An Agricultural Liturgy: Towards the Agrarian Kingdom-Value in the Vineyard

Team Members/Contributors

Jared P. Boyd Central Vineyard Church Contact Me

About this pastoral study project

"An Agricultural Liturgy" will make the argument that the Vineyard movement is positioned to engage the critical and timely issues of sustainable agriculture and food equity. This engagement, I will propose, can enhance and inform any number of aspects of our Kingdom work, including our theological frameworks, efforts toward spiritual formation, the church-planting work that is a hallmark of the Vineyard movement, and our engagement with the communities we are in (urban and rural alike). In this work, I will I will provide some framework for agrarian practice and the values that emerge from that practice as a much-needed working-out of the kingdom theology and theology of new creation that are important to Vineyard praxis. In so doing, I will be in dialogue with texts as varied as the Rule of St Benedict, the writings of contemporary Vineyard scholars who are preoccupied with questions about ecclesiology, the influential writings of Wendell Berry, and theological work on the centrality of place and food to the spiritual life. I will work to negotiate the tensions around the status of the Vineyard as a "movement" and to create space within the movement for the notion that the embeddedness in place that agricultural practice requires. Indeed, reconciliation to the land and a commitment to the liturgical and justice-bringing work of growing food will deepen the efforts that the Vineyard has taken up, and will be spiritually formative to individuals and church communities alike.