Mission Yearbook: Wild Indigo Guild cultivates faith, community and ecological restoration

From its base in western Pennsylvania, the Wild Indigo Guild helps faith communities discover God’s call to restoration and helps them mobilize their community toward life-giving action. The founder and director of the guild, the Rev. John Creasy, who was also the founding co-pastor of The Open Door Church and is founder and director of Garfield Community Farm in Pittsburgh, recently led an informative and inspirational webinar for Presbyterians for Earth Care.

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The Rev. John Creasy (photo courtesy of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary).

Creasy spoke from the lovely Garfield Community Farm, where he’d just helped to lead the weekly group of volunteers who help work on the 3-acre farm in Pittsburgh’s Garfield neighborhood. The community farm, which is near The Open Door Church, was created from three abandoned city blocks and has been supported by several Pittsburgh-area PC(USA) churches, “who gave us money to help this happen and sent us volunteers,” Creasy said.

In the world of permaculture, a guild is a designed plant community, Creasy explained. “We create guilds, those plants that benefit one another,” he said. “They give us food and support one another.” A primary producer — an apple tree, for example — needs to be pollinated, and the pollinators require beneficial pollinator plants such as milkweed or ironweed. Wild Indigo is a common name for Amorpha fruticose, a native shrub that supports pollinators and beneficial insects and fixes nitrogen in the soil through its relationship with bacteria.

“It represents restoration for us,” Creasy said. “It doesn’t produce anything for us to eat but helps the full health of the ecosystem. Wild Indigo shrub is a team player in the natural ecosystem.” It “brings new life to damaged ecosystems.”

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Garfield Community Farm (photo courtesy of Garfield Community Farm)

For the Wild Indigo Guild, a guild is also “a group of people from within a congregation or community who listen, learn and explore God’s restorative call together,” Creasy said. Wild Indigo Guild offers churches and other groups a three-phase program:

• Learn and explore. Through eight contemplative sessions, participants work on connecting with God, with each other and with the natural world. “It’s group spiritual direction,” Creasy said. People go to their “sit spot” during the week and then “come back to tell the stories of what they experienced.” It could be as simple as describing a type of insect they never noticed before.
• Dream and design, where participants discern “from what they’ve learned and experienced together how God is calling them to ecological restoration and food production on their communally owned property.” For churches with abundant land, that can be a food forest, “which can look wild and full, and it is,” he said, describing a food forest as resembling “a diverse orchard.”
• Dig and go deeper, which is “when we all get our hands dirty implementing the designs we’ve created, the programs we’ve developed and the partnerships we envision,” Creasy said. One church had a labyrinth that couldn’t be seen from the parking lot. The guild helped design a horseshoe-shaped food forest around the labyrinth to help it stand out. “I am really excited about it,” he said.

Creasy and his guild partner, the Rev. Evan Clendenin, an Episcopal priest, have recently started The Center Guild, a community of faith that gathers at a farm in Allegheny County “for worship and for working in our new tree nursery we are developing,” Creasy said.

Clendenin often brings Visio Divina — “sacred seeing” — to gatherings. “You look deeply into an image to find wonder, a place where God might be drawing our attention to,” Creasy said. “It might be something you can name, or something you don’t know about or have a question about. Maybe it brings a feeling.”

“We think that practice is good for developing what we see and how we see,” Creasy said.

One of the principles of permaculture design that appeals the most to Creasy is increasing the edge and valuing the marginal. On even a small piece of property, “we try to value the edge and get production out of it as well as allow nature to thrive there,” he said. “We expand the marginal beyond growing: In our lives, where are the edges? The places in our lives where God might be at work, where there is more diversity than we are used to?”

Mike Ferguson, editor, Presbyterian News Service, Interim Unified Agency (Click here to read original PNS Story)

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