What does it mean to care for a creek when the practices damaging it are woven into everyday life? Gail Heffner and Dave Warners begin with an uncomfortable discovery: the watershed connecting their university, churches, and homes drained into a severely contaminated waterway. Christian convictions about creation had not protected the place where they lived. Their response became Plaster Creek Stewards, an initiative linking education, research, and restoration.

They describe a watershed as an area of land that drains to a common point. That physical connection creates obligations among people who may never meet. Rain carries the effects of decisions made on farms, streets, lawns, and parking lots toward downstream neighbors. Buried streams and storm drains can hide these relationships. Learning where water goes helps make responsibility visible.

The speakers argue that lasting ecological repair also requires truth about a place’s history. They recount how a waterfall shown to a missionary by an Indigenous leader became a site of gypsum extraction and environmental damage. They connect the treatment of Indigenous communities with present patterns of pollution and flooding. Their approach asks whose knowledge has been respected, whose stories have been omitted, and who has borne the costs of decisions made elsewhere.

Reconciliation begins, in their account, with recognizing harm, acknowledging participation in it, and undertaking concrete repair. Oral histories and community relationships inform the work. Indigenous knowledge is approached through ongoing relationships and listening. The speakers resist the assumption that technical expertise alone is enough to make a project welcome.

The examples are practical. Curbside rain gardens divert runoff into planted basins. Native vegetation provides habitat and encourages water to enter the ground. Campus projects reshape portions of landscaped and paved areas. Floodplain restoration gives rising water room to spread and slow. Participants learn why the projects matter and then help carry them out, connecting explanation with action.

A closing account of opposition makes the social lesson clear. A proposed restoration encountered resistance and a lengthy appeal. A formerly resistant neighbor later expressed gratitude for the completed work. The speakers acknowledge that they should have listened more effectively at the outset. Restoring a watershed includes the slower work of building trust among the people who share it.

Ray Epp’s account begins with the Manitoba farm crisis, when economic distress affected farmers, families, and rural communities. A church-supported response led him to ask how food could reach consumers while giving farmers a fair price and workers a living wage. A bakery purchasing grain directly from farmers offered one practical way to reconnect the farm and the table.

That experience shapes his approach to regenerative agriculture in Japan. Epp asks what faith looks like when it becomes visible through work, food, and relationships. He describes learning to communicate his convictions through daily life before he could express them fluently in Japanese. Church structures, in his view, should help a community participate in God’s reconciling work.

His farm examples draw on processes already present in the land. Sheep provide grazing and wool for insulation. Wood-chip compost produces heat and material for the garden. Diverse cover crops support livestock and soil life. A no-dig garden reduces the burden of cultivation. A locally built roller crimper and a cover-crop seed business respond to tools and materials that farmers need.

Education spreads through films, demonstrations, and repeated conversation. Epp describes Japanese screenings of To Which We Belong and a learning community in which farmers investigate soil together. Digging, observing roots, and learning the names of organisms make the land more interesting. The aim is to help participants ask better questions and share what they discover.

Akiko Aratani adds a story about researchers visiting the farm. Hospitality and a conversation about what they were seeing opened a wider discussion of mindset and faith. She describes farmers discovering a place where questions and difficulties can be shared without embarrassment. The community supports learning as well as companionship.

The scientific discussion includes strong claims about soil carbon and climate change. Those claims would need supporting studies, explicit units, and defined conditions before being used as established findings. The clearest documented contribution of this session is the community’s practical experimentation and reported experience. For farmers considering a transition, Epp’s advice is to find mentors and peers so that the learning does not depend on one isolated farm.

Daisy Hill’s 2024-2029 preservation plan encompasses 1.78 acres of prairie and surrounding woodland. It distinguishes three areas with different needs: a high-quality prairie remnant to protect, recovering prairie to restore, and an upland forest buffer to maintain. Together, they illustrate why caring for a landscape requires attention to its particular conditions.

The plan combines careful invasive plant removal, native seed collection and planting, and prescribed fire. In the most sensitive remnant, management calls for removing invasive plants by hand and keeping the area herbicide-free. Other areas allow targeted treatments to support recovery. Species highlighted in the preservation materials include pale purple coneflower, little bluestem, and sideoats grama; management targets include autumn olive, bush honeysuckle, and garlic mustard.

The tour offered a setting for considering conservation at an intimate scale. Protecting a prairie means learning what is already there, recognizing what threatens it, and returning to care for it over time.

A farm can carry a meaningful mission and still struggle to pay its bills. Brent Barry and Sarah Macias address that tension through two distinct enterprises. Barry emphasizes livestock, vegetables, and direct sales. Macias combines agricultural activity with accommodation, retreats, and gatherings. Both describe finances as part of the responsibility of caring for land, workers, and family.

Their farms grew out of personal and vocational transitions. Farming offered a place to rebuild daily life and relationships, while theological study helped Macias imagine ministry beyond a conventional setting. The panel treats vocation as a way of living with a place and its community. It also recognizes the risks of creating work that consumes all of a family’s time and energy.

