Earthkeepers: A Circlewood Podcast on Creation Care and Spirituality · Forrest Inslee

Urban Earthkeepers: Greening the Church and the Neighborhood | Ep. 121

·36 min·2 clips

Rachel ties Genesis, Tower of Babel, Mary Magdalene, and Ruth to a single creation-care reading of Scripture.

1. Earthkeepers: A Circlewood Podcast on Creation Care and Spirituality follows a 12-week Creation Care Learning Group at Rainier Avenue Church in Seattle. 2. Rachel McKelvey, Logan McGlish, and Solis Aguilar-McGlish describe the group; Rachel leads the study, and Logan and Solis participate as church members and neighbors. 3. The episode asks how a church can use Earth Keepers episodes, scripture, and oral Bible storytelling to teach creation care in community. 4. Rachel says the group met Sunday mornings for 45 minutes to an hour before the main service. 5. Between meetings, participants listened to an Earth Keepers podcast episode and then discussed it with scripture. 6. Rachel says she often used oral storytelling for the Bible text, while other sessions used verses read aloud by different members. 7. The group also visited the community garden outside the meeting room during some sessions. 8. Rachel says her work grew out of a master’s in international community development completed in 2011 and years of volunteering on Rainier Avenue Church’s community development team. 9. She connects the church study to earlier efforts, including a book study of Randy Woodley’s work during the pandemic. 10. Logan says Rachel’s oral storytelling made scripture feel different from “words on a page” and helped him connect the study to daily life. 11. Logan describes his own path through ecological engineering, climate change study, and a long personal journey with “sustainability.” 12. He says that in many churches he has never heard a sermon on creation care, even though Genesis and the Garden of Eden are common themes. 13. Logan says Seattle has strong environmental interest, with waitlists for community garden plots and a culture that already sees the environment as important. 14. He says Rainier Avenue Church is also justice-oriented and has held three garden work days, plus landscaping work for a house used by World Relief refugee families. 15. Rachel says the church celebrated its 120th anniversary and chose in the mid-1990s to stay on Rainier Avenue rather than move with shifting neighborhood demographics. 16. Rachel links creation care to the Bible by citing Genesis, the Tower of Babel, Mary Magdalene meeting Jesus in a garden, and Ruth gleaning barley. 17. Logan says the group brought together people with very different backgrounds, including someone raised in an orphanage in China and people with agrarian or urban childhoods. 18. The conversation is reflective and conversational, with Rachel, Logan, and Solis answering long questions and building on each other’s examples. 19. People interested in Seattle churches, community gardens, and faith-based environmental justice will likely connect with this episode. 20. Listeners looking for fast entertainment or no religious framing may skip it.

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