Spirit & Soil
Spirit & Soil was formed to create a vibrant, spirit-centered internship that focuses on teaching practical homestead and farming skills in the context of growing closer to the Creator, Jesus Christ. The internship is focused on developing an understanding for our place in creation, with God, while also equipping each intern with the practical skills and experience of raising their own food and stewarding the land in a way that God speaks about in the Book of Genesis. Our program will be a 12-week intensive where students will be exposed to many different farming enterprises, farm business skills, natural healing and cooking skills, and most importantly, biblical understanding and encounter with God so that they can leave equipped practically and spiritually in farming.
Our book “Spirit and Soil’ will be available for purchase in our store. It is written in a way that can be self-guided or gone through with a group; we wanted to lay it out in a way that people could go through it at their own pace, on their own land.
While we are still building out some structures to make an in-person internship possible here on our property we wanted to make the material available in the interim.
The ultimate goal of this printed material is that it would help empower other Jesus-following farmers and farms to launch internships of their own using this material, forming a vibrant community where we can love the land and pursue land stewardship together.
Helping to pass on farm skills to the next generation while learning what it means to be a steward of the land as God intended, in relationship with Him, is at the core of who we are and what we are doing. We hope to not only equip the current and coming generation practically and spiritually, but to inspire them into a deeper revelation of God, in intimacy with Him, as He reveals more of Himself and our purposes here on earth. We hope this document is a blessing and a launching pad for many to come.
Read the Preface
Eden was more than a garden. It was God’s earthly home, the place where the divine and the human communed together. It was the nerve center of the “Make the Rest of Earth-Like Eden” project. Eden was special. It was not the whole world, and this made it superior to the rest of the earth; it was a prototype and a template for what Adam was meant to recreate across the globe. In the beginning, here in Eden, God walked with Man and showed Man the absolute best way for him to live. We see in this ancient garden how God made Man to function. Humanity was created to exist in His presence; that is where we belong. The most normal thing in God’s mind is for His children to be with Him. The most abnormal thing in His mind is for His family to be estranged from Him.
The mandate God set in motion in Eden still exists today. To produce the vegetation and the animals, He spoke to the land, and we continue to see the effects of His voice. The ground is always growing something, whether it be grass, shrubs, trees, weeds, etc. The word God spoke in Eden is moving and churning and boiling in the soil all around us. Many of us don’t view the earth as a living thing, but Genesis tells us otherwise. Even after the fall, the task—making the whole earth like Eden—remained the same. The fall just made the task more difficult.
The Bible ends in Revelation the way it began in Genesis. Revelation is just a new Eden, and now it is global. The mandate given in Genesis is fulfilled at the end of the book. That is where we are headed, which is why it is so important for us to spend time at the beginning.
If we want to rediscover our purpose on planet Earth, if we want to achieve our best, if we want to live the way God intended us to live, we have to go back to Eden and relearn what our forebears knew.
Man was made in the image of God. This sacred image does not come gradually or over time, nor does it come incrementally. We are human, and therefore we are imagers of God. That is who we are. His original intent was to create creatures who were like Him—essentially to be the way He would be, if He were in their shoes. We are His proxy, His representative, His agent to do things. To be human is to be the image of God. Man is not the affliction or bane of the earth, but he is needed to image God throughout the earth. If you are human, you are God’s imager. If you are yielded to the Creator to the measure that creation is yielded, you are living as a human was created to live.
By spending time in Genesis, we are spending time with the One who created us—and we are also spending time with who we really are, as the created ones. This book, and the accompanying internship, will help you reacquaint yourself with the true you, as designed by God for the special role of caretaker of the earth, in the footsteps of Adam and Eve.
The Bible says that creation groans for the revelation of the sons of Man. Creation is dismayed by the fact that Man has forfeited his rightful place as namer of names, as caretaker of creation, and as co-creator with the Divine God. In allowing disconnection, we shirk the responsibility of His mandate to fulfill the Edenic vision, and we hand over that power to forces that are against God.
It is time for all of this to change and for us to go back to the beginning.