Father Pete Nunally is the founder of Water and Wilderness Church, a Washington DC-based outdoor church and watershed community. You can read more about the model of Water and Wilderness Church here. Father Pete is a passionate and well-spoken advocate on his social media pages and other forums, as in this interview with Creation Justice Ministries.
Many thanks to Father Pete and the lovely group of people who welcomed Ron and me to Fletcher’s Cove to worship with them last May.
Pete Nunnally
And so this expression and experience of worship begins to expand, and I think people are really looking for that. They want the church to tell them and to show them that God is everywhere, and that particularly in the natural world, the theological thumbprint of God is on all of this, and there’s not a distinction or separation, but actually there’s a union.
Debra Rienstra
Welcome to the Refugia Podcast. I’m your host, Professor Debra Rienstra. Refugia are habitats 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 Father Pete Nunnally, founder of Water and Wilderness Church. Father Pete is an Episcopal priest with a tender heart and a sense of adventure. The Water and Wilderness community meets outdoors for worship in several locations around the Washington DC area, adapting traditional worship forums in ways that enrich our encounter with God by reconnecting us with the rivers and trees and sky around us. Water and Wilderness is also a dispersed community, connecting anyone anywhere through online book studies, in-person retreats, and more. I talked with Father Pete outdoors, of course, at Fletcher’s Cove on the Potomac River, just before joining their outdoor worship service. This interview includes a bonus trivia component. For extra points, see if you can identify the birds that join our conversation in the second half of the episode. Let’s get to it.
Debra Rienstra
Father Pete, thanks so much for being with me today.
Pete Nunnally
I’m so glad to be here.
Debra Rienstra
It’s great to talk to you. So let’s start with what Water and Wilderness Church is right now. You’re not a traditional congregation with a building. What are you, exactly?
Pete Nunnally
We are a church. We’re an outdoor worshiping community geographically located in DC, but we are also a watershed community of the heart and worked in a lot of churches, and everything that that church did, wherever I was, was really only for the people at that church. But what’s different about Water and Wilderness Church is the concept of watershed community. So the local community here in DC is like a wellspring, and out of that flow tributaries that go all over the country, and we create this watershed. And I use that word to mean both the watershed of a new idea or a new understanding of something, but also, like our physical watersheds are so important to us. And so anybody, anywhere—what I often say is Water and Wilderness Church, what we do is for anybody, anywhere, all the time. So if you are in Indiana, Arizona, California, these are states where we have people that are actively engaged in some of our online formation and things like that. That everything we do is for everyone, and most importantly, for the benefit of the earth.
Debra Rienstra
I wanted to ask about whether watershed was both literal and metaphorical for you, and it definitely is. You’ve also described Water and Wilderness Church as a threshold space. So what does that mean to you?
Pete Nunnally
I am influenced by so many of my friends that don’t go to church anymore, and so many folks that label themselves spiritual but not religious. They just aren’t going to go into a traditional church building. And I want to take what’s beautiful and valuable about our Christian tradition, and I’m Episcopalian, so, you know, the Episcopal version of the mainline expression, and translate that and then bring it out to where people are. My sister, during Covid, said they take walks on Sunday morning with her family in different parks. And she said, “I get more out of that than I do going to church. I don’t think we’re going to go back to church.” And I thought, man, I get that. And when I tell that to priests and other church people, they nod their head and they say, like, yeah. Some of them are like, “I wish I could take a walk on Sunday morning.” Like, well, how can we receive this reality that people are living into, and they really are searching and seeking deep spiritual connection, but they’re forced to take an a la carte approach. Like I walk in the woods and I get peace there, or I read a book by Thich Nhat Hanh, and I get a little bit of peace. I do you know, like a little bit of divinity here, a little bit of divinity there. Nothing that grounds all of that together. So to me, to take what’s ancient, holy and divine about our Christian tradition and what we understand about God, and then to bring it out of the doors of the church, but with integrity, into the wild places, engraft our worship onto the worship of God that is creation. And I think that’s what I mean when I say a threshold space. Like this is the world. This is the human world, this is the natural world. And then we sometimes just hide all of our really juicy, beautiful stuff about the Christian life as we’ve understood it for 2000 years, and we kind of lock that up into the church. And so we’re trying to bring that out of the church and in a way that has integrity, but is in new spaces and lowering barriers for entry for people.
