Theme: Responding to a Fractured World: Re-think, Re-act, Re-create

Topic: Church for Our Common Home and the John Cobb Eco Farm and Retreat Center

Presenter(s): Bonnie Tarwater

This presentation will share about the ministry of Church for Our Common Home and the John Cobb Eco Farm and Retreat Center and offer photos in a PowerPoint. In 2015 Dr. John B. Cobb Jr. invited me to head the Anima Track at the Seizing an Alternative Conference. This contributed to my own consciousness raising experince about the severity of our earth crisis and the founding of Church for Our Common Home dedicated to Mother Earth, the divine feminine, loving community, and the arts. I did not grow up with any religion and moved eighteen times in my first eighteen years in five different countries. Perhaps this contributes to my planetary perspective that celebrates the wonder of our interfaith, interspecies and interconnected web of life. As a disciple of Jesus and Unitarian Universalist, Church for Our Common Home is untraditional and esoteric.

My husband Dr. Walt Rutherford is a transpersonal psychologist and together we offer traditional as well as pastoral counseling, spiritual direction, dream work, etc. (more info at Our Common Home Counseling Center) Our transdisciplinary ministry offers a wide array of offerings to serve beyond the walls of the traditional church. We literally moved out of our “House Church” into the barn to be with the animals, 4 pm Sundays, on Zoom and celebrating the goats, chickens, ducks, cats, and our huge, beautiful rabbit Gracie, the breeze, trees, grass………….and we give thanks!

Dr. Cobb attended Church for Our Common Home worship on Zoom almost every Sunday the last few years of his life. My background in the visual and performing arts inspires our “Arts Ministry” and the Our Lady of Guadalupe Barn Mural. We have created an Interfaith Secret Prayer Garden, and The Mary Magdalene Café and rose garden hosts our weekly Earth Crisis Support Group and Potluck Party (ECSG) after church. We invited other organizations to join us and for the last year we have offered the Interfaith Prayer and Song Vigil for Peace in Corvallis Oregon every Saturday in front of the Court House to support the Corvallis in Solidarity with Palestine Free Gaza Protest. Church for Our Common Home is at the Capital of Salem for Moral Monday’s and the Poor People’s Campaign.

The John Cobb Eco Farm and Retreat Center is a five-acre farm in Oregon where we grow beets as big as your head and sunflowers over 12 feet tall. We are doing biodynamic farming a kind of spiritual farming and we call our vegetable garden, “The Hilda Garden” named after the 12th century mystic Hildegard. The prayer station for 14th century Julian of Norwich and first women to publish a book in English about her visions and near-death experiences invites us into the Labyrinth. Our theology is simply written on the colorfully painted barn mural, “God Is Love.” May we love God with all our heart, soul, strength and mind and the natural world, who is also our neighbor—often left out—all as our neighbors who are an extension of ourselves. Our vision is to be a sanctuary church for “the least of these” both humans and nonhumans. Praying for peace on earth we give thanks for the Good News of the Gospel that love is stronger than any suffering and even death.

About the Presenter(s)

Rev. Bonnie Tarwater is a Christian Unitarian Universalist minister and founder of Church for Our Common Home in Oregon and offering worship and programs globally on Zoom. Rev. Bonnie is an artist, musician, social justice activist, dream worker and writer. She served as a traditional parish minister for many years and hospice chaplain. Currently, she serves on several nonprofit boards and works with her husband doing counseling at the Our Common Home Counseling Center. Together they have four grown children and four grandchildren. BA, Art UCSD; MFA Theater, American Conservatory Theater; MDiv Claremont School of Theology

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