Our friends at Restoring Eden are going on tour this summer, and you can join them!

Restoring Eden, a Christian ministry empowering Christians to engage in creation care through education, public advocacy, environmental stewardship, and nature appreciation, is touring Christian music festivals this summer to inform and mobilize Christians who care about the earth and our impact on it, especially in the area of mountaintop removal mining.

Restoring Eden is looking for 2-4 individuals to join them in paid internship positions for the summer’s activities. Visit Restoring Eden’s website or view this description of the internship for more information.

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By Tracey Bianchi


Flourish Magazine, Winter 2010

Oh! Teach us to live well!
Teach us to live wisely and well!
- Psalm 90:12 MSG

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need,
but not every man’s greed.
- Gandhi

Craning my neck, I looked out the back window of my car and zipped down our driveway. We were off again for another morning preschool loop. My toddler whined for his pacifier, my infant daughter had already tossed her rattle to the floor, and my preschooler wanted gum.

As we merged into morning traffic, my then four-year-old gazed out the window and asked, “What does important mean?”

Always hyper about an educational opportunity, I threw the question back at him. “Well, honey, what do you think it means?”

He grunted, not impressed by my savvy parenting, and explained that he did not know, which was why he asked in the first place. So I started rattling off a list of important things: family, friends, God. After a few tries, he got into the game, and we bantered back and forth: his brother, his bed, his blankie.

As we pulled up to a stoplight my son’s eyes must have been drawn to the park on the corner, ringed by enormous trees.

“Mommy, do you know what else is important? Trees are important,” he said.

My morning caffeine jolted me into a giddy chatter. “Yes, yes, yes,” I cheered from the driver’s seat. Indeed, trees are important. After years of coaching and cajoling it seemed my son was destined to start Greenpeace for Preschoolers.

I am a self-proclaimed tree hugger. I recycle like a mad woman. I think camping is God’s gift to the overcivilized. I honk at people who whip fast-food wrappers from car windows. Plastic makes me panic. Trees are important! This was the sort of statement I’d waited four years to hear.

“So, honey, why do you think trees are important?” My waiting eyes darted to the rearview mirror.

My darling son paused, and then said thoughtfully, “So they can catch on fire and we can chop them down.”

My heart slid to the floor mat as he droned on about firefighters and logging trucks, the things dear to his manly little heart. Apparently impressing the value of God’s creation on my children would require more than a few bedtime stories and wishful thinking. [Read More]

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[Ed. note: this article is part of our series of weekly family activities called Family Fun, published on Fridays]

However your garden grows, start growing it now!

Believe it or not, it’s time to start your garden!

Kids are a lot like plant seedlings: small but fast-growing; fragile but strong; reminders of God’s grace and life’s important things; and in need of good care.

So what better activity to involve your kids in this weekend—when winter is saying its last goodbyes and spring its first hellos—than seed starting? Putting a seed in the dirt and nurturing its growth are some of the easiest and most delightful activities a young child can do, and the process of planting a seed, nourishing it with God’s simple provisions (soil, light, and water), and watching it flourish is a good learning experience for the whole family. It’s also a money saver—growing plants from seed is more economical than buying seedlings, and harvesting your own vegetables is priceless!

Here’s how to get started: [Read More]

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[Ed. note: This article is part of our weekly series of church activities, called Cultivating Community, published on Thursdays.]

For the next few weeks, Flourish’s Family Fun editor, Joanna Pritchard, will be in Haiti, using her Haitian Creole fluency and international development skills to aid the International Organization for Migration in its earthquake relief efforts there. We covet your prayers for Joanna’s safekeeping, and also for her ability to be a presence of hope, help, and grace to the Haitians she meets and works with in these next few weeks.

We can still help our Haitian brothers and sisters rebuild from the earthquake. (Image courtesy Plant With Purpose)

There are still opportunities for your church to partner with our brothers and sisters in Haiti as they rebuild their lives and communities after the January 12 earthquake. (Your church may also wish to help Chile rebuild after its more recent earthquake. Although that earthquake did not cause as great a loss of life, and Chile has the capacity to rebuild from it, the country is still in need of support.) The initial rush of international giving that immediately followed Haiti’s disaster may be slowing, but there is a creative, conscientious, and community-building way that your church can continue to help. It’s as simple as breaking bread together. [Read More]

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by Kendra Langdon Juskus

[Ed. note: This article is part of our series of weekly reflections, called Deep Down Things, published on Wednesdays.]

Are baby steps worthless?

“Personal change doesn’t equal social change,” says writer Derrick Jensen in a July/August 2009 Orion Magazine article that has already been addressed, at length, here at Flourish. Ever a provocative advocate for wholesale structural and societal deconstruction as the only solution to the brokenness of creation, Jensen believes that the small steps taken by many seeking to live rightly are, alone, worthless. They must, at the very least, bolster a larger surge of resistance to an oppressive economic, governmental, and cultural structure.

