Category: md-5-2

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.

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.