Barry explains that relationships and the quality of life on the farm come first. He describes paying workers fairly, helping with housing, sharing meals, and communicating with respect. Those practices support a stable team. Macias organizes decisions around restoration, education, and inspiration. Renovating a farmhouse, creating places for guests, and welcoming groups allow the property to serve family and community.

The business discussion is concrete. Barry describes farmers markets, winter pop-ups hosted by a church, restaurant relationships, farm visits, and cooking demonstrations. He compares the short production cycle of broiler chickens with the much longer cycle of grass-finished cattle. Enterprise choice therefore affects how much capital a farm needs and how long it must wait for sales.

Macias says accommodation and rentals are the main financial support for Sister Grove Farm. Seasonal gatherings and retreats create opportunities to learn, eat, and reflect together. Their popularity suggests demand for experiences that connect people with a place. The agricultural and hospitality activities can support one another, although both require labor and attention.

The speakers also describe exhaustion, borrowing, ambitious plans, and the emotional histories people bring to money. Macias is considering succession with her family and a young farmer. Barry explains how mission and business decisions sometimes require difficult choices. Their examples show that financial sustainability depends on context: customers, prices, labor, capital, and a family’s priorities. The sales figures in the session describe revenue, not profit.

The grazing plan provides a framework for moving livestock through smaller paddocks and allowing grazed areas time to recover. Planned fencing, lanes, and water infrastructure will make those movements more practical and give the farm greater flexibility as forage, weather, and animal needs change. The aim is to support livestock while maintaining productive pasture and protecting the land that sustains them.

Silvopasture adds a longer horizon to that work by bringing trees, forage, and grazing animals together in a deliberately managed system. The project envisions tree rows within working pasture, with young trees protected as they establish. Over time, those trees can provide shade and shelter for livestock, add wildlife habitat, and create possibilities for future tree crops and farm income.

James’s pasture talk connected everyday animal care with the planning behind a more resilient farm. Paddock moves, reliable water, pasture recovery, and tree establishment are practical parts of the same undertaking: producing food while caring for the living landscape.

Plants recalled from the walk included milkweed, slippery elm, white and red oak, honeysuckle, pokeberry, nettle, greenbrier, and thistle. Mushrooms also became part of the conversation, with participants contributing observations about yellow oyster mushrooms, dryad’s saddle, and turkey tail. Each encounter offered another reason to pause.

Underlying those exchanges was Heather’s invitation to approach plants with the appreciation we might bring to a friend. Learning a name or recognizing a useful property can begin a relationship, but understanding also grows through time spent observing: noticing a plant’s shape, surroundings, and whole presence.

That perspective gave the walk its distinctive character. There was room for questions, shared stories, and quiet attention, without needing to turn every encounter into a lesson about usefulness. Participants were invited to become more attentive to the lives around them and to discover what patient familiarity with a place can teach.

The panel brings together community food work, family organic farming, housing ministry, theological education, environmental teaching, and a Catholic service community. Each setting offers a different answer to how Christian faith takes shape in agricultural practice.

Fredando Jackson, known as Farmer Fredo, describes tending land, people, and community. At Koinonia Farm, shared labor, meals, and moments of silence give daily work a spiritual rhythm. Flint River Fresh connects farmers with schools, clinics, and local partners. Growing food becomes part of helping people belong and obtain what they need.

Jacob Landis asks why Christian identity does not more often influence the way farms are managed. His family initially moved toward organic farming for economic reasons and later recognized connections with faith and environmental care. He describes both continuing discovery and the practical frustrations of certification. Steve Graham approaches sustainability through intentional community, housing, food growing, and sharing meals.

Laurel Kearns connects farming with theological education. She asks students to consider the food and labor involved in communion and to learn from a place through gardening and quiet observation. Jonathan Schramm emphasizes attachment to creation as a foundation for responsibility. Students need to encounter beauty and people doing useful work, alongside understanding environmental damage.

Eric Fitts describes Bethlehem Farm through prayer, community, simplicity, and service. Volunteers repair homes, garden, prepare food, and help shape the community’s prayers. The experience offers time away from devices and opportunities for direct relationships. Ordinary discoveries, such as digging a potato or seeing the Milky Way, can change how a person understands the world.

The discussion also recognizes shortages of labor, financial pressure, administrative delays, and exhaustion. Prayer is described in different ways: asking for provision, sitting with uncertainty, listening, expressing gratitude, and remaining open to an unexpected direction. The panel does not offer a single formula for faithful farming. It shows how conviction can be practiced through attention to people, land, work, and the limits of what one can control.

The panel begins with a question that runs through all four accounts: how can a person support good farming when money, land, time, or infrastructure limits the choices available? The speakers approach that question as a consumer and student, a business student, an agricultural practitioner in Uganda, and an urban farmer near Chicago.

