Doug Kaufman directs the Anabaptist Climate Collaborative, an organization that leads climate justice initiatives from an Anabaptist faith perspective. Doug and his team support Mennonite and other Anabaptist churches, helping to build networks, train leaders, and empower climate-related initiatives. Doug describes environmental work as a form of peacemaking, a way of countering the slow violence of actions that cause and exacerbate climate change. Thanks to Doug for geeking out with me on theology and offering some glimpses of Mennonite climate work.
Explore some of Doug’s writing on climate advocacy here.
In this episode, we highlight several Anabaptist faith communities who are pursuing climate justice through simple, sustainable living:
- The Taftsville Chapel and their climate initiative called the Schoolhouse for Simple Living
- Doug’s “Mennonite cookbook canon”:
- More-with-Less Cookbook by Doris Longacre
- Simply in Season by Mary Beth Lind and Cathleen Hockman-Wert
- Extending the Table by Joetta Handrich Schlabach
- Sustainable Kitchen by Heather Wolfe and Jaynie McCloskey
TRANSCRIPT
Doug Kaufman
I think an important part of this is lament. I think that’s part of how we tell the truth at a time when so much damage is being done and we’re losing so many good things. And so there’s a strong biblical tradition of lament and bringing that into our worship. I led a service when the Biden administration delisted—was it 23 species, I think—from the endangered species list, because they presumed that they were extinct. Well, we named every one of those in worship and had a “Lord have mercy” kind of understanding of that. It helps us to acknowledge the truth in a way that doesn’t break us, I think.
Debra Rienstra
Welcome to the Refugia Podcast. I’m your host, Professor Debra Rienstra. Refugia are habits in nature where life endures in times of crisis. We’re exploring the concept of refugia as a metaphor, discovering how people of faith can become people of refugia: nurturing life-giving spaces in the earth, in our human cultural systems and in our spiritual communities, even in this time of severe disturbance. This season, we’re paying special attention to churches and Christian communities who have figured out how to address the climate crisis together as an essential aspect of their discipleship. Today, I’m talking with Doug Kaufman, Executive Director of the Anabaptist Climate Collaborative. Doug is a pastor, theologian, and master naturalist. In his work with the Climate Collaborative, Doug and his team support Mennonite and other Anabaptist churches, helping to build networks, train leaders, and empower climate-related initiatives. Doug describes environmental work as a form of peacemaking, a way of countering the slow violence of actions that cause and exacerbate climate change. We reflect together on the practical and theological gifts of the Anabaptist tradition, gifts that bless the whole church as we face together the challenges of our time. Let’s get to it.
Debra Rienstra
Hi, Doug! Thanks for being with me today.
Doug Kaufman
Hi, Debra. It’s great to be with you.
Debra Rienstra
Yeah, I appreciate the time you’re taking today. So tell us about the Anabaptist Climate Collaborative. What does the Collaborative do? And how did you get involved?
Doug Kaufman
Yeah. Our work is to help people engage climate justice—to seek climate justice from an Anabaptist base, a perspective and values and community, working towards a more just and peaceful world with less carbon emissions. And we see carbon emissions and justice and peace all going together. The actual “doing” is more focused on equipping and activating leaders, both student leaders and pastors and congregations. And so we have programs. We have students at most Mennonite campuses in North America that are ambassadors that work at climate change in their campuses, and then I’ve developed a program with pastors and congregational leaders that I’ve done some 20 times now through the years in different settings, helping them think about how to address climate change in their congregations. Two other things that we do besides developing emerging leaders is amplifying diverse voices. And so we have this climate pollinator series that tells stories from Anabaptists from across the globe who’ve worked at climate change in some way. And so we do a lot of storytelling with that. And then we also work at building networks, which, one of the ways we do that is with a climate directory on our website.
Debra Rienstra
How did you get involved? How long have you been at this? There’s a lot going on. So how did you get involved in this?
Doug Kaufman
Yeah, yeah. I started in 2018 and I was a pastor of my home congregation, and I started baptizing people in the local river that sometimes had too much manure in it for safe baptism. And so I became very interested in creation care.
Debra Rienstra
It started with baptizing in a river!
Doug Kaufman
Yes, and a poopy river at that. And so I learned both how to read the Bible a little differently with that question in mind. That’s not a question I’d ever asked of the Scriptures, what God thinks about rivers in that way. And I also became a community scientist. And so as this organization was starting to come together—and Goshen College, Eastern Mennonite University and Mennonite Central Committee were the founding partners, even though now we’re independent, but at one point we were part of them. And so someone at Goshen College approached me about developing something for pastors, because they’d done a lot of work with students, but hadn’t done much with pastors yet, and thought of me as someone who would have a sense of that, and I was studying eco-theology at University of Toronto, so that’s how I got started.
