Sacred Soil Conference 2007
To “treat someone like dirt” is to be rude and disrespectful. “Getting the dirt” on political figures involves discovering their embarrassing secrets, and no one wants to be “dirt poor.” Yet our lives are totally dependent on dirt. Every meal we eat depends on healthy soil. Like the Banana Slugs song says, “dirt made my lunch.”
Participants at the annual Autumn Hope Conference at Merry Lea Environmental Learning Center of Goshen College September 28 – 30, reflected at length on this connection between “dirt” and “lunch.” The theme for this year’s event was Sacred Soil: Reclaiming the Source of Our Food.
Autumn Hope Conferences are an annual event at Merry Lea. Each weekend integrates
theological and ecological reflection with fieldwork outdoors led by trained
naturalists. This year, for example, participants hiked on Merry Lea’s
trails observing the ways in which soils generate different plant communities.
Later they got their hands dirty learning ways to improve their own
soil. Another hike took the group around the acreage needed to produce
one person’s food for a year. 
Plenary speakers were Jeff Hawkins, M.Div., and Luke Gascho, Ed.D. Hawkins operates a family farm in North Manchester, Indiana, where he also mentors other pastors through HOPE CSA, which stands for Hands-On Pastoral Education using Clergy Sustaining Agriculture. Groups of pastors spend a day each month helping with farm work and reflecting on the relationship between care of a family farm and care for their congregations.
Hawkins is concerned that both U.S. churches and farms are frequently run using a model that emphasizes increasing production rather than the health of the whole. He challenges pastors to think of themselves as stewards of a household rather than as CEOs in charge of increasing production.
"The more we are removed from creation, the more we risk being removed from critical insights about God, the church and ourselves," Hawkins says, alluding to Thomas Aquinas’ famous quote, “Any error about creation leads to an error about God.”
Luke Gascho, Merry Lea’s executive director, led reflective sessions following the outdoor fieldwork. Part of his role was to enable participants to move beyond the negative statistical data about the environment that can be overwhelming and to focus on the resilience that undergirds creation.
“We began this conference working from the idea that ecosystems are regenerative,” Gascho observes. “There is hope built into the way ecosystems function that can serve as a model for our own actions related to the environment.”
This year for the first time, Merry Lea’s Autumn Hope Conference is linked to a related course at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Elkhart, IN, taught by Gascho and Ted Koontz. Participants can earn one hour of credit by registering for Sacred Soil: Reflections in Ecological Theology, Ethics and Spirituality.
A variety of staff members from Merry Lea led additional sessions during
the weekend, and Registered Chef Greg Beachy of Goshen,
IN, led a cooking class. Guests also had the opportunity to stay at
Rieth Village, Merry Lea’s “green” collegiate facility,
designed to use less than half the energy a conventional building uses.
Merry Lea Environmental Learning Center is an 1,150-acre nature preserve owned and operated by Goshen College, Goshen, IN. The preserve is located just south of Wolf Lake in central Noble County.