Esther describes buying food on a student budget in Switzerland. Local production, organic methods, and affordability do not always coincide. Shopping across the German border can make some food more affordable, while highlighting reliance on international systems. Her account of an international church gathering also shows how difficult sustainability conversations can become when a congregation includes people with different farming practices and political commitments.

Christina describes discovering that people can help rebuild soil and then seeing those ideas in practice at Hungry World Farm and Bethany Land Institute. Her business training leads her to consider the infrastructure around farming. Processing, distribution, investment, and market access influence whether producers can sustain their work. Supporting regenerative agriculture can involve building useful businesses and services as well as cultivating land.

Fiona traces her path from growing up in Kampala through forestry and agroforestry to an 11-month placement at Hungry World Farm. Seeing productive crops grown without the spraying she expected challenged her assumptions. Back in Uganda, she needed practices suited to local crops, climate, labor, and resources. Bethany Land Institute provided a setting for that learning and for cooperation among people of different faiths.

She describes insecure access to land, particularly for women, and the difficulty of investing in borrowed property. Capital, skilled labor, storage, and processing are also barriers. Her ambition is to make healthy food accessible to poorer people. In the discussion, she explains how labor costs and limited machinery can make chemical use an economically attractive choice. The account calls for understanding the conditions that shape farm decisions.

Camille Walker describes the pleasure of physical work, seasonal rhythm, and eating food she has grown. She also raises questions about leadership, motherhood, and preserving workers’ bodies. Making a harvest easier is a way to care for colleagues. The discussion acknowledges that production targets and payroll can make accessibility difficult. Sliding-scale purchasing, relationships with congregations, and opportunities for children are considered as ways to widen participation.

Organizations working in sustainable Christian agriculture may need one another most when they have the least time to meet. The workshop begins with that capacity problem. Harvests, staffing shortages, and the demands of daily work can prevent people from attending events that might help them.

The facilitator proposes reaching organizations where they are. Regional ambassadors could visit farms and connect people with useful opportunities. Regular conversations and a shared forum could help circulate questions and experience. Longer-term possibilities include a rotating pool of skilled labor, educational resources, and financial support. These are proposals for development, rather than descriptions of an operating network.

The group conversations make the cost of volunteering visible. A visiting group may contribute important work, but hosting also requires meals, orientation, supervision, and planning. Good intentions alone do not ensure that an organization receives help. Longer stays, preparation, and clearer matching between people and tasks could make service more useful.

Participants identify resources already present: land, teaching programs, experienced workers, congregational relationships, and people seeking meaningful service. Young adults and retired volunteers may have different needs and availability. A network could help organizations describe what they can offer as well as what they lack.

The plenary distinguishes two kinds of exchange. Relationships develop through time and trust. Practical answers may need to arrive quickly, when a farmer faces a specific problem. Proposed online formats include groups, moderated forums, and a system that connects questions with people who have relevant experience. A host who makes introductions and invites responses can be as important as the platform.

Participants also consider local, regional, and national layers. Soil, weather, and proximity matter for some questions, while others benefit from a wider pool of experience. Existing sustainable-agriculture organizations may offer useful relationships and resources. The workshop ends with further conversation ahead. Its immediate lesson is to begin with a service that saves people time or helps them solve a problem, then build the network around that value.

Nyberg begins with the sower’s surprising generosity. As a gardener, she carefully prepares beds and guards the few seeds in each packet. Jesus’s sower does the opposite, scattering seed even on paths, rocks, and thorny ground. She reads this abundance as an image of God’s goodness, shared widely rather than reserved for those most likely to respond. The invitation extends to believers: we, too, can sow goodness generously without controlling where it takes root.

The seed is the word of God, which Nyberg understands as more than words printed on a page. Drawing on the language of scripture, she describes it as living, creative, nourishing, and capable of inspiring new ways of life. Reading the Bible matters, but the life it points toward also takes shape through prayer, service, worship, fellowship, and attention to the world around us.

The different soils name real obstacles to that growth. Accusations of inadequacy, hard circumstances, relentless exposure to outrage and despair, and attachment to comfort can weaken hope and crowd out a person’s calling. Nyberg speaks candidly about feeling that everything depends on getting herself together. Jesus’s parable, in her reading, acknowledges these pressures while inviting honest, patient care for what is growing within us.

Healthy soil offers her a way to think about spiritual formation. Just as many forms of life work together beneath the ground, a varied set of spiritual practices can nurture a person’s capacity to respond to God. Alongside traditional disciplines such as silence, study, prayer, and service, she names spiritual direction, centering prayer, and attention to nature. She presents the comparison as a working hypothesis: a richer spiritual ecosystem can help sustain the care and healing people hope to bring into the world.

St. Francis supplies a recurring example of goodness taking root in a particular life. Nyberg recalls his simplicity, delight in creation, service to excluded people, and willingness to cross lines of hostility. His practices flowed from his personality and relationships rather than a single prescribed picture of religious life. The sermon closes by asking whether we will offer God’s good word the fertile ground and patient attention it needs to grow through us.