Group 3: Vision

Vision of Success

• If we could rapidly accelerate the youth movement on spirituality and sustainability, what would it look like? What might be happening that is not happening now?

  • What excites and inspires action is a vision that is so compelling that many individuals and groups will jump at the chance of working towards it?

  • Who will have substantial intellectual and passionate talent at the gathering to paint an initial version of this picture?

  • Focus on collaboration with other groups for speed and scale.

  • Having a compelling vision is one of the best ways to overcome obstacles - think “Field of Dreams.”

Facilitator:  Jim MacClellan   

Rapporteur: Tim Van Meter

Summary

Questions from the group: 

• What would the bigger picture look like? 

  • Joe offered a good response: "I can't offer you the bigger picture, but I can offer you a few paintbrush strokes of my own."

  • As the group proceeded, each person tried to paint the larger picture from that. 

• What does it mean to be a person who brings a pearl of different wisdom through listening?

  • The need for listening as a source for relationship 

Points & suggestions made: 

• Richard mentioned the International Decade for Earth Restoration begins through the UN in a very short time.  

• The work of this group could be strongly focused on centering ourselves more carefully around a much larger cosmovision, reclaiming the loss of cosmology by modern Western Christianity’s spiritual traditions. Tim's work is in agriculture, and he sees the desperate nature of our soils because of the reductionist nature of what agriculture is. Multiple people noted this. 

• The need to overcome western epistemologies and the need for cosmovision from our people like Mendahi Bastida and Geraldine and others who do their work. It is a powerful way to go forward.

• To support someone like Xiye Bastida who is doing really important work on national and international levels, to make sure she has the funding to do that work from a place of health, including other young people who do similarly. 

• The need to critique and revise SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) from a larger cosmovision, from a larger than the western vision of the world and larger cosmology. 

• Jim challenged the group to live into eldership, to live in what it means to be an elder, meaning that eldership means facing your own death, whether it's tomorrow or in 40 years. 

• The worst thing the western church ever did was invite young people to what they're already doing rather than come alongside young people in the midst of their own vision and vocation for a critically new world (aside from Jim, from teaching youth ministry in his own work). 

• Sharon Joy spoke out about the connection and visions for new-fold cosmovision. 

• Need for engagement in music, in art, in reenvisioning festivals, in reenvisioning food and our connection to food, in revisioning our connection with how we grow our food. 

  • One example is the Worm Farm Collective, a collection of artists who have revisioned what a two-week agricultural festival might look like, bringing people in from a wide variety of perspectives 

• A database would help collect these things (airtable, etc). 

Suggested organizations to network with: 

• Catholic Climate movement (multi-generational, has a strong presence in the global south as well) 

• Movement around the Earth Bill 

• Movement around Rights of Nature

• Our Children's Trust 

• Sunrise 

• Zero Hour