Debra Rienstra
So you got all this up and running in a mere seven years?
Doug Kaufman
Yeah, yes, yes.
Debra Rienstra
That’s impressive. So one of the things I’m really interested to talk with you about is the way that you describe in one of your articles, three gifts that the Mennonite tradition in particular—and I imagine other Anabaptist traditions too, but we’ll focus on that one—what the Mennonite tradition can offer to the larger church and the larger world in addressing climate change. And I really loved your three gifts, so I’d love to talk about each one of those, in turn. You started with a peacemaking tradition. So how might peacemaking be applied to climate action?
Doug Kaufman
Yeah, and just a little bit about that peacemaking tradition is that something that all the Anabaptist groups have in common is that we refuse to participate in military conflict, and so this is a longstanding tradition in the US context. It developed this interesting kind of alternative service that was part of that: instead of just refusing participation, we found ways to do some kind of important work in other communities. And so this was especially during the Vietnam War. The Mennonite Central Committee, which is a larger organization that’s done service work across the globe, would send people to all over the world. And so it helped bring these connections. And many people served with MCC as an alternative to military service. Now, when we’re talking about peacemaking and climate change, I think it’s partly a recognition that climate change engenders conflict throughout the world. When we look at the civil war in Syria, it seems to be connected with the displacement that came when many farmers had to leave their homes because of drought. And this is a story—the problem of drought is a story that keeps happening where people move into cities and don’t really have anything to do because they can’t farm the way it used to.
Debra Rienstra
Yeah. Droughts, floods, fires. We’re going to see more of this kind of migration and conflict.
Doug Kaufman
Yeah, all kinds of things. And Rob Nixon sometimes describes this as a slow violence. This kind of…what can happen to a community over time when there’s ecological destruction. Of course, sometimes climate change brings violence that’s just as fast when there is like a flood or a hurricane that destroys an area. So it’s partly bringing our peacemaking intentions to this slow violence, to this ecological violence, but it’s also true that war making is itself an environmentally destructive activity. This is something that’s already seen in the Bible where the Babylonian army surrounds Jerusalem and has to take trees for their siege works and that kind of stuff. But the US Defense Department is the single highest emitter of carbon in the world, with our 750 military bases. So anything we can do to reduce militarism, to argue against an expanding defense budget, we’re helping to bring—it’s a kind of climate action. And of course, the Defense Department also is very sensitive to climate change as well, because the Navy in particular is concerned about rising sea levels.
Debra Rienstra
Yes. And the military has been describing climate change as a threat multiplier for years. Not sure where that’s going right now.
Doug Kaufman
Yeah, yeah. And so to me, there’s this interesting, as a Mennonite, weird connection to some of what the Defense Department is talking about as well, and I’ve wondered, too, whether, finally, now that that’s changing, although I do have my doubts about that. I do have the concern that sometimes climate change is talked about in militarized terms, and militarism is the solution to the problems engendered by climate change.
Debra Rienstra
Yeah, well, we’re seeing that more and more as there’s a kind of authoritarian crackdown. Can you give us examples of churches making the connection to peacemaking in their climate work? What does this look like day to day in practical terms?
Doug Kaufman
Yeah, you know, and I think it’s partly a question of how people articulate the work that they do. For example, my own congregation, Benton Mennonite Church in Indiana, we talk about seeking God’s peace at the river as our primary vision for the congregation, or among three primary visions. And so we were able to talk about the work that we’re doing with the river as a kind of peacemaking activity. The Ivage congregation in Colombia in South America is a congregation that worked with the larger community at opposing a gold mine that was coming into their valley, and they certainly talk about justice and peace and integrity of creation as part of the work that they do. And then another person I think of is—there’s this interesting family farm in Ontario. Andre Wiederker is one of the members of this family, and he talks about composting as a peacemaking activity.
Debra Rienstra
I love that.
Doug Kaufman
And it’s because of the way we do resources in our economy, where we use them up and dump them and turn them into waste, rather than having the way nature works generally that you use the resources in an area, and then they join the soil community and become life again. Like there’s a circularity to the resources in nature. We’ve made linear resource systems, and then that drives conflict as we have to grab more resources.
Debra Rienstra
Interesting that this approach of peace making addresses both our conflicts with each other, but also our sort of violence on lands and waters, which is, of course, all interconnected. And I wonder if this is such a beautiful way through, as you describe, you know, the sort of ways that we talk about fighting climate change or fighting against minds, or fighting this way in that way, but to think of this all as peacemaking might be so much more appealing to people who are tired of conflict, right? Yeah. Did you personally have anything to do with the fact that the Global Season of Creation theme this year is “peace with creation”?