Debra Rienstra
Yeah, so you’re responding to this kind of pervasive alienation between people and the natural world. One of the things I read on your website, and one of the things that you’ve said frequently, is, “What’s good for the earth is good for the soul.” Yeah. Say a little more about how that phrase is meaningful for you.
Pete Nunnally
I think we forget that we are part of the community of creation. This is a phrase I got from you.
Debra Rienstra
Well, I got it from Randy Woodley.
Pete Nunnally
Randy, what a great writer and theologian. And so for a long time, we’ve forgotten that. Did you know our Christian tradition is an indigenous tradition, really? And we’ve scrubbed all of that away. You know the concept of Ubuntu, the African concept of “I am because you are,” and I cannot be a person if you’re not a person. So like the sacred in me recognizes the sacred in you. Like we understand that African sort of understanding that Desmond Tutu and others talk about, but what if we looked at creation the same way? That we can’t be fully human unless the wild world that God created is free to be itself also. And we do. We’ve isolated ourselves from this world, like nobody knows—we’re eating foods that are out of season all year round, and kids grow up and they think that the food comes from the grocery store. And yet, part of what draws us out into the world—see, part of why I like worshiping here is there’s just people around. And you know, like they wanted to come and just be by the river today.
Debra Rienstra
Explain where we are today.
Pete Nunnally
We are at a place called Fletcher’s Cove and Boathouse. It is a park along the Potomac River in DC proper. And once you get in, kind of the whole place opens up. There’s forest that goes right up into the river. And actually, the Potomac River is tidal in this area, believe it or not, we still have tides all the way up here, and it’s a beautiful place. All kinds of people come to the edge of the river to enjoy themselves. It’s incredibly diverse: people of different nationalities, and celebrating birthdays and graduations and beautiful days. And I like to worship here because you have the combination of people, but also, it really is forest along the river, and so the trees are down and slowly giving themselves back to the earth, and you’re interrupted sometimes by, in our worship, by what’s going on in the natural world. And of course, that’s not an interruption, it’s just what God brings us next. So we have migratory birds and blue herons, and the shad run is just about over, but shad and herring come up the river to spawn, and that brings fishermen out along the river, including myself. And so you get to experience a fuller version of what happens in the world when you’re in a wild place, and when you worship in that same space over and over again, you get to know it through the seasons, and it gets to know you. So we become known to the trees and the river when we continue to come back over and over.
Debra Rienstra
Yeah. So you do outdoor worship, but you have other things going on too. So describe some of the other things that you do.
Pete Nunnally
Well, we do Zoom book studies. Our very first one was Refugia Faith.
Debra Rienstra
Oh, I’ve heard that’s good.
Pete Nunnally
It’s really well written, insightful, highly recommend to everyone. And that’s exciting, because we have 20 to 30 people from all over the country who join and it really is a community of the heart, like, “Oh, I believe that I see God in nature.” And a lot of these folks come from a Christian background, but their traditional worship, it’s not doing it for them anymore. And they want to be validated, because you feel so alone when you’re like, “I love Jesus. I grew up with church, but I don’t think it’s responding to the times that we’re in,” and when the world is on fire and our planet needs us so much, so often the church is silent or has trouble finding out what to do. So to me, the natural world is going to show us what to do, and the more we come out here together and graft our worship onto—take the wisdom that we have and add it to the wisdom of nature and the ecology of God, then we’re going to know what to do and cultivate a love of something, then you can really do something. So just to add one more thing on top of that, we do in-person retreats. And those are really, really fun. Next week, we’re going to the Chincoteague Bay Field Stations, an educational marine lab, and they take us into the field, and they teach us about the marine environment. So we’re learning about how barrier islands are formed, or, you know, dropping a net down and bringing up sea urchins and sea sponges. And we really get to experience and see what’s underneath the surface of the water. And then we apply that to our spiritual life and see, not only is God amazing and all these things like—there’s just the granularity of what God has has brought into this world, but then we can see where our faith can grow and our understanding of God can grow by encountering things we haven’t seen before.
Debra Rienstra
Yeah. So I often ask people about their spark point, so the moment when you began to realize the urgency of the climate crisis. What was that point for you?
