"Making Room for Monasticism: Doing Justice from the Margins": Talking with Jared Boyd

Vineyard Justice Network Podcast

There are many people in our churches doing justice with people on the margins. In this workshop, we will engage in a conversation about how the monastic tradition - and particularly the new monastic expression in the Vineyard Movement, The Order of Sustainable Faith - can help us as people and churches, at least a segment of us, to move into marginal spaces. There is so much to explore theologically (and practically) about what it would mean to serve the poor while taking a vow of poverty, for example, or to come under people in poverty and follow their lead. We will explore power dynamics, humility, engaging suffering from a place of weakness, rather than strength. Jared served as Associate Pastor at Central Vineyard Church in Columbus Ohio for 5 years before stepping down to focus on planting The Order of Sustainable Faith, a missional monastic expression in the Vineyard (beginning in 2014). In 2007, on the heels of the Justice Revival conference at Vineyard Columbus, Jared began a non-profit organization called Justice Gardens, which was committed to the production, sharing, and proper use of food. While the non-profit organization didn’t survive, it proved to be the beginning of a much deeper connection to issues of food justice. Jared’s interests are in the intersections between food, land use and the practical and theological issues of food, ecology, and agriculture. He is currently working on a book project that provides a practical theology for the church to take up the work of sustainable agriculture as part of a vocation of “new creation.”