Doug Kaufman
No, no. I wish I could say that I did, but I did not.
Debra Rienstra
I wonder how that came about. I don’t know.
Doug Kaufman
But the Season of Creation does start with the prayer for peace with creation. So it is in keeping with the International Day of Peace, prayer for peace with creation. I think I’m remembering that correctly.
Debra Rienstra
Okay. Let’s take a detour now into more esoteric theology.
Doug Kaufman
And that’s my hot spot.
Debra Rienstra
Okay, let’s have some fun here. So I read a little bit about eco-pacifism, and this was a concept I wasn’t very familiar with. I read an article by Peter Dula, and he examines some sort of virtues and problems with this approach. What do you think about it? What is it and what do you think about it?
Doug Kaufman
Yeah. Eco-pacifism is partly a kind of way of talking about veganism or vegetarianism, an approach that works at not having to kill other beings in order for our own sustenance. You know, part of what Peter Dula does is deconstruct that a little bit, because even in a sense, eating a plant is just taking a living being and it dies for this pure sake. And also just the whole problem of the—how do you think about this ecosystemically? There’s ways in which death is what’s needed for life and that kind of thing. I am sympathetic to it. I am not a strict vegetarian. I eat meat probably about once a day. I try to be a flexitarian, as it’s sometimes called. I should say I have a lot of admiration. I know a number of the people in that community, and have a lot of admiration for their ethic. The way I approach eco-pacifism, because I’ll admit I don’t squash bugs and things like that, or even mosquitoes, unless they’re biting me, but they usually don’t bite me.
Debra Rienstra
Lucky you.
Doug Kaufman
Yeah, I’d say I have a peace treaty with mosquitoes. But I think part of how I think of it is to not individualize it, not to think of just the death of one particular individual, but to think more in terms of the communities, and so, communities of insects, communities of snakes, which is one of the hardest things for me to love in God’s creation.
Debra Rienstra
Fair enough.
Doug Kaufman
Yeah, and so to worry more about when we are destroying habitat that puts a particular species at risk. And so it’s one thing to kill a firefly, but another thing to destroy the habitat that would bring a firefly species to extinction. And of course, some firefly species are at the brink of extinction. So that’s how I think about that. I don’t know if you have more questions about that.
Debra Rienstra
Yeah. Well, that reminds me of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s essay on the honorable harvest, which isn’t about insects, right? It’s about the fact that all of us who are creatures kill other creatures to survive, plants or animals. And so from the human point of view, since we have conscious choice about that, the idea is something like what you said, where you only take an honorable amount, you give thanks for that, and you always make sure that whatever it is you’re taking will go on, even though you’re harvesting some of it. So that sounds like a little bit of a similar concept to the sort of eco-pacifism you were talking about there.
Doug Kaufman
Yeah. And one thing that was, I think it’s sweet grass that she writes about that was interesting to me, that it’s sweet grass or another plant that actually does better when it’s disturbed some, and so the actual consumption of the plant has helped it to spread. So sometimes there’s a mutual encouragement, you might say, when we eat or use a plant.
Debra Rienstra
Yeah. And I wonder if the sort of self-referential, incoherent problems of eco-pacifism might lead us into this idea of the gospel of the creatures. You seem interested in this concept, and maybe describe what that is a little bit and what maybe the practical implications of the idea might be.
Doug Kaufman
Yeah, and the gospel of all creatures comes out of reformation times, which is when the Anabaptist tradition started, although it starts with Thomas Muntzer and Hans Hut, who is an early Anabaptist writing in 1526 as he’s articulating why we wait to baptize, why we don’t baptize someone until they’ve made a decision to follow Christ. And so he sees the gospel of all creatures as Christ, the crucified one, being crucified in all his members. Like it’s not just something that Christ did. It’s something that Christ continues to do among we humans, but it’s also something happening among the creatures, that creatures also, in a sense, preach the crucified Christ because of the way that they give their lives for our sustenance. And so part of the idea that I think is important is that suffering is part of creation. It’s part of existence. It’s not necessarily a punishment for sin. The part that I emphasize, maybe more than Hans Hut did, is that it’s also that this suffering—although he did in individual lives, but I’m not sure he applied it to creation—to see how the resurrection comes through going through the cross as well. And so a little bit like that sweet grass example that in consuming some of the sweet grass, it actually brings more life. And so the ways that the soil community, this place that takes a dying matter, whether from trees or whether it’s a possum or whatever it is, takes that matter and turns it into new life, where resurrection is always happening. So for me, it’s a very powerful way of seeing the cross and resurrection is not just an individual kind of experience, so it is that too, but it’s also a broader human community experience, but also it’s in creation itself. Yeah, well, and even just that, some of the challenges that the earth brings to certain creatures, I mean, that’s part of the evolutionary process as well, that the creativity needed to deal with some of the challenges that come up. And so for me, it’s a sense of of when God says at the beginning, and according to Genesis one, “Let there be,” and all these things where God is, in a sense, inviting creativity, the auto-creativity of creation itself, of humans, but of all creatures. So to me, it’s a beautiful way of thinking about Christ, the work of Christ in a creation context.
