes that many American Christians have no place to lay our heads; we are perpetual strangers to our landscapes because our only Holy Land is one we may never see.6 For many, place is apparently just dirt: static and inert, something we wipe from our shoes. We forget that place is soil: living and dying, humming with organisms and complex horizons. Perhaps political theologians can be forgiven for this oversight, considering that our lives are far removed from the people, places, and processes that sustain us. But a displaced Christian theology of dominion has too often sanctified or ignored social and ecological destruction. We cannot divorce the social and the ecological because the former is immersed in and sustained by the latter. They co-evolved, and no matter how big we get we still depend on patterns of water, light, and soil.

The three major political theologies have encouraged, or at the least not discouraged, living beyond any sense of human scale. We need a resilient and regenerative scale that confesses the bond between human powers and the life and health of the earth.7 We never live nowhere and we never live alone; even if we constantly relocate we are always somewhere and we are always related to other lives. The polyphonic biblical narrative does not suggest a uniform perspective about the earth, but it also does not pine for a heavenly afterlife for the disembodied soul. From the Garden of Eden to the New Jerusalem, a recurring biblical icon of salvation is not a spectral heaven but a transfigured earth. This salvation depends on people who care about where they live and those who live there. The transfigured earth also depends on politics, not as control or escape, but as practices that help us live together in common places.8

Ecological theologies have blossomed dramatically as more people awaken to the social and ecological toll of a global economic system geared to overproduce items and waste for a minority of the world’s population. Scholars have scribed sophisticated treatments of biblical visions of the land and penned philosophical treatises on anthropocentrism and creation, but these interpretations often struggle to translate generalized theory into sets of practices that enable people to dwell well together. A politics of the transfigured earth must pay attention to the ravens and the lilies of the field, to the distinctive creatures and places around us. If we do so, then we might consider bioregions as meaningful sites of action and reflection.

Reinhabiting the Transfigured Earth

Bioregions are the confluence of patterns like watersheds and landforms, soil and vegetation types, climate, and human interaction. Bioregions are places with negotiated cultural and ecological boundaries in which we know the scale of our actions, these actions are sensitive to feedback, and inhabitants can be included in making decisions. Even though these boundaries are fluid, they are more viable than arbitrary political lines.9

I currently live in the Shenandoah Valley, part of the Ridge and Valley subsection of the Great Appalachian Valley in North America. This two-hundred-mile basin is hemmed by the Allegheny Mountains to the west, the Blue Ridge Mountains to the east, and the Potomac and James Rivers to the north and south respectively. Shenandoah is carpeted with mixed hardwood forests and fertile limestone soil, evidence that the valley was once under ocean, which explains its long cultivated history. The valley’s spine is the eponymous river and its watershed. Landscape architect Robert Thayer describes bioregions as physiographically unique, geographically legitimate, and operative spatial units.10 Shenandoah might fit that portrayal.

Thayer’s depiction emphasizes the importance of scale in bioregional imaginations, founded on the premise that we create ethical relationships when our actions have consequences for others,11 which is always. Loving our neighbors as ourselves, including neighbors we did not choose and maybe are not even human, is easier done when we are close enough to see the effect our lives take through critical feedback loops, such as observing that our energy use exhausts its sources or sustains them, and then having the decision-making ability to change and reorganize the system. Clearly, bioregional boundaries will not completely supplant political precincts in the near future, but partnerships like the Appalachian Transition Initiative are forming across such arbitrary lines to address social and ecological issues.12

Appalachia is one of the most biodiverse regions in North America, but also one of the most socially fragmented and economically poor. In the late nineteenth century, Central Appalachia became the dominant source of coal and timber for the American economy, but increased mechanization, depleted mines, and deforestation forced millions to immigrate north for factory work. Thirty-six of the poorest one hundred US counties are in this region, with the greatest poverty found in rural counties with high coal production. Access to education and healthcare has been limited and the region has high rates of diabetes, cancer, mental health conditions, and widespread drug abuse. The land itself has also suffered from pervasive mining and logging. The abuse of the land is substantially correlated with absentee corporate ownership. State and federal regulations are inadequately enforced and counties are often controlled by a powerful few. People often feel compelled to choose between jobs and the health of the land and themselves. The modern industrial economy has not been the savior for Central Appalachia.

