A Rocha is an international family of Christian conservation organizations whose mission is to inspire and equip Christians to know and love their local places through practical, community-focused conservation. This partnership retreat addressed the importance of understanding our role as servants embedded in God’s creation and our responsibilities to help all creation flourish. Our speakers drew particular connections between the arts and the created world: the generosity and gift-based economies in which they thrive; the fragility and vulnerability shared by both.
The necessity of sustained attention become a recurrent theme. One evening featured a handful of attendees sharing stories (or a song) of where they had witnessed an “ecology of hope”: a local and personal place where positive and redemptive change (reconciliation) had resulted from faithful attention. Perhaps surprisingly, the retreat instilled in us all an eagerness to return home – to our places – with eyes recalibrated to see God’s comprehensive redemption all around us.