Pete Nunnally
I’m a fisherman, and fishing populations have been going down. I read a really wonderful book called Beautiful Swimmers by Warren Wilson; it won the Pulitzer Prize in the 70s about the Chesapeake Bay and the waterman. Even then he was talking about how the watermen were saying that the bay is sick. And I grew up here in the Delmarva area, seeing the sign “Save the Bay” and things like that, but it wasn’t personal to me until I started spending more time there and and you can see like the effects of hardened barriers versus living shorelines at the end of the people’s property. And that the fish population is leaving, like they’re moving. And some of the charter captains that I know talk about like there are no stripers in the river, in the bay anymore. I mean, there are some, but the water is too warm, so they go north and they don’t come back south. And then when I started doing Water and Wilderness Church, that was really an important entry point for me as well.
Debra Rienstra
How did you get other people involved in water and wilderness church? When was the moment where you said we need to worship outside and I need to gather people? How did that all work?
Pete Nunnally
Well, it started because we were at the end of Covid. We were kind of inside, kind of not. And I’m an old camp counselor, and I said, “I think…I think we can do this outside. And I’m pretty sure it all used to be outside.” And so many stories of Jesus: he’s talking to people at the edge of the Sea of Galilee. He’s talking to them, they’re hiking up a mountain. Like these are things that we can actually do. And so these are rituals. And we walked and talked during Water and Wilderness Church. And so I just started it and said, “Hey, does anybody want to do this?” And some people came out of necessity, because we didn’t really have a lot of church stuff going on.
Debra Rienstra
Yeah, this is at your parish?
Pete Nunnally
My church, yeah, St. Mary’s in Arlington. And every Sunday we did it. We did twice a month. I thought, this is the Sunday no one’s going to come. And people just kept coming. 23 people came in a snowstorm. Well, not a snow storm, but it was snowing. And the weather was bad, and people would bring hot cider. And when the weather was hot, they’d bring cold lemonade. And, you know, kids started bringing their instruments. So then we had this little homegrown, intergenerational band that started leading the music, and all I did was just keep showing up and saying, “I think this is good.” And then, you know, a beaver comes in the middle of our homily one day, and now all the attention is on this beaver that, Ron, is the size of you. It’s a humongous beaver, and it slaps his tail like you see in the cartoons. And so this expression and experience of worship begins to expand. And I think people are really looking for that. They want the church to tell them and to show them that God is everywhere, and that particularly in the natural world, the theological thumbprint of God is on all of this. And there’s not a distinction or separation, but actually there’s a union. I grew up on four acres and a semi rural area right across from the Potomac, further up river. So I grew up playing in the creeks and the rivers, and spent a long time away from that, and during Covid, kind of came back to it. And as a priest, everything looked different after my seminary training. And I’m like, “Wow, this whole thing is magic. This whole thing is a miracle.” I mean, the river, it’s the same river, and it’s never the same river. We’re here, and y’all can see this, but we just had major flooding in DC, and hundreds and hundreds of massive logs have washed up so far up, no one has seen it this far up and it’s closed the road down here. And there’s this immense redistribution of what used to be. And I think there’s a spiritual biomimicry that we’re trying to get at when we worship out here as well.
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 you served as a rector for a long time, and now you’re serving as the wilderness priest. So what has that dialectic been for you between traditional congregational life and what you’re doing now? And maybe there’s people in your community who are still doing normal church, so to speak, and also part of this. So talk about that dialectic a little bit.
Pete Nunnally
Yeah, when we began Water and Wilderness Church, I talked a lot about it being a good compliment, and that is—for anybody trying to do something new, it’s a great way to position your new idea relative to the traditional authorities. And it is. People that are formed traditionally can see and understand what we’re trying to do out here. And people say that they’re like, I see the Episcopal, the mainline underpinnings of what’s going on. On the other side, for people who are spiritual but not religious—and just so many good reasons to be that—I really want to affirm the journey that the church needs to take in order to repent and to worship God with integrity and consistency. But the deeper roots that we have as an ancient tradition, and as we were saying earlier, as originally, the followers of Jesus were following an indigenous tradition, and the people of Israel as well. But what the experience of worship is, we do Eucharist, but I tell the story of salvation in a way that’s, I think, right size for people and personalized for people. The language in our Book of Common Prayer as Episcopalians is exquisite in some places. Also still has some language that can be interpreted as penal substitutionary atonement. And we wonder why people have that view, and it’s kind of baked in in some of our stuff. So how can we focus on the story of Jesus to somebody who has never heard of Jesus, that’s what I’m thinking. You’re a spiritual person, or you love nature, and somebody invites you and says, “Hey, there’s this church. I know you’ve been looking for more community, so you can’t be spiritual in isolation. And maybe you could come here. It’s kind of a church, but it’s more relatable.” But we’re not gonna get rid of Jesus. You know? So what does Jesus mean to somebody? Why do we need the Eucharist, for example?
