By Loretta Fulton
Ian Shelburne with the Eden Center for Regenerative Culture will be guest speaker for the Sept. 25 session of the Creation Care Series sponsored by the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest.
The public is invited to hear Shelburne tell about the unique Eden Center that covers 92.5 acres, mostly in Callahan County, 22 miles southeast of Abilene. The Sept. 25 meeting, which is free, begins at 6:30 p.m. in Gerhart Hall, located behind the main church building at 602 Meander St.
Heavenly Rest is featuring the Creation Care Series on Wednesday evenings in September and October. The public is invited to all the sessions free of charge. On Oct. 2, in honor of St. Francis Day, guests will gather at the Abilene Zoo for a Blessing of the Animals.
On Sept. 25, Shelburne will discuss the significance of a regenerative culture and tell about life at the Eden Center.

Following is a Q&A with Shelburne:

Ian Shelburne

BIO
Hometown: Zomba, Malawi
Current positions: Adjunct faculty in the Department of Bible, Missions, and Ministry at Abilene Christian University; member of the leadership and development team of the Eden Center for Regenerative Culture; Texas Master Naturalist
Family: Married to Danetta since May 1985; seven children (4 biological, 3 adopted); four grandchildren
Education: PhD Agricultural Communication & Education; MDiv; MA (Old Testament); BA (Biblical languages)
Previous positions: 16 years as an administrator and educator in Malawi and Uganda; 5 years teaching PALS self-contained special education at Abilene High School

Q What is the Eden Center for Regenerative Culture? 
A Geographically, it is 92.5 acres in the Callahan Divide, about 22 miles southeast of Abilene between Dudley and Oplin, mostly in Callahan County but a sliver of its western edge is in Taylor County. In terms of personnel, we are a group of five families who comprise the Eden Community, now in its 11^th year together. Currently one of these families resides on the Eden Center land. We hope to build two additional homes there in the coming year or two so that two more families can move and expand our capacity for attention to development tasks on location.

Q Do you grow food for the families involved? Do you sell any surplus, like at a farmer’s market?
A We have a 2,600 square-foot  high tunnel hoop house in which we have been growing a couple of crops of various vegetables annually for the past three years or so. Much of the produce has provisioned the Eden Community families, but we have also given away a lot informally to friends and neighbors. We haven’t yet ventured into produce sales, but perhaps when we have more people on site, we might be able to consider broader possibilities.

Q How often do the members meet as a group?
A We have a standing Sunday lunch gathering of community families and other friends that includes an informal devotional time afterward. Most months we have a couple of Saturday work sessions on the land, and all of us participate as our availability allows–planting/harvesting vegetables, maintaining trails, moving brush, etc. Once a month we have a general business meeting for conversation among the adults about matters that need attention. Subgroups of the community tasked with specific responsibilities meet as often as weekly or monthly, as needed.

Q Does the center have a connection with ACU? 
A Neither the Eden Center nor the Eden Community has any formal institutional connection with ACU. However, a number of us do have ties personally and professionally with the school, and the Eden Center has partnered in various ways with ACU in recent years. Four of us have served as adjunct faculty there, and another one of us is semi-retired from a full-time position in the Graduate School of Theology (GST) of many years. Among the informal ways that we have partnered with ACU has been to serve as a laboratory field setting for students in the Department of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. Groups of range management students have visited the Eden Center to observe sustainable and regenerative practices in land management, and to sharpen their plant-ID skills. Water resources students donated a significant amount of their lab time last fall to an experiential-and-service-learning project in which they built about 15 check-dams at the Center to slow down-slope rain run-off and promote infiltration of water into soil.

Q Is the center connected with a larger organization?
A The Eden Center is a ministry of an Abilene faith-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit called Jesus Family Network (JFN), which operates with its own board and is not a part of any larger organization. 