The Appalachian Transition Initiative is a network of almost sixty organizations and associations devoted to a just and sustainable Central Appalachia. They refuse to wait for outside solutions, being instead committed to creative local responses to concentrated power, poverty, and land abuse. Their network is a resource of experiments and stories for the transition of their economies and communities. They propose diverse ways forward like art and place-based education, small-scale business and community healthcare, housing and infrastructure, environmental restoration and renewable energy, and sustainable agriculture and forestry.13

The Appalachian Transition Initiative does not use explicit bioregional language, but it combines affection for place with transformative relationships that constitute the bioregional imagination. Bioregions are never insular because watersheds are part of the global hydrological cycle, climatic domains include multiple bioregions, and nutrients flow where they will like the holy ruach. The Shenandoah River includes two forks almost 100 miles each until they converge for 55 miles flowing northeast into the Potomac River and then southeast to the Chesapeake Bay and into the ocean. Simply by the flow of water, Shenandoah is related to the world. Our actions always affect our neighbors and strangers.

Places are not only connected, but they are always changing. There is no state of place, no “pristine baseline”14 to which we can return. Bioregions are grounded mosaics moving through time that reject the dichotomy between culture and nature: like every other creature, we alter and adapt to our ecosystems, which in turn adapt to and alter us. We are, as historian Dan Flores says, “endlessly recreating place.”15 Purist rejections of change and difference are inattentive to the lively unfolding of place.

Bioregional praxis recognizes that human communities always live within the ecological household. This perception shifts us from a culture of occupation to cultures of reinhabitation.16 The best hope for a sustainable future is reinhabitation, which means committing to the life and health of our places. Occupation controls, but reinhabitation converses. If we observe and interact within context, which also means recognizing that contexts are dynamic and connected, then we will find more appropriate and transformative responses to complex social and ecological patterns. Political theologies of empire, the state, and alienation can prevent diverse people from actually facing one another to address common life. Reinhabitation, dwelling well together in the world’s diverse and dynamic places, begins to envision the transfigured earth.

The River is Reconciliation

The practice of reinhabitation makes possible, and will be made possible by, imaginative interpretations of biblical stories. The stories about Jesus arose from certain places; we make important connections—such as the one Jesus makes between social transformation, care of the land, and welcoming the stranger—when we replace these tales in their social and ecological context.17 The land, which Mahmoud said Jesus loved, is part of those stories in ways that challenge the three prevailing political theologies.

Israelite practices were closely related to the land and seasonal changes. Defining regions was important because harvest times differed based on local climates.18 Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of God grew from the soil, seasons, and stories of the Lower Galilee under imperial rule, a social ecotone where creation and empire overlapped.

The land between the river and the sea, like Appalachia, is a fragile place, but it is also astoundingly fertile with diverse ecological niches close together.19 Biblical scholar Ellen Davis suspects that its “liminal location gave that small corridor of land a gene flow with few parallels worldwide.”20 This funneled strip is like an ecotone, which is the overlapping edge between two ecosystems that results in greater biodiversity.21 Instead of rigid borders, bioregional boundaries are ecotones and mosaic habitats. According to Toby Hemenway, edges like ecotones

are where things happen. Where a forest meets the prairie, where a river flows into the sea, or at nearly any other boundary between two ecosystems, is a cauldron of biodiversity. All the species that thrive in each of the two environments are present, plus new species that live in the transition zone between the two. The edge is richer than what lies on either side.22

We need readings of reinhabitation, because these ancient myths about this ancient place catastrophically influence modern geopolitics. It matters that Zionist leaders like David Ben-Gurion hosted study groups on the Book of Joshua with scholars, politicians, and military officials.23 It matters that the United States has considered itself as both the persecuted New Israel and the triumphant New Rome.24 We should, and can, interpret these stories with a bioregional imagination that tends to the earth and its creatures. Jesus’ homecoming in the Gospel of Luke helps us imagine bioregional engagement with the land and the people in it.

As was his custom, Jesus attends synagogue service on the Sabbath while visiting his folks. He reads from Isaiah that the speaker has been anointed to preach good news to the poor, liberate the oppressed, and proclaim the Jubilee. In a dramatic afterthought, he announces, “Those words are fulfilled right now.” Everyone nods in amazed approval, and maybe the poor in attendance say, “It’s about damn time!” In those days, peasants were subject to multiple layers of colonial taxation, and those who could not pay were evicted from ancestral lands in the wake of wide estates.25 Jubilee envisions a radical social order that preserves the economic viability of agrarian peasants26 through an ethic of abundance and self-restraint.27 Moreover, jubilee suggests that the central political and moral question of land possession is not ownership of the land but care of the land.28 If possession is conditional on care and not ownership, says Davis, then Jubilee challenges not only old states and empires but also the new ones.29