Debra Rienstra
Yeah, so it resonates. The Christ event, the cross and the resurrection, resonate with all of creation, and I love using Colossians one as a kind of support for this idea. Can I read a quotation from you, actually, that helped me understand this a little bit better? Here’s what you wrote: “Hut’s version of Christ’s ecological union in suffering is especially important in the midst of the ecological crises of our day. If our gospel is not good news for all creatures, then it falls short of God’s vision for the created order. The need to clarify this grows out of the calamity we face as our ability to devastate God’s creation has outpaced our desire to nurture creation as creation has nurtured us. Congregations must cooperate with human and other-than-human neighbors to restore, reclaim and revive our ecosystems for the good of all.” So besides being a really beautiful set of sentences there, that might lead us into the sort of practical implications. So how would you describe where you see people responding to this idea in practical ways?
Doug Kaufman
Yeah, and part of what I would emphasize are those final words about restore, reclaim and revive, because I think a lot of our work is that way. The word sustain—not sure if I use “sustain” in there anywhere, but we used to talk about sustainability, but more and more, I think we need to be talking about restoration, because of the ways things have already been damaged and that we’re needing to work at that. I’ve already mentioned the soil community, and so that whole area is one of the ways that anyone who’s cooperating with land, I think, is cooperating with it—towards what God intends for the land. I’ll tell another personal story. Just that I bought a house eight years ago. I actually just moved now, but eight years ago, the backyard was a church parking lot, and because a church had owned it at one point. And so I finally found someone to pull that up and put in native species. It’s a little bit like the story you tell of your yard, except it’s a church parking lot. It’s an unpaved paradise, in a sense. My niece actually wrote a little song for me using that “paved paradise, put up a parking lot.” They reversed it. But Berkey Avenue Mennonite Church here in Goshen is a congregation that had some—I think it was a cornfield or something like that. And they also used it for a community garden for a while, community vegetable garden, I think they didn’t maybe quite have the volunteers or staff to keep that going and moved it to a natural tree area, just thinking about the kinds of goods and services that that could bring to the community, but also just being in relationship to that place.
Debra Rienstra
Hi, it’s me, Debra. If you are enjoying this podcast episode, go ahead and subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. If you have a minute, leave a review. Good reviews help more listeners discover this podcast. To keep up with all the Refugia news, I invite you to subscribe to the Refugia newsletter on Substack. This is my fortnightly newsletter for people of faith who care about the climate crisis and want to go deeper. Every two weeks, I feature climate news, deeper dives, refugia sightings and much more. Join our community at refugianewsletter.substack.com. For even more goodies, including transcripts and show notes for this podcast, check out my website at debrarienstra.com. D-E-B-R-A-R-I-E-N-S-T-R-A dot com. Thanks so much for listening. We’re glad you’re part of this community. And now back to the interview.
Debra Rienstra
So the next gift that you cited that Mennonites and Anabaptists can offer is a commitment to simple living. So how do we see that aspect of the Mennonite tradition applied to living in a time of climate crisis?
Doug Kaufman
Yeah. Well, this is an area that I think is the easiest one to talk about because it’s fairly popular among Mennonites. Like all people, we sometimes maybe talk about it better than we act on it, but we definitely have this value of simple living. And so there’s an emphasis on thrifting for clothes, and that organization I was mentioning, Mennonite Central Committee, or just MCC, they actually have thrift stores throughout North America that’s partly fundraising, but it’s also part of reusing things that one person—maybe it doesn’t work for them anymore, but someone else can use it. And so there’s an emphasis on purchasing modest consumer goods, and so it’s quite common to see folks having solar panels or driving a Prius, increasingly driving an EV, that’s still not taken off quite as much. Having a garden, not purchasing plastic, focusing on the “reduce” side of things, but it’s a long tradition that goes back to those Vietnam War era times. I mean, I grew up washing plastic bags. I don’t know how common that is.
Debra Rienstra
Oh, I still do that.
Doug Kaufman
Yeah, I still do that to you, actually. And so the one thing I’ll say is that sometimes simple living has focused on what is cheapest. That was, in some ways, the generation just a bit older than me, where we sometimes were trying—like my mother in particular, trying to get her to understand when sometimes getting something cheaper was actually doing more harm…because of the supply chain that it was used or also because you sometimes cheap goods that don’t last. And so I have much more of a sense of trying to buy something once and keeping it rather than having something that will break within a few years.
