• New Pamphlets
• Koinonia Farm
• Wipf and Stock
• EP Board Meeting
• Meet the EP
• New Endorsers
• Signs of the Times
• Anarchism and Christianity Gathering

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Ekklesia Project Website   

 

John 6:35

Koinonia Farm to Celebrate 70th Anniversary!

 

2012 is a landmark year for our friends at Koinonia. Not only will they celebrate 70 years of mission and service, but 2012 also marks 100 years since the birth of founders Clarence and Florence Jordan. Accordingly,

they plan a full month of celebration, beginning September 28-29 with the Clarence Jordan Symposium for which President Jimmy & Mrs. Rosalynn Carter are serving as Honorary Chairs. Use the link above to register, or to read about the impressive list of speakers and workshop leaders who will be participating.

 

You can read about other special anniversary events, including the Koinonia Family Reunion, here. Our congratulations and best wishes go to director Bren Dubay (a regular participant in our gatherings) and all of our other dear friends at Koinonia!

Meet the EP: Jeff Reed

Jeff Reed is an aquatic research ecologist and part-time theologian living in Alexandria, Minnesota (just up the road from Lake Wobegon).  He finds living on the edge of the Great Plains to be a blessing and considers the prairie to be one of God's greatest gifts.  Jeff is married to Jeanne and they have three children, Sarah, Anthony, and Will.  Raised Presbyterian in Winneconne, Wisconsin, Jeff is currently a member of the Alexandria United Methodist Church and is also a candidate for ordination as a deacon in the UMC.  He studied at the University of Wisconsin and Auburn University and currently oversees Minnesota's long-term ecological monitoring program of the state's aquatic resources.  He is most interested in the effects human activity (mainly agriculture and watershed development) has on lakes.  He recently completed studies at St. John's University in Collegeville, MN where he earned two M.A. degrees in Theology, one in Scripture and the other in Liturgy.  Not surprising his research interests in liturgy center on baptism and the sacramental nature of water.  Jeff has been fortunate to work with Seeing the Word, a program based on illuminations from the St. John's Bible that uses visio divina to draw people into reflection on scripture. 

Growing up in Wisconsin Jeff was greatly influenced by the writings of Aldo Leopold and he still finds Leopold central to any discussions of ecological sustainability and agrarianism.  While a fan of Wendell Berry, he also sees the need for local voices in discussions about sustainability and agrarianism; to that end, the writings of Minnesota writer Paul Gruchow have had a great influence on him.  His theology has been shaped by the writings of Dom Virgil Michel, the monks of St. John's Abbey, liturgical scholars Gordon Lathrop and Don Saliers, and most certainly Stanley Hauerwas.  Jeff discovered the EP when a Google search for a research paper turned up Ragan Sutterfield's God's Grandeur: The Church in the Economy of Creation.  Jeff attended the EP gathering this past July and is now totally hooked.

New EP Endorsers: 

This month, we begin something new: a listing of everyone who has endorsed The Ekklesia Project in the last month. Some background on this decision: at the beginning, 'endorsing' was carefully chosen as a way to affirm publicly one's willingness to be known by the company one keeps--a crowd gathered around the Declaration and Invitation of EP, now summarized as a fourfold claim. Our first pamphlet, A School for Subversive Friendship: The Ekklesia Project,was printed with the names of all endorsers. That original intent of bearing public witness to shared conviction continues now in the list of Endorsers on our website. Yet now only Endorsers can see that list of Endorsers (this to prevent internet 'spiders' from grabbing our contact data for spam), a situation that considerably mutes any notion of public witness. 'Meet the EP,' running here and then archived on our website, is visible to any and all, but not every EP endorser gets profiled in that way. 

So here are the new Endorsers:

Gail Cromack (California)

John Wymer (Nebraska)

Ryan Dowell Baum (Iowa)

Travis Curtice (Arkansas)