Debra Rienstra
So talk about ritual, especially because one of the things I’ve been thinking about is the importance of ritual, and the way that people of faith are stewards of ritual. We have the sacraments, our sort of central rituals, but we also have other rituals, and you’re adapting an Episcopalian flavored Eucharist in particular, maybe baptism too. Is it different when you do those outdoors? What do you do that’s the same? What do you do that’s a little different? How does it feel different when you’re doing those rituals outdoors?
Pete Nunnally
When I was in my liturgy class, our professor—I fought with him a lot. Praying shapes believing was like the thing. And just to talk about the Episcopal thing, this is a mainline, this is for everybody, like the church needs to break down the barriers of denominations and all the rest. So this is really for everybody, but I’m an Episcopal priest. But I think the rituals become alive to me when they’re done out here, and they are changed and translated sometimes. So when I tell the story of salvation, like typically we hold the bread and wine up at the end and say, “These are the gifts of God.” And when I started doing it outside, I said, “Well, hell. Like all of this is a gift from God.” And when you’re inside, it’s still all of this, but it’s different when you say, “Look at the river, look at the sky.” This is all—and they say, “look at one another,” like you are all gifts of God. But I never would have come to that point without doing it outside. And then we say, “Take them and remember that Christ died for you and feed on him in your hearts by faith.” And I’ve never really liked that, because there’s this sort of like, “Remember that Christ died, you know, and you should feel a little bit bad about it.” Christ died for you—and I thought, that’s not what the Eucharist is really about. The Eucharist is about Christ living for us. And so I said, “Take this and remember that Christ lives for you, that love and justice and mercy and forgiveness, they live for you, with you and in you. And that is what these things are.” That’s what we’re about.
Debra Rienstra
So the way I’ve learned about the Eucharist is it’s remembrance, communion, and hope. So it is remembrance of sacrifice, but it’s also right now, communion with Christ, communion with each other, and then this kind of eschatological hope. But we do often in various traditions tend to get stuck in the remembrance part, and we miss the communion and the hope part. The hope for the feast to come, right? The heavenly feast to come, the ultimate telos. So even just doing it outdoors triggers that a little bit.
Pete Nunnally
Yeah, and this river is at least a million years old. And so when you’re in an ancient place, in a regenerative place, all these logs are eventually going to become soil somewhere and feed on itself and to sustain the next thing—that’s the communion of saints that we are part of. It’s not just the people we read about in the Bible. It’s us too, no different than the disciples, the women that supported Jesus’s ministry.
Debra Rienstra
Have you ever seen the Cathedral of the Angels in Los Angeles? It has these beautiful murals on both sides of the nave, and it’s depictions of famous saints, but then mixed in are regular Angelenos. The artists—just so that sense that we’re all a part of this community is amazing.
Pete Nunnally
One more thing on ritual is that we we’ve had rituals pop up here—
Debra Rienstra
—That was my next question!
Pete Nunnally
—that we do now. Somebody, about a year in, somebody came and said, “Hey, Father Pete, there’s always different groups of people here. It’s like some come pretty regularly, and we have some new people. And how about every time, every beginning, we introduce ourselves and say one thing we’re grateful for.” And I was like, “Lucinda, that’s a great idea.”
Debra Rienstra
So simple.
Pete Nunnally
It’s so simple, but can you imagine going to your priest or pastor at home and being like, “I have an idea for how we should start the service now”? Like, it’s impossible to do. But so we do that every single time, and we circle up so the shape of us changes. When we gather, we’re individuals, kind of a mob, and then we circle up so you see somebody says at traditional church—which, by the way, I love traditional church. But they say, “I go to church, I sit in a pew and I see the back of people’s heads,” but at Water and Wilderness Church, we’re circled up. I see your face. But yeah, so that’s a tradition or a ritual here of offering ourselves up to God by speaking our name and beginning with gratitude.
Debra Rienstra
Yeah. Do you see a role for the church in—I don’t want to say inventing, because that can make people nervous—but in, let’s call it stewarding ritual, not just the sacraments, but other kinds of ritual that people really need in a moment of crisis, maybe rituals of lament, thanksgiving, as you suggest, other sorts of threshold type rituals that we really need as we deal with this moment of crisis?
