Join an Online Guild this Winter

Happy Winter Solstice… celebrating the longest night of the year.

Darkness is a curious thing in religious contexts. We often vilify the darkness as the place of evil, danger and the absence of goodness. But, darkness can also be a place of wonder, mystery and contemplation. What might the darkness be ready to unveil in your life? Maybe the darkness is inviting you to seek and find something new.

In the darkness of winter we’re unveiling a new opportunity with Wild Indigo. Join us for our first fully virtual guild, where we'll explore the goodness of all creation and God's call in our lives to care for the earth, care for others, and demonstrate the peaceable kingdom of heaven. We’ve been leading guilds all year round in 2024 and have loved the experience of working with a wide variety of people from Western PA. Now we want to open it up and make this experience available to anybody, anywhere, who wants to connect with God, others and the natural world. Evan and John will host eight gatherings on Monday evenings, 6pm ET starting February 17th. Payment is "donate-what-you-can" for this guild. Send us a message and sign up today! For more info, check out our website. Zoom link coming soon. Learn more on our website. Sign up by emailing us and we’ll send you the zoom link.

Oh yeah, and help us get ready for 2025 with a donation today! We need to raise about $2000 by the end of December, every bit helps.

Dear Friends, Let’s do this!

Fifteen years ago we (John Creasy and Evan  Clendenin) helped start Garfield Community Farm in Pittsburgh’s east end. Hundreds of youth and adults continue each year to experience this place of community and care for land and people, through healthy produce, education and service programs, and simply being there.

Our first guild after planting our first oak tree! 

Now we want to extend the vision of faithful people restoring creation to a broader network of faith communities. In 2024, Wild Indigo Guild worked with five groups of youth and adults from four different churches and organizations. We guide them through our eight learning themes in contemplative christian ecology, forming a ‘guild’ of people growing further in their connections with creation and God. We accompany them to discover God’s restorative being in their land, community and lives. Each guild uncovers the missional call for their community of faith, a call that always brings together creation care and people care in their neighborhood.

By God’s grace Wild Indigo Guild has already born good fruit. We have worked with  seven-year-olds and seventy-seven-year-olds. Individuals see anew how their land, lives and congregations can demonstrate God’s restorative love. They yield healthy food, clean water, habitat for wildlife, and places they and their neighbors reconnect with the peace of God.

The beginnings of a food forest at Beulah Presbyterian Church!

We hope to see Wild Indigo continue this work in 2025 and beyond. We believe that the Spirit is calling all of us as followers of Jesus to experience and to demonstrate God’s love for people and all creation.  We expect to begin work with several congregations and groups, accompany our 2024 guilds, collaborate in youth-work, and offer opportunities for fellowship in tending the earth with all our hands. Your support nurtures this work.

This feels like a huge risk. We move away from the comfortable routines and pay of pastoral ministry to a less predictable mission “field” with plenty to harvest. And we laborers need to provide for our families! We take this risky step in ongoing discernment and fidelity to our vocations.  This work has shown itself valuable for others. So we trust God and a wider community.

John and Evan on a hike at Wolf Creek Narrows. 

Would you consider becoming a foundational donor toward this new work? Your monthly gift would support our families as we pursue this new work. It will expand our reach and continue to make ends meet as we get this new ministry off the ground.

Help us create this new endeavor together! Just scan this  QR code with your phone’s camera, or visit www.wild-indigo-guild.com/donate

Trusting in God’s Provision,

Rev. John Creasy

Rev. Evan Clendenin

1400 Hawthorne Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15201

Advent Offering: Keeping Afloat

Soon the season of Advent will offer us hope at the endings, and we pray, in-breakings of new life we can take hold of in deepened trust and courage.

I want to invite you to an Advent class series: Keeping Afloat. 

This is a seasonal offering of Wild Indigo Guild, and you can also find more about it at www.boatandtable.org/build. 

Most simply, I offer time to gather and keep in touch with that of God in you and others. These days of the year and history may be feeling especially dark and uncertain. As the seasons change, disappointments erupt, times of uncertainty swirl, we can listen together for consolation, and hope that runs down deep.

We will explore five practices drawn from the centuries of Christian life that can aid you to sink down contemplatively into the stability, integrity and beauty of the divine life.

Imagine them as a craft by which to float through the smoother and rougher waters we pass through of various kinds.

Reading the Land

Praying in Time

Accompanying Others

Nearing Stillness

Working with Your Hands

We will meet for an hour to take an easy paddle through a series of slides that include art, images and quotes that afford ways to see, be and act, knit with ecology and life today. Our contemplative time and conversation will lead us toward practical steps for your life now. (And it will be relaxing and fun to look at the art and quotes I've 'curated' for us to ponder together!)

Time and Dates: gather 'online' Monday 4-5pm Pacific/7-8pm Eastern on November 25, December 2, 9, 16 and 23. With enough people, I can offer two evening times, one Pacific and one Eastern.

To sign up, simply email, call or text me to say that you'd like to take part. . Please provide me an email address, you will receive a link to join the meeting near to the first session.

The class is free of charge, and I welcome your sharing this class with your friends, local community or church. 

Attend as many or as few as you like. I hope to see or hear from you soon.

in hope and peace,

Evan

John Shute Duncan, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Commit to the Renewal of Creation

By Evan Clendenin

What way of life for you would express a commitment to God’s renewal of creation? Maybe in regions of the country that are naturally forested, it would involve planting trees?

Beulah Church Teens plant a native Red Mulberry.

These four young folks worked with John recently to plant a tree on the grounds of Beulah Presbyterian Church, just east of Pittsburgh. Several years ago the church planted hundreds of trees around the property. Having learned some lessons, they are regrouping to commit to ways to more manageably plant and tend to their care in the long haul that unfolds day by day.

