Do Joel Salatin Events Practice "Local Theologizing?"

As advertised in earlier posts, the Alaska Design Forum brought Joel Salatin to Alaska this week.  The goal was to inspire events aimed at designing a more effective and integrated food system for Alaska Grown foods.  Last night Salatin joined a group of leaders in Alaska’s food system.  The panel presentation, followed by a spirited discussion from the crowd that gathered, approached becoming an exercise in local theologizing

Cindee, my spouse, served as moderator for the evening, and did a great job.  She, and the whole team that put this together, brought an amazing week of learning and collaborating to Alaska.   I’m so proud of the good work she is doing with these other wonderful folks.

Local theologizing is a process that draws together people from local communities to take practical actions for their communities based on Christian ethics.  It requires a collaborative effort for defining the issue, seeing what is possible, and planning actions based on our best understanding of the Christian faith. 

Essential for good local theologizing is a collaborative process that allows everyone to be heard, and celebrates the gifts everyone has to bring to the table.  A number of great processes are available to assist this kind of work (open group agendas, affirmative inquiry processes, etc.), but they need to be applied to a situation as an intentional Christian action to count as a “theologizing” action.

In this case, the event was not intended to be Christian, per se.  Everyone was invited, and the group did not discuss faith at all.  Clearly, I overstate it when I say this teetered on the brink of becoming an evening of local theologizing.

Still, the topic fit, and the ethics of the ideas presented would also fit, if they had been couched in Christian theological language.  The group wrestled with the six elements necessary in an integrated food system that would be good for people, for the land, and for all the creatures of the land.  That is a great topic of Christian ethics…if the ethics were to be looked at from the perspective of the Christian faith.

Indeed, the Bible is clear that caring for the earth and its creatures, as well as caring for people are the very essence of what salvation is about.  Jesus points to the Hebrew Scriptures to tell us that all the Law is wrapped up in two commandments, love the Lord your God with all you’ve got, and love your neighbor as yourself.

But I have found more clarity on loving God and neighbor by looking at the six areas of salvation that Genesis 3 tells us that we all need for there to be real salvation.  According to Genesis 3, the fallen nature of humanity and all creation requires the following six areas of relationships to receive healing:

1.     Our relationship with God

2.     The meddling of the devil

3.     Relationships between human beings, with all the justice issues that entails,

4.     Relationships between human beings and the rest of creation,
both in terms of how we survive in this world from day to day, and our need to ultimately be restored to Eden.[1]

5.     Relationships with our bodies as we prone to sickness and suffering,

6.     And coming to terms with the reality of death, and our eternal hope in God.

This week with Joel Salatin has been especially an exercise in looking at items 3 and 4 in that list.  In his opening talk at the Rasmuson Museum on Monday, he made the point that there are extremely effective systems available for transforming our industrial farm system, which  does violence to every element of the system, including the workers, into an organic farm system that takes action to reduce and, hopefully, end the violence.  Instead of factory farms that require workers literally to attend to parts of it in haz-mat suits, organic farming methods create integrated communities that honor people, animals, land and the plant world.

An example was the cycle needed to create fertilizer.  Cattle manure is collected and mixed with organic fiber (straw, sawdust, etc.).  This mix is put under the shade areas left for the cattle, and the cattle tread it and mix it into an anaerobic compost.  In the winter, enough heat radiates still radiates from this anaerobic compost to warm the cattle at night.  In the spring, pigs are let loose in it.  The pigs love the corn and root through it to get the corn, stirring the compost and changing it from anaerobic to aerobic, turning it into fine compost to use as fertilizer.

Of course, I have shortened his description and left out some things, but I hope to give the point that there are ways of farming that honor everyone and every thing.  As Salatin puts it, a system for pigs should honor their “pig-ness.”  Indeed, his processes honor everyone, helping them learn their gifts and then become independent contractors, set free to take charge of whatever part of the farming stirs their imagination, whether it be planting crops, caring for poultry, marketing, or distributing the final product.  It becomes a system that cares for everyone.

Salatin advertises himself as “a Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer.”  These events are not overtly Christian, but he does not hide his faith, either.  He is upfront about it, which I think challenges the rest of us to think about our own witness to the faith.  By making room for people to join these earth-changing conversations, Salatin shows the total generosity of his own relationship with God, just by the way he is open to others.  Buy engaging them in earth-changing questions and processes, he makes prayers for “thy Kingdom come” to make sense.

No, this was not an exercise in local theologizing.  The people did not engage in specific questions of whether their outcomes were congruent with the Christian faith.  However, the focus and the relational values behind these events and this work sure do come close.

[1] Some see Eden as “heaven.”  Others, however, see Eden as a way of life, where we live in harmony with God, with each other and with all creation.  Eden, in that sense, is heaven.  But it also become the goal of human life, which Jesus included in the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  Local theologizing, therefore, is the action phase of praying this line of the Lord’s prayer.  If we are to pray for it to happen with integrity, we must also put our effort into the ministries (the actions) that help bring that prayer to fruition.