Debra Rienstra
Yeah, so this has been a kind of counter witness to the sort of raging consumerism that we’ve had to deal with in North America. And I notice in my students, who are 18 to 22 years old now, they love thrifting. They’re very interested in this, partly because they’re students and they don’t have a lot of cash, but also it just makes sense to them. They’re just less interested. Now, I’m generalizing, of course, but yeah. So the Mennonites and Anabaptists have been doing this for a long time.
Doug Kaufman
Yeah, and just one other little thing, I’ll say, like, I do feel like there are a lot of very wealthy, very rich Mennonites, but it does seem like making a higher income isn’t quite as big of a deal. And I don’t know what all the subsets are, and I’m over generalizing too, but I’ve just had more conversations where people aren’t as concerned about that.
Debra Rienstra
I think we need to talk about cookbooks. Yes, let’s talk about food. So apparently you were describing that there’s a sort of Mennonite cookbook canon.
Doug Kaufman
And by the way, that might be my term. Sometimes I’m not quite sure whether I got it from someone else, because I looked it up and I didn’t see anyone else saying that. But there is, in my mind, a definite cookbook canon.
Debra Rienstra
Well, that term must exist, because, if you made it up, great, but in any case, we need it.
Doug Kaufman
It ought to exist.
Debra Rienstra
So I pulled out my copy of the More-with-Less Cookbook, which turns out to be a 1987 copy of a 1976 original. And I found a lovely thing that Doris Jansen Longacre wrote. She wrote, “Feeding a hungry stomach is in no way less honorable than thinking lofty spiritual thoughts.” I thought that was just lovely. So how might Mennonite thinking and practices around food be especially inspiring to others right now in light of climate change?
Doug Kaufman
Yeah, yeah. And so yeah, More-with-Less Cookbook is what you might call the Gospel of Mark in this canon. It’s the original one. And then there’s Extending the Table. And then Simply in Season, which does, I think, sort of especially Simply in Season. Extending the Table was recipes from across the globe, and both of those built strongly on this tradition of service globally that had people doing service assignments in places where there wasn’t electricity, where things were different, and, yeah, trying to find a way to live more with less. To me, it’s interesting that first there’s a cookbook, and only later does someone say, “Well, there ought to be a living more with less.” And there is a “Living More-with-Less” book that Doris wasn’t able to complete because she died of cancer quite a few years ago. And the other thing I’ll say is that when I tell people I’m Mennonite and they’re an international worker, they almost always have the More-with-Less Cookbook. And I think it is the best-selling book by our denominational publisher, that they do better with cookbooks than theology.
Debra Rienstra
Well, as Doris said, you know, the cookbook is a form of theology in its own way, and I was surprised to read her introduction from the 70s, maybe updated in the 80s, and realize how absolutely pertinent everything she said still is. The way we use land, the way we eat meat—she and others, I’m sure, were onto this long before this became more widely understood.
Doug Kaufman
And just to answer your question a little more pointedly, Drawdown, the organization that’s come up with the 80 some ways to address climate change, to get our emissions down to zero and even into negative territory—of the top 10, two of them are food related. And so how we eat food, what we do with food, both of those have huge consequences for carbon emissions. How we treat soil, to reducing food waste, is one of the key things, and eating a plant-rich diet are the two top ten ways to reduce climate change. So like the book Simply in Season is about if you have a garden, or if you have a farmers market, and you’re getting food seasonally, it actually kind of guides you through the year. It’s a calendar, in a sense, of what recipes you could make during those times of the year. So the whole need for local food systems, I mean, there’s a whole movement that I think is connected to the cookbook. And I’ll just say one other sort of esoteric theological thing, in that, to me, it is interesting that as Mennonites, we’re not sort of known for being sacramental, that we don’t think of the Lord’s Supper—we don’t think of Christ literally present in the Lord’s Supper, at least that’s not denominationally where we stand. But we’ve also—the split between the Amish and Mennonites had to do with the common meal and applying excommunication, not just to the holy meal, not to just the Lord’s Supper, but also to the common meal that you wouldn’t even have a regular meal with someone who’s been excommunicated. So to me, there’s an implied sacramentality to the way we emphasize food and the way that we emphasize gardening, and of course, we also just have had a lot of agricultural roots that aren’t necessarily out of theological conviction. It’s probably just how things turned out for us, perhaps as we were avoiding the authorities during our times of persecution, 300, 400 years ago.