Jesus announces that this ecotone belongs with the people who care for it, not to those who may own it and exploit it. As everyone nods in agreement, Jesus adds that Jubilee is not just for the chosen people, some alienated church set apart. “There were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleaned—only Naaman the Syrian,” who was not just any outsider but a major cog in the “Aramean military machine.”30 Jesus describes the kingdom of God by pairing the tale of an unclean outsider with his vision of the social renewal of Israel, which is like saying that enslaved Africans are more responsible for building America, or that indigenous people are more responsible for democracy than the Founding Fathers, or that Hispanic immigrants who do our dirty work are returning this land to its multicultural roots. Jesus’ listeners try to throw him off a cliff because of his audacious social ecology.

Jesus reminds his enraged audience that welcoming the stranger is deeply compatible with at least some of their political traditions.31 He juxtaposes Jubilee with a leprous foreigner to reinterpret how the kingdom of God rises like leaven in the land. The Jordan River flows through that interpretation in an important way.

Naaman’s Israelite slave girl recommends that her leprous master see the prophet in Samaria, highlighting “a link between invasion and illness as well as between peaceful contact and healing.”32 According to the folk wisdom of the unnamed girl, healing can only “result from a nonmilitary encounter with his Israelite rivals.”33 But the general scoffs at Elisha’s advice to wash seven times in the River Jordan because that watercourse is a trickle compared to the rushing rivers back home. Once again servants, not authoritative advisors, intervene and convince him to perform the ritual. He does not even need the prophet or any priests because the river itself is enough.34 Naaman has crossed the streams of the Jordan twice: once to attack Israel and once again to find healing. This time, Elisha tells the afflicted general to immerse himself in the river that separates, or perhaps unites, Israel and Aram. The Jordan is one of Hemenway’s edges, “places of transition and translation, where matter and energy change speed or stop or, often, change into something else.”35

When Jesus combines the healing of Naaman with the renewal of society, he recognizes that places like rivers are not sites of separation, whether between Israel and Aram, Israel and Arab countries, or Texas and Mexico. Rivers are sites of encounter, boundaries that merge rather than divide. A river is not a wall because, as Naaman found out, by its nature the river is reconciliation: drawing life back together in the watershed. The movements of rivers tell us that strangers are always among us and the familiar always appears in the foreign. The river is the local and the global, the neighbor and the stranger in our midst.

Our attention to the movement of water is related to our treatment of neighbors and strangers. According to Marianne Sawicki, the Herodians operated by a Hellenistic Mediterranean idiom of centralization and marginalization.36 They employed Roman technology in an early pave-and-pipe paradigm that erected massive visible aqueducts that conducted water from faraway streams to urban centers. Such irrigation, which provides plentiful water during droughts or off-seasons, has profound effects on watersheds: groundwater is used faster than rainfall can recharge it, which can cause land to subside and salinization near coasts. Water is borrowed from other places and from the future, and the likelihoods for nutrient leaching and soil erosion are increased.37

In contrast, Sawicki proposes an idiom of circulation and grounding to interpret the indigenous Israelites.38 For them, the heavens poured down water to the earth, where it was grounded by crops and stationary containers, such as cisterns, or circulated through mobile containers, such as channels, both of which pay close attention to the pattern of water through contours, geological features, and vegetation.39 Catching and storing rainfall represents the people’s dependence on the gifts of heaven and the earth.40 Circulation and grounding, Sawicki believes, is a better way to understand Israel’s view of holiness than the prevalent view of separation: “a place is holy when things move rightly within it and, moreover, when it can rectify the trajectory of what crosses it. Thus, what profanes is whatever moves the wrong way.”41 Naaman’s movement through the land is corrected by the circulation and grounding of the watershed. He learns to move differently, from profane control to holy conversation, through reinhabitation.

This is not a quaint comparison between two ancient views. The modern state of Israel controls the Jordan River and 80% of Palestine’s depleting groundwater sources, both of which are channeled to taps in Tel Aviv and farms in the Negev. This diversion, an idiom of centralization and marginalization, has severely diminished the ancient waterway, made essential aquifers extremely vulnerable to salinization and raw sewage, and tightened the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.42 Water, and how it is used, may determine this conflict,43 as well as many others.

Bioregionalism is the conversation between people and place, and conversations always hold open the possibility for mutual conversion. According to Daniel Kemmis, places can breed cooperation when “people who find themselves held together (perhaps against their will) in a shared place” discover that their best chance for survival is learning to work together.44 Our best chance is to enact Jesus’ blend of Jubilee and watershed transformation.

