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