More on the Sustainable Enterprise Conference

I've been mulling over some of what I learned last weekend, and am somewhat surprised by the connections. I think it started when in the workshop on Web 2.0 our leader said there were many common values between geeks and greens, and it was time environmental activists got over their anti-technology attitude. I don't think I've ever been there, but I certainly saw what he meant. And when you add in the challenges of re-localization, which we heard about on the second day, you really have something: a renewing of the local economy and community combined with greater global communication and trans-local networking and collaboration through the wiki-world.

(Is wiki-world an amusement park?)

It also seems to me that local ministry development fits into this picture - the revitalization of the local congregation in its context, with its resources, combined with greater connectivity with the wider church no longer mediated by a professional clergy class.

What does this have to do with food?

Well, perhaps food is the place where can begin to live into relocalization and enhanced communication, and also one place where we can sign that reality.

Suppose our congregations put more of emphasis on the seasonal and the local in our feeding and food distribution programs, with gleaners, and community gardens, and the like? And suppose we could then build a network of churches doing this, to share vision and information, and maybe even to work together to get some grants - to redistribute money to local projects - not just in one locale, but in national or even international networks.

And suppose a locavore meal were not something we did once a year at church - but that every Sunday the coffee hour, the flowers, the potluck, reflected the beauty of the local season in that place?

Then there's the whole notion of sharing. Julian Darley of the Post Carbon Institute suggested we need to bring back sharing. Why are our congregations not sharing networks? We don't need to go to the extreme of challenging the concept of private property (though some of us might like to) to see that there are many things some own that could be shared by everyone. There might even be some things - tools or equipment or ??? - I need to do more imagining here - that we could hold in common and then "rent" from the church to members.

There was not just a rush of self-righteous frugality, but real joy, when I lived in Los Angeles and the Horstmans brought a big bag of lemons to share from their very old back yard tree. Ditto in congregations around here when excess fall persimmons find their way to church. How could we see this sharing of bounty as sign and invitation to get creative and do more?

Another message for our churches I took away from the relocalization address was that limits are good. Too often, I think, our churches have bought into the American way of Growth Is Good. Thirty-five years ago on those early Earth Days, I thought about limits, and what a theology of limits might look like. It is time to revisit this, and draw out of our bag of tricks those Christian virtues which respect the limits of nature, and the limits which justice requires.

Okay - one last heavy thought. Darley said that relocalization is inevitable. That feels like both a statement of doom and a challenge to get started now, and do it right, in ways that are creative and adventursome, not cramped and painful.