Pete Nunnally
Do I see the church being able to do that?
Debra Rienstra
Yeah. Is what you’re doing a kind of experiment in thinking about what what my husband Ron Rienstra would call liturgical shenanigans?
Pete Nunnally
Yeah, I think so. And I think that—again, like I’m from a highly liturgical tradition. We’re just not able to change that much, you know? We’ll have a season of creation, which we did last year, my traditional church, you know, I love those resources. They’re great, but everything else is exactly the same, and so we save different words. But what I like to think that we’re inviting people into is an alternative way of being in the world based on Jesus’s radical love. And one way to do that is to do this outside and let our worship be informed by something that’s been here a lot longer than we have.
Debra Rienstra
Yeah, yeah. So I wonder if there’s something about these sort of experimental spaces that effectively can jar traditional churches, which I also love, but jar us into being a little more inventive, a little more attentive to the moment, by doing something so different, you know, we can learn from your example in more traditional churches and congregations and say, “You know, it’s not so scary to try stuff.” We tried stuff during the pandemic too. And honestly, I really miss being outside and hearing the birds worship with us, essentially. You know, I feel like worship is not complete without birdies! But we, I think churches so often just say, “Well, let’s just do things how we always do them,” because it’s already hard, but to have experimental spaces like yours, where you’re just trying stuff and it’s fine and you’re actually discovering riches and richness that you wouldn’t have discovered otherwise. Okay, but true confession time. What do you miss about traditional worship in a sanctuary, high Episcopal sort of traditional worship, if anything?
Pete Nunnally
What we’re still working on is how to build lament in every time. And I like the confession of sin and the absolution. It’s important to me, and it’s important for everybody. Again, you know, our spiritual-but-not-religious brothers and sisters, I’m with you. I totally get it. I’m first in line to criticize the church. But if our spirituality is just what feels good to us, then we’re never brought into that place of pain, and in reality, the reality of ourselves in our lives, and then the reality of God’s forgiveness and sustenance and redemption. And confession is a big piece of that, particularly in the natural world, we have done so much and continue to do things to harm your planet.
Debra Rienstra
I guess I would not have guessed that your first thing would be confession. But it suggests that there are these theological wisdoms that come from practice and reflection over centuries of the church, and you’re in a place now where you’re thinking through where our emphasis needs to go, and maybe lean away from, so maybe leaning away from our sort of focus on buildings and programs. And leaning into some of these deeper things. There’s certainly advantages to buildings and programs, right? But what sort of theological ideas, or even—I don’t know practice is the right word—but what sort of theological ideas or practices do you feel we need to really lean into right now, at this moment?
Pete Nunnally
Obviously, I think we need to go outside, like do it outside.
Debra Rienstra
Maybe lean into that kinship with all creation. That’s part of the tradition, but…
Pete Nunnally
We’re not on top of it. We’re supposed to be within it. And the body of Christ is not just humans, it is the natural world as well. I look out, the river is—we’re water people, and I did a river baptism last week.
Debra Rienstra
Did you?
Pete Nunnally
Yeah, down in Petersburg, Virginia, and it was amazing—to have everybody on the bank, and we walked out into the river and took this little baby, Rixie, and dunked her in three times. And it’s hard not to feel there’s the intimacy of God in that moment, because it is a flowing river that’s connected then, to the James River, which goes to the bay, which goes to the ocean. There again, with the communion of saints and this interconnectedness, I think we just run away from God in so many different ways. And one way is that we hide away from this natural world.
Debra Rienstra
Yeah, and people are so hungry for embodiment. So to me, connecting embodied ritual with the world is a deeply incarnational response, right? If we really believe, as you say, that Christ is incarnate, then we can’t forget that we are bodies on a planet. So that, to me, is where you know something like a river baptism just—sorry about this, but overflows with the resonance of our embodiment and with incarnational theology. So two final questions: where is Water and Wilderness Church headed? Your goal is not growth. You don’t have a building to deal with or programs to continue. So what is the goal for you? Where are you envisioning the future for Water and Wilderness Church?
Pete Nunnally
I do want to grow, but one of the goals is to show—when I was younger, and people would say like, “Oh, you know, understand your life, and then like, you’ll find what you really want to do.” And Buechner talks about your vocation is where the “world’s deep hunger and your deep gladness meet.” And it was about a year into doing this before I realized, like, oh, my whole life makes sense. So I grew up outside. Fished a lot. I’ve loved church. I went to church camp, and was always confused by the gap between this embodied reality of God in community at camp and then we go to church, very sacred space, but very, very different and not as embodied to me, and… what was the question?