Debra Rienstra
Yeah, I like that phrase “implied sacramentality.” That’s a good one. Tell us about Taftsville Fellowship, because they have a program called Schoolhouse for Simple Living, which is pertinent to this examination of simplicity. What are they up to? And what are some other churches that are offering good examples of this gift?
Doug Kaufman
Yeah, Taftsville Chapel is a congregation that has been engaged in creation care for decades, I think because of the great leadership of Heather Wolf, and she actually wrote a book with Janie McCloskey, also from Taftsville, called Sustainable Kitchen, a cookbook. It’s not part of the canon, but I would put it in the apocrypha.
Debra Rienstra
I hope someone’s keeping track of this.
Doug Kaufman
Yeah, you can see how I…well anyway. Yeah, so they were part of a retreat that Anabaptist Climate Collaborative did with two of our partners, BTS Center and Creation Justice Ministries at Acadia National Park last summer, and we actually were looking for congregations that already had substantial creation care work that they had done. And part of what I think is cool about their Schoolhouse for Simple Living, which came out of that event, is, I think it was part of this interdenominational dialogue with United Church of Christ folks who I think have a much more of a sense of: work needs to impact the community. And so, because a lot of the work that Taftsville had done was maybe more internally oriented towards, you know, themselves and what they’re doing in their households and what they’re doing on their land. And so they—and this is a congregation that partly emerged in Vermont because a lot of these conscientious objectors to military service had gone there for their alternative service. COs is what we call them. Conscientious objectors. So they—for one thing, so their newer congregations started, like in the 50s or the 60s. So they meet in a schoolhouse, so that’s where the “schoolhouse” comes from. Yeah, and it’s a beautiful old schoolhouse, like you might expect in a New England village.
And they actually, as part of their articulation of this, they say that this is part of living into their legacy of peacemaking, by leading and serving as a Schoolhouse for Simple Living. And part of that, the first event that they did, I just think was so wonderful because Heather Wolf is a dietitian. She is also now an eco minister. But she talked to them about the benefits of preserving food. And then they had a couple of Mennonite grandmothers there, Joanna Biedler and Mary Guntz, you know, who were taught canning, and were passing on canning. And they made applesauce together with community members. And they had a number of community members who had never been inside the church before, who came and learned how to make applesauce. And now they’ve continued that. I think they do it quarterly. They did like a holiday crafting event that was, you know, focused on natural things. They did a mending workshop, which, again, I imagine Mennonite grandmothers teaching people how to mend things. And they also, as part of that, made MCC sewing kits, or probably school kits, and here in the summer, they’re going to do something around gardening. So anyway, they’ve just found a way to connect with their community and to bring some of these simple living crafts that have been passed on from generation to generation, and are even in the Mennonite community at risk of being lost.
Debra Rienstra
Sure. I don’t know how to can. My mother would be horrified if I tried to learn how to can. She would say, “This is exactly what I don’t want you to have to do!” But now, you know, I sort of understand the reasoning behind those sorts of practices, and you’re right, those skills have been largely lost. So the Mennonites, in many cases, are carrying them forward, and others too,
Doug Kaufman
Yeah, no, there’s a renewed interest, and partly a local food shed is part of it. I grew up hardly eating grocery store food. I mean, we basically raised everything that we ate, vegetable-wise.
Debra Rienstra
Yeah, yeah, wow. So let’s go on to our third gift, which you describe as “down to earth theology and practice.” So I’m gonna let you explain what you mean by that.
Doug Kaufman
Yeah, I mean, I’m trying to keep two things in play here, which is this: partly the earthiness part, which connects to the gospel of all creatures. And by earthiness, I don’t mean just Earth, I mean planetary in a sense—like the importance of earth, sky, and water, and how all those things nurture us, and that we are part of that broader creation. And so there’s some practices. In some ways, this is better expressed in the Amish community, where there’s some practices that have an earthiness, or another way to say it is like an earth-based religion, even sort of pagan kinds of practices that go back to a pre-modern time, and that have not been rooted out yet, in the Amish tradition.
Debra Rienstra
Interesting.
Doug Kaufman
Yeah, yeah. But then I also mean down to earth, and back to what I was saying earlier about—how did I say it? Well, sacramentality. Implied sacramentality. The importance of everyday life, of the quotidian, how the spirit is expressed in just the everyday things that we do. I don’t say weeding, I say sorting volunteers. So the way I sort the volunteers in my yard, when I say no to this volunteer and yes to another volunteer. You know, there’s a spirituality to that, that kind of stuff, like what we do with our yards, that matters. And that we’ve even, you know, we’ve had arguments about these things. And there’s, particularly in the Amish community, there’s sometimes splits, although I don’t think the splits are often around clothing or these questions of how we adapt to technology, but we have a tradition of seeing these as matters of faith. They’re not just—it’s not that they’re just ephemeral…not ephemeral. What’s the word I’m looking for? It’s not that they don’t matter.