Conclusion

The good news of the kingdom of God could be interpreted as ecosynthesis, which is the evolution of native and exotic species into new ecosystems in response to novel conditions. These new ecosystems have remarkably beneficial effects by restoring devastated landscapes,45 by reinhabiting the transfigured earth. Imperial occupation from Rome and Jerusalem relentlessly disrupted Galilee, so perhaps Jesus’ particular articulation of the kingdom of God was an imaginative patchwork of observation and interaction within an endlessly recreated, and recreating, place. As Mahmoud said, Jesus loves the land and its people.

Jesus embraces the buzzing biodiversity of the land as a parable for social diversity, an ecosynthesis stitching together Jubilee and the leper in the river. The reconciling river is not just the Jordan, but also the Shenandoah, the Rio Grande, and all the watersheds of the world.46 Reinhabitation uproots nostalgia for Christendom, baptizing the state, and resident alienation. For the kingdom of God is the transfigured earth. The ground beneath our feet is the holy land.

Jonathan McRay grew up in East Tennessee (Central Appalachia) and worked in Palestine and Israel. The author of You Have Heard It Said: Events of Reconciliation, he has an MA in Conflict Transformation. Jonathan and his wife Rachelle, a physician assistant, live with friends on a small homestead in the Shenandoah Valley, where he also works with New Community Project (http://ncpharrisonburg.wordpress.com): an education and demonstration center for permaculture and regenerative gardening; a supportive home for friends recovering from addictions and homelessness (which is all of us to varying degrees); and a project incubator to hatch community building with neighbors, schools, and local associations.

Bibliography

Berry, Wendell. Citizenship Papers: Essays. Washington, DC: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004.

________. Foreword to Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible, by Ellen F. Davis, ix–xiv. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

________. The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 1981.

________. Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community: Eight Essays. New York: Pantheon, 1993.

Carr, Mike. Bioregionalism and Civil Society: Democratic Challenges to Corporate Globalism. Sustainability and the Environment. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004.

Darwish, Mahmoud. “We Travel Like Other People.” In Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, edited by Carolyn Forché, 563. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.

Davis, Ellen F. Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Deloria, Vine. God Is Red: A Native View of Religion. 2nd ed. Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1994.

El Houry, Ramzi. “Water for All: The Case for a One-State Solution.” Aljazeera. January 2012. http://aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/01/2012117121836414354.html.

Evanoff, Richard. Bioregionalism and Global Ethics: A Transactional Approach to Achieving Ecological Sustainability, Social Justice, and Human Well-Being. Studies in Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2011.

Falk, Ben. The Resilient Farm and Homestead: An Innovative Permaculture and Whole Systems Design Approach. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012.

Faris, Stephan. “Holy Water: A Precious Commodity in a Region of Conflict.” Orion Magazine. November/December 2011. http://orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6473.

Flores, Dan. “Place: Thinking about Bioregional History.” In Bioregionalism, edited by Michael Vincent McGinnis, 43–60. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Freyne, Sean. Jesus, a Jewish Galilean: A New Reading of the Jesus-Story. New York: T & T Clark, 2006.

Gliessman, Stephen R. Agroecology: The Ecology of Sustainable Food Systems. 2nd ed. New York: CRC Press, 2007.

Habel, Norman C. The Land Is Mine: Six Biblical Land Ideologies. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995.

Havrelock, Rachel. River Jordan: The Mythology of a Dividing Line. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Hemenway, Toby. Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture. 2nd ed. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2009.

Holmgren, David. Permaculture: Principles and Pathways beyond Sustainability. Hepburn Springs, Victoria: Holmgren Design Services, 2002.

Horsley, Richard A. Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.

Howard-Brook, Wes. “Come Out My People!”: God’s Call Out of Empire in the Bible and Beyond. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010.

Kemmis, Daniel. Community and the Politics of Place. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.

Lowery, Richard H. Sabbath and Jubilee. Understanding Biblical Themes. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2000.

Pinches, Charles R. “Stout, Hauerwas, and the Body of America.” Political Theology 8, no. 1 (January 2007): 9–31.

Renew Appalachia. http://appalachiantransition.net.

Sawicki, Marianne. Crossing Galilee: Architectures of Contact in the Occupied Land of Jesus. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity, 2000.

Spina, Frank Anthony. The Faith of the Outsider: Exclusion and Inclusion in the Biblical Story. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005.

Thayer, Robert. LifePlace: Bioregional Thought and Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Wright, Ronald. What Is America? A Short History of the New World Order. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2009.