Debra Rienstra
The question is, what do you envision the future of Water and Wilderness Church to be?
Pete Nunnally
I have always kind of felt like I’m on the outside of things, but that situates me very well to do something like this. And I think the future is that we continue to offer this, and this is a church community, so we’re going to build a community of people, and our building will draw, you know, 20 or 30 people here today to worship in this way, and draw people in who’ve been waiting for something like this. Henry Ford said, if he’d asked people, they would have said they wanted a faster horse. Nobody knew they wanted a car until they got that opportunity to have one. And so that’s a little bit of what this: “Hey, you can do it like this,” and it’s not just all woo, woo, making up stuff. It’s true woo. It’s true, but it has these ancient roots. We’re not getting rid of the central reason why we’re here. We’re just opening it up and letting God speak to us through nature. And I see tributaries all over the place. I see this as a movement. So we hopefully will keep a monthly service in Delaware. I want to have a monthly service in Maryland, in DC, obviously, weekly here in Virginia, and so that for people on our border from North Carolina, they’re like, “I want to be on a board so that I can help this come to us in North Carolina.” Yeah, it’s particularly people with neurodivergent kids. Like worshiping in nature is an incredible way for them to encounter God. It’s so hard to sit still and pay attention to a traditional service. So I want to see wherever you go, you know, in six or seven months…wherever you go in the country…
Debra Rienstra
Hmm, six or seven months, huh?
Pete Nunnally
No, but eventually that there will be churches like this all over. And there are some. I think what’s different about us versus some of the other expressions, is that we are faithful and have integrity to our Christian tradition, but it’s really an act of recovery. We’re not making anything up. We’re just remembering what our spiritual forebears used to know about the wisdom of creation as it relates to God’s ecology and our own personal lives. So I want to see churches like this in every state, in different places. We do it in DC, and people are always like, “Oh my gosh, you should do it in this very remote, beautiful place. “And I’ll be like, “Well, I’d love to do that…” The highly populated areas, cities like DC and New York and Boston…the need is so great for people to be pulled off of the hamster wheel, because everybody wants to climb a ladder, you’re going to realize it’s leaning against the wrong wall. You get to the top, and you’re like, “This isn’t what I wanted.” All that work and effort. So my vision of the future is that there are multiple Water and Wilderness Churches. That’s not a new concept. Evangelical churches and multisite churches all over the place, and it wouldn’t be like that at all.
Debra Rienstra
Yeah, you’re just prototyping, and people can find an expression.
Pete Nunnally
Somebody has to show other people that you can do it this way, and you can get it funded and make it self-sustaining. The watershed community is part of how we keep that self-sustaining, because you can encounter and you have touch points with our Zoom book studies, or with the videos that I do, or the blog or other resources. It’s this gathering movement, this rising of the tide of spirituality that really is, like it’s going to happen, because people—I talk to so many people and they’re like, “Yeah, I don’t go to church anymore, but I would go to that church.”
Debra Rienstra
That’s something.
Pete Nunnally
They’re like, “I would do that. I can’t do this because it reminds me of past harm or hypocrisy or whatever, but I would do something like that.”
Debra Rienstra
It answers a deep, deep need that people don’t always have the words for. But, as you say, when they see the possibility, something in them says, “Yes, that’s what I’m looking for.”
Pete Nunnally
Yeah, Debra, and like me too. I still don’t have the right words to express what happens to me when we do this. All I know is that I have to do this, and it’s not easy. It’d be a lot easier to take a nice-paying, traditional church job with a staff, and you know, this regular stuff, but it’s not what God wants me to do.
Debra Rienstra
Well, thank you so much for talking to me today. I have one final question: favorite fish, favorite fishing spot?
Pete Nunnally
My favorite fish would be, I mean, I sure love fishing for catfish, but that’s a lot of hanging around. I would say redfish, and I like to fish down in the Northern Neck, which is where the Potomac and the Rappahannock and the York rivers go into the Chesapeake Bay. So the bottom end of those rivers are all salt water and they’re just exquisite. So it’s just so beautiful. And I love chasing down those redfish. Tastes delicious.
Debra Rienstra
Well, happy fishing. And thank you again so much for talking to me today.
Pete Nunnally
Thank you. Thanks, Debra.
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.