Q Is the focus of the center on developing sustainable living situations or developing spiritual disciplines—or both?
A I would say both, and more. A core value for us is discovering (or re-discovering) the goodness of a healthily integrated life in all its dimensions. A variety of drivers seems to have pushed us toward a culture of disintegration, fragmenting lives into separate, almost unrelated, parts. There are many resources available for a focus on sustainable living, as there are also for spiritual disciplines. Our interest is to foster communities of practice in which spiritual disciplines and sustainable patterns of living are inseparable, along with equally integrated processes for healthy conflict management, community governance, recovery of intergenerational connections, and ecosystem-focused models for land management (to name just a few). Part of this mission we pursue by offering workshops and other educational activities. But to communicate effectively the value of an integrated rather than a siloed approach to everything, we think demonstration is key. Our primary goal is to be, visibly and practically, a vibrant community in life-giving relationship with our social and environmental context, in ways that transcend conventional polarities like religious/secular, conservative/liberal, etc. Toward this end, we are working slowly on developing facilities on the land that will allow us to host more visitors. We would like them to experience the place and our partnership with it in ways that  contribute toward rest, recreation, learning, healing, and hope.

Q What is a regenerative community?
A Normally we spend a five-day workshop working on that question, and run out of time without fail! Paul Hawken has a gift for communicating the complex in simple terms. “Regeneration means putting life at the center of every action and decision. This applies to all of creation” (Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation. Penguin Books, 2021, p. 9). He goes on to refer to the “exquisitely complex systems of relationships” on which all life on this planet depends. Similarly, in a recent TED talk, Hawken explains that to be regenerative is to foster the conditions in which life flourishes (my paraphrase). We agree with that, and interpret it through the lens of the Genesis 1 and 2 stories of creation. Those tell us about generation, what the life of God does.

Genesis 3 centers the human declaration of autonomy–why be content with a dependent relationship with God when you can be God’s independent equal simply by acquiring the proffered knowledge? Then–although our first parents didn’t topple over dead on the spot–a series of formerly life-giving relationships were broken (with God, with each other, with the natural world), casting a shadow of death over their damaged existence until mortality caught up with them. This is degeneration, or degradation.

God’s response to this has always been some form of regeneration – to create anew, to renew, to restore. Many OT texts hint at it, and the word itself appears a time or two in the NT (Titus 3:5, for example). We hear it in the idea of rebirth in John 3, and in Paul’s writing of “new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17), and in Peter’s preaching reference to the “restoration of all things” (Acts 3:21). In our own cultural context, the principle of regeneration has often been stuck in a religious silo, and simply means God gives his faithful a ticket to a vague heavenly existence some day. But it seems irrelevant to the here and now.

We believe Adam’s original mandate has never been abrogated or replaced–to serve and protect God’s garden and all its inhabitants (Gen. 2:15). With the effects of degradation all around us, we want to partner with God in the work of regeneration. (By the way, “sustainable” is great if things are awesome–of course we want to sustain that; but if things are damaged almost beyond repair, who would think of sustaining that? Regeneration, restoration, must precede sustainability in order for there to be something worth sustaining.)

Regenerative work will look different for each person and each community, of course. For us, it looks like serving and protecting the ecosystems of the Eden Center so that they increase in vitality, year by year–water, soil, biodiversity, all of it. And welcoming people to experience the place and its ecosystems, and perhaps get inspired in some way. But it’s not necessarily just a rural thing. For the Carver Townhomes in Abilene’s Original Town North, which our community owns and manages as affordable housing, we seek regenerative approaches in improving the quality of those dwellings. We do the same in building welcoming relationships with our neighbors who live there, who can help us understand what they need, and who bring an abundance of gifts to support the growing well-being of their community in that urban space.

To summarize before this gets longer: In our view, a regenerative community is one that aligns in some active way with God’s wildly diverse restorative purposes for our world, and that helps other communities to begin and to grow in the same way of life.

Q What are Eden Fellows?
A Eden Fellows is another informal partnership with ACU. In this case, the Eden Community’s training team curates a 10-month experiential-learning fellowship for students working on graduate degree programs at ACU. We offer a curriculum oriented toward:

• the dynamics of healthy communities and how these interact with spiritual formation;
• vocational discernment; and
• practicing regenerative culture in ways uniquely suited to a particular group and context.

Several of us meet regularly with the Fellows through the academic year for shared meals, with mentoring and reflection time. Our menu of possible events together includes retreats, conferences, and travel to spend time with other communities that showcase their own version of regenerative culture.