Debra Rienstra
Yeah, so you have a long tradition of resisting the kind of dualism between the spiritual and the actual physical earth itself, the practical matters, the body, yeah,
Doug Kaufman
Yeah. That’s a great way to say that. And maybe it’s because the dualism that we did have was between church and world. And that can be problematic, and so maybe that made it easier than within the church to think about all things being under the Lordship of Christ would be a more traditional way to say it for at least in our tradition.
Debra Rienstra
Yeah. So that leads to two other questions. One is about quietism. So you mentioned to me that at first you were a little worried about the refugia metaphor, because you thought, “Oh no, another quietist way of thinking.” And that is a valid criticism. I think the biological phenomenon of refugia—that quietism is not the issue there. So we do get around that, but explain a little bit about maybe the dangers of quietism.
Doug Kaufman
Yeah, I think it has been a problem in our community at times. And I’ve mentioned persecution in the first 100 to 200 years, depending on where—Holland is actually a place where persecution did not last as long, and so kind of a withdrawal during that time, and then seeing the church as a refuge. And then, of course, you can get to the point where you kind of have to use a military metaphor of “fortress mentality,” where you draw very stark lines and a kind of isolationism and quiet in the land. I mean, there’s a phrase that is “de stille im Lande.” I know the German because it’s such a powerful phrase that I think was used by outsiders about us—you know, these folk who are the quiet in the land. So I like the way that you addressed a couple of these things in your book, to see that refugia is not about bunkers to hunker down and remove ourselves from the impurities of society.
Debra Rienstra
Refugia have to have permeable membranes, or they’re not serving their purpose. They’re meant to, if possible, not only preserve remaining life, but also allow it to spread and thrive again. So yeah, the quiet in the land, I think we could use a little more of that…
Doug Kaufman
Right, you contrast it with the sort of imperialist approach—that’s not quite the right word, but the one of trying to take over society, which has generally not—I mean, there is one instance of that in our history, but that isn’t how we have generally…Another thing that you said about refugia that I thought also was quite applicable is when you talk about the strongest refugia being the most biodiverse. And I think that is a challenge when you are being an isolated community. It’s nonconformity to the world, but that then implies conformity to the church. And so there can be a way in which people within the community who don’t think quite like the others, the more innovative thinkers, can sometimes be pushed out. So those are some of the problems with it. I think the best part of what I tried to take from that, that I think has been helpful, is that, you know, sometimes we’re called sectarians, but another way to say it, that seems more positive to me is to say we’re dissenters, that we’re a community that has nurtured dissent from the larger society. That we’re okay with being different from broader society. I think that gives us some place to experiment, to try things that broader society doesn’t seem to be interested in. You know, something as simple as when I started bike-commuting 20 some years ago, and just to be in a community where there were a lot of Amish that were already biking to and from work, because these straight county roads, I mean, cars are going 55 miles per hour. And just so that cars are aware that there are bikers, even if they sometimes mistreat us, still, it was just helpful. So anyway, this sense of dissent, and trying something different and being experimental.
Debra Rienstra
Right, yeah, prototyping, modeling, you know, yeah. And that’s how I think about refugia too, as places of trying things, prototyping, at least in human communities. You know, what can work, what can be adaptive and still be life giving. You mentioned, too, that advocacy can be a little bit of a steeper climb for some Anabaptist folk, but they’re doing it. So that’s the sort of moving outside that quietism. Is there something we can all learn from approaching advocacy from a Mennonite perspective?
Doug Kaufman
I do think that perhaps that dissenting tradition is a big part of it, and I’ll say too that part of that tradition is that we actually were hauled before government officials to answer for our faith, because at that time, we were doing practices that didn’t fit into civil society. And so to think about that tradition, which is also found in the Bible, of going before the authorities to talk about our faith and what matters, and why, maybe installing solar panels on what had been a hog farm, which is something I have done. I have, you know—I’ve argued about that, I’m saying. I have not done that, but I have spoken about that at a county zoning meeting. That kind of thing is, I think, an important part of the Christian tradition: to speak to authorities. And it is one of these sort of weird things. I mean, maybe that smaller community has helped to create these activists, because it’s true that I know a number of Mennonite activists doing great work in Chicago, in Lancaster, in Columbia, in Boston. And again, I think it’s a combination of that peacemaking tradition too, that says, you know, peace is the will of God, and we need to work at this; so is a care of creation. So is justice, and this conviction that we should be doing something about it, should be witnessing to it, so that it’s a form of witness as well, is all I was trying to get at.
