Loving a forest can teach people of faith how to love congregations

Forests -- not unlike religious congregations -- are profoundly complicated beings. And both often need help to remain healthy.

Which is why I want to introduce you to a lovely and engaging new book, How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World, by Ethan Tapper. (The book's publication date is next Tuesday, but it can be ordered now.)

The author did not write this to help people in congregations think about how to keep their faith communities healthy. That idea might have been pretty far from his mind, I'm guessing.

But so much of what he writes -- quite elegantly, I might add -- corresponds to the questions of the health of congregations, so I'm going to draw from the insights of this Vermont forester and suggest how and where they might apply to faith communities.

Of course, you may read this book as simply a well-written look at one man's commitment to stopping the degradation of a forest that he now owns and to return it to health in a balanced, diverse way -- an individual commitment that may have broad and positive ecological applications. And that may inspire you to do what you can to promote ecological sense and justice. That would be a wonderful use of this book.

But because the interests of this blog tend toward matters of faith, I will draw from it some lessons that congregational leaders might think about applying to rescue declining faith communities.

After finally getting his college degree, Tapper, who earlier in life had lost sight in one eye in an accident, began work as a forester in Vermont. Part of his job was "helping private land-owners understand how to care for their forests."

He eventually bought some land in northwest Vermont and "began to truly understand how forest management could be restorative and regenerative, how it could enrich forests, how it could help forests rediscover their true capacity for life. I began to truly understand how the cutting of a tree could be an expression of compassion and humility, an act of healing, an act of love."

And so it can be with congregational management. Sometimes in religious communities what goes wrong and leads toward their diminishment are things that have been allowed to grow without pruning, to invade areas of ministry the way non-native plants invade a forest to its detriment. The leaders of houses of worship must find ways to grow effective worship services, healthy programs and various approaches to ministry by knowing what to change and when, what to fertilize and what to let die.

And if that's true for programming and worship approaches, it's also true of leadership. There is a time for long-time leaders to hand things over to younger members, even if the elders are worried that the "kids" are immature and won't know what they're doing. Change isn't always life-giving, for sure, but lack of change almost never is.

Here's one way Tapper puts that idea as it relates to forest management: "(F)orests are socioecological systems (and). . .our lives are forever stitched into the green flesh of the biosphere, that the separation of the human world from the wild world is an illusion. We cannot care for ecosystems without recognizing that we will always rely on them and we will always tax them, that human life will always be precious and worth nourishing and will always come at a cost."

What's important, he writes (and here what he says applies directly to both forests and congregations), is "a vision of relationship and responsibility, freedom and power, resilience and humility, legacy, beauty and change. . .In a world that is both human and wild, both wounded and vibrant, both suppressed and emergent, this is a vision both for how we manage forests and take care of ecosystems and how we manage ourselves, how we take care of each other."

Tapper draws an interesting distinction between forests and orchards that he began to notice once he "learned to reimagine the forest as something messy and imperfect, complex and undefinable, dynamic and expansive over space and time." Congregations that become well-ordered, no-surprise orchards can survive for a time, but in the end they will lack the dynamism and the resources to grow and thrive like a healthy forest because they fear the very changes that will save them.

When Tapper purchased his Vermont forest, what he found was "a monoculture of diseased beech saplings." It took courage and foresight for him to begin pruning (and, in some cases, eliminating) things and replanting or at least opening up space for nature to take its course. If that reminds you of some religious congregations, then the leadership of them needs to learn the hard lessons for life-giving pruning and restoration.

There is much more to this sweet and disturbing new book, but if congregations are to learn anything from its lessons that were meant for forests, one of those lessons is to make changes with humility, recognizing that time may prove those decisions to have been mistaken. But the bigger mistake will have been not to try.

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WHY ARE THERE SO MANY EXORCISM FILMS NOW?

Filmmakers are producing more and more films about exorcism, and Joseph Holmes, the author of this Religion Unplugged piece about this trend, thinks it has to do with the shifting place of religion in American culture. As he writes, "People who can speak the language of both faith and film will be in high demand as the people most capable of speaking to one of the only audiences will have a unified meta narrative. And because that unified meta-narrative is specifically religious, the stories being told will likely be more overtly religious as well." The internet and social media have fractured the culture in countless ways, and finding an audience for any sort of entertainment, sport or idea is increasingly difficult. Maybe the culture needs an exorcism, too.