HOPECSA.ORG

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A ministry toward

clergy well-being…

HOPE CSA stands for "Hands-On Pastoral Education using Clergy Sustaining Agriculture". It is an ecumenical teaching ministry that offers a course of experiential learning and academic study to assist pastors to become healthier and more effective leaders. Its method is to use the resources of Creation and colleagues in the context of a small, diversified family farm to teach the natural processes that make for well-being, or, as we like to call it, “holy health”—a wide view that understands a person spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, physically, interpersonally, environmentally, and vocationally.

Mindful that the word “pastor” comes from the Latin pascere which literally means “one who puts to pasture,” the ministry of HOPE CSA is fitting in its approach to link pastor and pasture, human and humus, soil and soul.

For more detailed information, click on the 2008 Brochure link. (Meetings for 2008 are generally on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, the third week of each month.)

To see the January 1, 2006 article by Jenni Glenn in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, click here.

To see the article on HOPE CSA in the July/August 2005 issue of Science and Theology News, click here.

To see the August 2005 Lutheran Partners article describing the thinking behind HOPE CSA, click here.

To see the May, 2005 article describing the ministry, from the South Bend Tribune, "Sustainable Growth," click here.

To see the September 2004 article "Pastors in the Pastures" click here.

For copy of article in the April 2004 Indiana Kentucky Lutheran click here.

For song written for HOPE CSA by Ken Medema, "Song for Soil and Soul," click here.