So John and the crew walked around to look at the various trees, undertake some tree care, and even plant a new tree. I can well imagine this was a good lesson in how to plant a tree well. And we can hope that the experience will root in their hearts, and grow as a desire to stay with this and all the trees they plant, to see and assist the life God is bringing about in that place thru the trees and more.

A life lived out of commitment to the renewal of creation. Planting a tree. Not just one, but many, over and over. And not just you, but teaching others, showing them by example, by your love, enthusiasm, care and wisdom for this task of tending the life, breath and soil of the ground we inhabit. And not just teaching, but learning, and making room for others to watch, listen, learn, contribute, receive, pray, enjoy, as well as work. Planting, and staying with it, tending the tree, the land, the life growing up. To return to the tree, and to gaze upon its beauty your whole life long. To take care of it through its days and years, however long you are here, and to teach others to go and do likewise.

And in taking such care, to find the tree part of a much larger, diverse, interconnected place on earth. Returning to the tree again and again, you find your whole being also part of the land, part of its renewal. And not just yourself, but generations into the future, generations into the past. The souls and bodies of those before us, human like us with loves, gifts, wrong doing, learnings, good deeds, and hope of ‘on earth as it is in heaven.’

The Wild Indigo Guild sessions for contemplative formation invite us to consider how we commit to a life involved in the renewal of creation. The sessions that start a new guild help us grow in awareness and uncover impulses for how our whole being can pray, work and be in the world, guided by a love of God present and at work in all things. Such an awareness can reshape and guide a way of life day by day.

A renewed way of life can emerge out of a commitment to the renewal of creation. It becomes a calling to each one of us to shape the life we have hidden in God according to this abiding and transformative impulse of divine love present and at work for and in us. And we might compare it to those relationships which demand commitment. Think of marriage, taking religious vows, or signing up for national service. These are just a few examples of commitments. They entail a risk, an act of faith in the face of the unknown, and an opening to life lived and work undertaken in love and responsibility to others. We neither enter nor leave such a commitment lightly. These relationships and other commitments will present us with challenges and difficulties. They often mean that our illusions are falling away, and the real work of learning another person, and loving them as they are, has begun to transform you and the other.

And to endure such transformation requires a way of life that grounds, guides and sustains us. It requires becoming part of something much larger than ourselves alone. A way of life that keeps us faithful through time day by and day, and renews in us a present tense awareness, -gratitude, joy, compassion in sorrow,-of God with us here and now.

So you might consider concretely:

What way of life -patterns, habits and practices- would help you remain faithful to grow, learn and love out of a commitment to the renewal of creation?

For example, What would help you plant trees, and return to them, and invite others to be there with you, and to remind you all of the Spirit’s renewal of the face of the earth?

Sister Grove Collective

My partner, Alyssa, and I had the privilege of being part of a song writing retreat for Creation Justice Ministries, a national organization that is helping churches make climate change and ecology central to our faith. The retreat was at Sister Grove Farm an hour north of Dallas, TX. Alyssa and I call each other “partners” because we truly do partner on so much of our lives. For almost thirty years, since we were kids, we’ve partnered together to make music. For the past twenty or so years our band has been called This Side of Eve. On Monday we gathered with another singer-songwriter, a composer, a lyricist, a jazz pianist a classically trained vocalist and a long-time staple of Christian music, Ken Medema. Needless to say, the pure talent and experience in the room when we gathered was overwhelming. I felt under-qualified for sure! But I held to the idea that I brought important connections to the song writing by my work in agriculture, permaculture and sustainability.

The beauty of Sister Grove Farm abounds. 

Our task…. we would write new songs that help churches centralize earth-care, climate justice and ecology. These new songs would be used by Creation Justice Ministries in their work, especially in April when they release new tools for congregations for Earth Day, 2025.

Ken Medema, an amazing pianist, singer, song-writer and an even greater human being led the group with wisdom and a humble heart. We were tasked with writing five new songs for congregations to sing all over the country… songs that would inspire action on climate and action to restore God’s creation. But would the group gel? Would certain personalities get in the way? Would there be conflict? Could we bring such divergent styles of music together in our writing? Would we even be able to write one song together, let alone 5? What if we failed to accomplish anything? For two days we would work nearly twelve hours each day. Would we end the retreat burnt out and frustrated?

Important aside! On day one we also met with Brian McLaren to discuss his new book, Life After Doom. This was perfect, since Wild Indigo Guild is leading a book group on Life After Doom starting this Monday, September 23rd! Email John to get the Zoom log in for the book group. All are welcome.

Get your book and Join us on Monday!

I soon realized that Alyssa and I were not looked down on for not being full time musicians, for not living in Nashville or for not having degrees in musical composition. Instead the team of musicians were curious about each other, without judgment. We heard each other’s stories and realized each one of us had something to bring to the group and the creative process that would ensue.

The group working on a song by Mark. 

After two and a half days of persistent work we were done. We had bonded together. We had all sung our hearts out. We had put ourselves out there in vulnerability through our music and our stories. We had seven songs! Not five, but seven! From here we’ll work to record all seven songs. They’ll all be scored and charted. By early 2025 they’ll be ready for listening and learning. They’ll be available for churches to use as they see fit, and along with new curriculum and liturgy developed by Creation Justice Ministries.

Ranger is a five month old herding dog who Alyssa and I kind of fell in love with. Here's he surprised me while I was resting with a wet nose to the face! 

My gratitude is overflowing for the time we had, a very short time, but a very powerful time of creativity, work, bonding, sharing and so much more. Stay posted in the coming months as this music is released and look out for Sister Grove Collective! We’ll even be able to use these songs as resources for Wild Indigo Guilds for use in church and worship services.