I was resistant, but God is patient. However, God knows how to turn up the volume. By 2013 I could not pray without hearing, loudly and insistently, the call to begin Plainsong Farm. That’s when I realized that I was afraid to die without trying. I didn’t want to have that conversation with my Lord. That’s when I began to pray the prayers that led to the founding of Plainsong Farm.
God brought the farm into being; I didn’t. We wouldn’t be here at all without divine intervention. And we still barely exist. In our start-up phase, we learned that any farm has to get ten years under its belt before it has a solid foundation. So this isn’t the story of how Plainsong Farm began, because we’re still beginning. This is the story of why Plainsong Farm began. Even though I thought I might be crazy, I can now see rationality behind the call—logic based on Holy Scripture and contemporary organizational change theory. That logic wasn’t apparent to my clergy group or my spiritual director. That is why the church needs this book.
As I faced forward into the dream of the farm, I couldn’t see why a farm-based ministry made sense. Only in hindsight has it become clear: this new beginning occurred both because of preparation God provided over twenty years of reading, ministry practice, and the crazy willingness to leap. My husband and I turned over the keys to our house, our barns, and the use of our ten acres to a family we barely knew. My cofounders and I self-funded a ministry start-up; we worked without pay while we tried to bring a dream to life. I left a perfectly good, compensated ministry role with a perfectly wonderful congregation just because I couldn’t juggle it all anymore.
I thank God for the call of our presiding bishop naming the need for crazy Christians. We do need some crazy Christians. I might qualify.
But in all honesty, I don’t think I’m faithful enough to have taken all those steps without a solid foundation in the teachings of scripture, the church, and change theory. I needed to understand why God was asking me to take a leap before I was ready to jump. And I needed to know that I wasn’t alone.
My guess is that God is whispering in a lot of hearts these days. Both church and Creation are in trouble. The church gets smaller and older every year; the planet gets warmer.
God called both Creation and church into being; God created and loves us. God is acting for us in ways that might not yet be visible—because we humans might not yet see how to bring God’s dream to life.
Why would I think that God’s dreams for humanity are not yet visible? Because fourteen years passed between the time I first wrote the words “Plainsong Farm” and when the farm actually began. Fourteen years. God’s dream was alive long before I was bold enough to act on it. I wrote this book to pass on the lessons that prompted me to take that leap so it doesn’t take you—or your church—that long to begin whatever God is whispering about to you.
This book is for both Christians seeking to grow as disciples, and people curious about how Christians think and act for the health of our communities and all Creation. My goal is to take you on a journey that goes from death to life, from decline to renewal, from despair to hope. If you are reading this book as part of your practice of faith, my desire is that this isn’t a journey you take alone, but with others. My dream is that you would read this book in communities that already exist: a clergy group, a church book group, a judicatory staff. My prayer is that God would use these words to equip, encourage, and enable more of God’s people to live God’s dream. Are you troubled by the news about climate change and the decline of the church? Do you wonder what you might do to make a difference? I hope this book helps you find your next answer and, even more, to take your next action.
To become a crazy Christian takes a leap of faith. Before you jump, you need to be able to trust that there is a reason to leave solid ground. God might be calling you—just as God called me for more than a decade—but resistance is normal. Sometimes you need a reason to propel you in the direction where faith leads you. My hope is that these pages provide you both the inspiration to be a crazy Christian and the logic to recognize that taking one next step as a crazy Christian is the sanest thing you can do.
Nurya Love Parish
November 22, 2017
Feast of Clive Staples Lewis
I often say I grew up without any religion. I went to worship at a church precisely once during the first nineteen years of my life. I never went to other houses of worship at all. Neither of my parents found organized religion meaningful. If I wanted to practice faith, they decided, I could figure that out for myself later on.
I was an only child, and a reflective one. In the absence of religious teachings, I found meaning in abstract concepts: compassion, integrity, justice. These were untethered from ancient stories and traditions, which made me feel untethered too. As a college student I found myself looking for someone, somewhere, who had thought through my questions already: how am I to live? what is right? what is good? Slowly it dawned on me that religion was the container for these questions—and their answers.
Because I was born and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada, at an early age I began to realize that humanity was headed for some type of ecological crisis. As a child I recognized that green lawns could not last forever in the desert, and wondered how my species had gone so wrong. More important, how could we be put right again? Eventually, I discovered that religion was the discipline through which these questions had been asked and answered throughout the ages. I converted from “nothing” to “something” because I needed the wisdom of those who had gone before me. I became a Christian and was baptized at the age of twenty-five because in Jesus I found someone worth trusting with my whole life.
Organized religions are meant to be deeply trustworthy. At its core, religion exists to provide a shared language for that which renders us speechless. Organized religion enables the practice of faith—trusting our lives to the One who is far greater than we are—across every generation. As Phyllis Tickle wrote in The Great Emergence, religion is like the rope that connects the boat to the shoreline: a “cable of meaning”1 which tethers us to the source of life. Dr. Cornel West says, “Faith is stepping out on nothing and landing on something.”2 Religion is what teaches us that the first step into “nothing” leads to life and not—as we would logically expect—to death.
The church’s crisis and the climate crisis share the same root—a failure to practice the faith that is in us. God’s people have always been distracted from relationship with God; this story begins in Genesis, chapter two. Trespassing against God’s boundaries because we want to be like God is apparently what we do. Many generations have preserved this story. But preserving the story does not mean we understand what it means for our time.
When it became clear that extracting fossil fuels from the depths of the earth was leading to the destruction of Creation, Christians could have recalled the story of the apple in Eden. We could have remembered that we tend to reach for that which makes us more like God but is actually out of bounds. We could have called for research into the consequences of fossil fuel use. We could have demanded public policy that would steward Creation as witness to God’s glory and a home for future generations. We could have made the health of God’s world our first priority. If we had done so, we would have witnessed to the importance of remembering scripture as a source of wisdom, while also turning to science as a source of fact. We would have rewoven the cable of meaning that is fraying in our lifetimes. And perhaps, we could have changed the course of history.
The