Debra Rienstra
Right, so when you’re living in an alternative way, you have the strength to dissent and say another way is possible.
Doug Kaufman
Yeah, yeah.
Debra Rienstra
I wonder about worship. I know that you’re interested in ritual, and in particular, you wrote about ritual as sort of a way through denial. But I wonder what sort of worship practices you’re seeing in Mennonite circles in particular, as a way to bring people into deeper engagement with grief and hope and climate action.
Doug Kaufman
Yeah, there’s been a lot of interest in wild church, or what’s sometimes called forest church, especially here in the Great Lakes region, where wild places are forests as well. And in fact, one of the founders of the wild church network is a Mennonite in Ontario. And so wild church, or forest church, is not just worshiping in a forest, doing a regular worship in a forest, but it’s doing it in a way that engages our surroundings. And so when I lead a forest church service, I don’t preach, I instead send people out into the environment and have them seek what the Spirit would say to them as they do that. I think an important part of this is lament. I think that’s part of how we tell the truth at a time when so much damage is being done and we’re losing so many good things. And so there’s a strong biblical tradition of lament and bringing that into our worship. I led a service when the Biden administration delisted—was it 29 species? Or 23 species, I think, from the endangered species list, because they presumed that they were extinct. Well, we named every one of those in worship and had a “Lord, have mercy” kind of understanding of that. It helps us to acknowledge the truth in a way that doesn’t break us, I think. I think some people, and there’s this kind of optimism in American society that says we shouldn’t acknowledge, you know—just keep thinking about good stuff. Don’t dwell on bad stuff. But I think worship and ritual—and partly for me, ritual, if there can be an action associated with it, I have a ritual that I’ve developed from connecting with a number of people in this work, where we name endangered species of the area, but then I also invite them to write a lament, and then we place it into the ground. And in a sense, plant it, and I invite the soil community to do its work of bringing sprouts of joy from these laments.
Debra Rienstra
Yeah, I really like the idea of ritual and worship ritual in particular, as a way to deal with grief and name it, but not let it break us. Yeah, Doug, I really appreciate talking with you today. How might listeners best engage with the resources that the Anabaptist Climate Collaborative has developed?
Doug Kaufman
Yeah, so most of that would come through going to our website, anabaptistclimate.org. Among our resources is a three session curriculum on climate change, where some of the things that we’ve been talking about are part of that. We have a session on climate justice and racial—actually, it’s actually more focused on defecatory justice, which is another whole topic, which tells you this is a Mennonite scholar who works on poop, basically. She says defecatory justice. But again, yeah, this brings me back to the earthiness of Mennonite theology.
Debra Rienstra
I’ll say.
Doug Kaufman
And that’s also where we have a collection. We have a book as well, but on the website, we have a collection of about 45 to 50 stories of Mennonites around the globe who are engaged in some kind of climate action. We also have a climate directory of Mennonite organizations. As far as the kinds of training that we do for pastors and congregations, that’s something that we haven’t done as much with having online resources for that. And so getting on our mailing list, finding out when we’re coming to a community. We do something in North Carolina every year with Creation Justice Ministries, and then we add BTS center and do something in Maine about every other year, it’s starting to look like. And I’m doing something in Elkhart County, Indiana this fall. So those are some of the ways that someone could get engaged with what we do. We haven’t done as much online, like we don’t have a podcast, we don’t have webinars very often. But I’m exploring whether we should do more webinars.
Debra Rienstra
Well, you’ve done a lot in the years that you’ve been working on this. So, okay, final question, bonus round. Favorite recipe from a Mennonite cookbook.
Doug Kaufman
Vietnamese stir fried rice from More-with-Less.
Debra Rienstra
Okay, a classic.
Doug Kaufman
Yeah, now this will be a bonus, bonus. I mean, the other one that comes up is not from the canon, because there also are just Mennonite cookbooks, and there’s a strawberry shortcake recipe in the—I think it’s called the Mennonite Country Style Recipe Book. And I happen to know that the author. And it’s just for me, sweet corn and strawberries, like if you want to describe Doug, he is someone who has plenty of sweet corn and strawberries in his body at certain times of the year. That is just part of my life, of my existence.
Debra Rienstra
Oh, Doug, it’s been so fun to talk to you. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and thoughts today. I really appreciate it.
Doug Kaufman
Yeah, great to talk to you.
Debra Rienstra
Thanks for joining us for show notes and full transcripts. Please visit debrarienstra.com and click on the Refugia Podcast tab. This season of the Refugia Podcast is produced with generous funding from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. Colin Hoogerwerf is our awesome audio producer. Thanks to Ron Rienstra for content consultation as well as technical and travel support. Till next time, be well.