From this point of view, small steps are dangerous. They lure us into thinking that we are doing something helpful for creation and for our brothers and sisters, while allowing us to ignore that the whole shebang is still falling down all around us. They block the trajectory of what could be meaningful change.

But there is another instance in which small steps, of a different kind, are equally threatening. [Read More]

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By Scott C. Sabin


Flourish Magazine, Winter 2010

Nearly one billion people make their livings as farmers at or near subsistence level. Since these men and women barely participate in the cash economy, they are overlooked by most economic indicators.

Urban poverty tends to get the most attention. It seems more ugly. The squalor of open sewers or the sight of children picking through smoldering garbage is shocking, whereas poor rural villages look quaint, peaceful, and bucolic.

But in many ways rural poverty is worse than urban poverty. [Read More]

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[Ed. note: This article is part of our weekly series of church activities, called Cultivating Community, published on Thursdays.]

Your church is a little far afield? There's still lots it can do in your community!

It’s exciting to dream of our churches being, like traditional front porches, intermediary spaces of welcome where neighbors can form community that is more enriching than social networking or watching TV or getting trapped in other electricity- and technology- driven substitutes for face-to-face fellowship.

But for many of us, these dreams will remain just dreams for one simple reason: location, location, location.

Whether it’s in the middle of farm fields or locked between dangerous suburban arterial roads, many of our churches are in no way accessible by bike or foot, the way a front porch ought to be. We could plant gardens or host block parties, but they wouldn’t have the curbside appeal of events at a church in town. So what are we to do?

Fortunately, physical isolation is no need for a church to give up on being hospitable, neighborly, or even green in the vein of a front porch culture. For example, many far-flung churches own giant swathes of parking lot. That space, often reviled by the eco-police, can actually be used for the good of our communities and creation. Here’s how: [Read More]

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The Gift of Good Land

The Gift of Good Land

Today’s response to Wendell Berry’s essay “The Gift of Good Land” comes from Ed Brown, director of the environmental missions organization Care of Creation.

“The Gift of Good Land,” was published 30 years ago, and we reprinted it in the Fall 2009 issue of Flourish Magazine to celebrate Mr. Berry’s work, but also to provoke some questions: How has the natural world, and efforts to steward it, changed in these 30 years? How has Christianity changed? What is still relevant about Mr. Berry’s words today? What have been our successes and failures as creation’s stewards in these three decades? Where do we go from here?

We’ve asked a wide variety of Christian thinkers, writers, and leaders to respond to Mr. Berry’s essay, taking into consideration these questions and their own relevant experiences. Here is Ed Brown’s reflection:

The Good Word on the Good Land
By Ed Brown
On being introduced to the world of Christian environmental stewardship about ten years ago, I found that I had a lot of catching up to do. Wendell Berry was one of the authors I was directed to, and he has taught and continues to teach me. Evidently, this is true of many of my colleagues as well. It is a privilege to be counted among those who have sat at Wendell’s feet and learned from him, and I am sure I am not the only one who wishes that that learning could have been in person rather than through the pages of his books.

“The Gift of Good Land” appeals to me not only for what it says, but for the method that Berry uses to discover the truths he wants to share. This is not so much an essay as a sermon, in the very best sense of the word. His purpose is twofold: “to attempt a biblical argument for ecological and agricultural responsibility” and “to examine the practical implications of such an argument.” I’m not sure how Berry would feel about this analysis, but really, what he’s giving us is an old-fashioned expository message from Scripture, complete with exegesis and application. I know more than a few pastors who could learn from this essay. [Read More]

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By Dean Ohlman

[Ed. note: This article is part of our series of weekly reflections, called Deep Down Things, published on Wednesdays. It was originally published at Wonder of Creation.]

The creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God (Romans 8:20-21).

C.S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer have both helped me form my view of the meaning of the natural world. And it was Lewis who introduced me to the literary and spiritual mentor who helped him form his view of the creation, among many other views: George MacDonald.

I have used MacDonald’s and Schaeffer’s thoughts extensively in my writing, but have somewhat ignored Lewis. So today I am going to let “Jack” have a say. [Read More]

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From Kendra Langdon Juskus, Managing Editor


Flourish Magazine, Winter 2010

 
As winter rounds the final bend of its course, we find ourselves balanced between enduring the season’s final, coldest days, and gratefully anticipating the relief of spring. For many Christians, this is also when we walk the tightrope of Lent according to the church calendar, empowered to abide a season of fasting only by the promise of the resurrection feast.

So it’s appropriate that this winter issue of Flourish magazine attempts a similar balance. It includes reminders of hardship and grief, reminiscent of winter’s enforced denial, but concludes its last page with a reflection on gardening—the delight of cultivation that reignites each spring. [Read More]

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