A tent with a new view

A Colorado backpacking trip brings perspective to new worshiping community leaders

by Beth Waltemath | Presbyterian News Service

A “tentmaker” from 1001 New Worshiping Communities movement enjoys a new view from his literal tent on a backpacking trip to Colorado. (All photos by 1001 New Worshiping Communities)

The hike to Diamond Lake is only 3 miles from the trailhead, but for pastors and leaders immersed in the hard work of organizing new communities, the silent beauty of the wilderness and the sparkling mountain lake where the group set up camp is a universe all its own. In the evenings after hikes ranging from 5 to 10 miles, bread baked on a Jetboil stove as the group read Scripture together and sang songs that echoed the natural call to worship of the woods around them.

In late September, a group of nine leaders of new worshiping communities spent five days backpacking in northwest Colorado through a trip organized by the Rev. Jeff Eddings, associate for Spiritual Formation & Coaching in the 1001 New Worshiping Communities movement. The wilderness adventure was led by the Rev. Chris Brown, an experienced church planter and coach in the 1001 NWC network. In 2022, while serving First Presbyterian Church of Berthoud, Colorado, Brown became a bi-vocational pastor and set up Still Mountain Leadership and Life Coaching. Through his coaching practice, Brown offers outdoor excursions. “I like to practice coaching and spiritual direction outdoors because I’ve seen the ways nature opens up our minds and hearts to hear God in new ways,” said Brown.

Leaders of new worshiping communities hiked 3 miles to Diamond Lake with all the food and supplies they needed to spend three nights.

“I wanted to offer the opportunity for 1001 leaders to get out in the wilderness because nature creates an opportunity to commune with God and with others in ways that are being lost in a world where we are plugged in 24/7 and endlessly looking at screens,” said Eddings. Our tradition has called church-planters and evangelists to new communities, “tentmakers” following in the footstep of the Apostle Paul, who was skilled in the tentmaking trade and traveled far and wide in the open air. The backpacking trip gave new worshiping leaders an opportunity to literally set up a tent and gain a new perspective on the exploratory nature of their ministry.

“Our screens were the amazing and vast wilderness that is the Rocky Mountains,” Eddings said. “The leaders all pressed into this opportunity and opened up about the challenges they face on a daily basis and their need to cultivate more space that connects them to nature and God.”

Diamond Lake, at an elevation of 10,000 feet above sea level, was the site of a backpacking trip organized by the 1001 New Worshiping Communities movement.

“Each day I found myself a bit more in tune with my place in Creation,” said Reed Conley, a commissioned pastor to Artisan Church in Lincolnton, North Carolina. He said it took time to adapt to the altitude and become less winded at 10,000 feet above sea level and on the long day hikes. “I saw signs of the vastness of God’s glory and creativity. Within the immense backdrop of natural wonder, my perspective shifted to remember that the decisions which are important in my life and ministry are only flickers of faint sound in a massive symphony,” said Conley.

Others found spiritual lessons in the practical logistics of the trip, like packing and unpacking or paying attention to safety. “Most of one’s time backpacking is spent zipping and unzipping things,” joked Dr. Adam Barnes, leader of The Freedom Church of the Poor in New York. “I learned how to better pack a backpack. I learned that moose are more dangerous to humans than black bears.” Barnes then connected practical lessons to the theological witness that our human fragility calls us to confess. “I was reminded that people are beautiful and struggling in all kinds of ways. I was reminded that God is bigger than we can imagine. I was reminded that God is also closer than we can imagine.”

The group posed for an album cover titled after an insight shared at their final meal together that the connections to Creation, to each other and to the Creator felt more like reality than the persistent cycles and systems that strive to separate us. (From left: Jean Brown, Ciara Taylor, Steve Pavey, Esther Jung, Adam Barnes, Rola Al-Ashkar, Reed Conley, Ashely Diaz-Mejias, Chris Brown. David Bonnema’s head is hidden behind Rola.)

“Showing up to enter the Colorado Rockies with a group of incredibly talented, Spirit-led folks that I had never met was a risk but was the kind of risk that offered a reward found only in the extraordinary healing of connecting with land and others,” said the Rev. Ashley Diaz Mejias, co-pastor of Voices of Jubilee, a new worshiping community that accompanies young people who are incarcerated and their families in Central Virginia. Diaz Mejias said that the trip helped give her space from the despair and deception of the system she has worked in every day for 10 years. “The system can convince you that perhaps we really are safest in exile, alone, separate or that, at our most essential, we are only individual collections of cells that are detached from one another, detached from the ecosystem that we conspire to extract resources from.” The trip reminded her to do “the work to cultivate wonder, or else I will find myself lulled back into the deception of our separateness.”

“Our days were framed with simple communal meals, devotions, brief reflections and song,” said the Rev. Jean Brown, founder of Earthen Hands Gathering, who said she felt a “clear yes from within” when she learned of the trip, because the new worshiping community she has been “giving shape to is grounded in experiences seeking to connect us more deeply with Earth, God and one another.”

The group gathers at the camp site on Diamond Lake to have dinner and reflect on the last day.

Brown appreciated not only the natural beauty, the daily communion over Jetboiled bread and the cooperation of the group to care for each other, but also learning she was not alone in her struggles to start a new worshiping community. “And I learned some new songs that continue to ground me as I return to all that waited at the bottom of the mountain.” Brown said she carries the words and the melody with her even after her backpack has been unzipped, emptied and stored away. “The words rise within,” she said as she quoted the lyrics from “Centering Prayer,” the Porter’s Gate Worship song that Brown had taught the group:

“I want to be where my feet are,

I want to breathe the life around me,

I want to listen as my heart beats right on time,

I want to be where my feet are. …

I run to capture the next horizon,

but what you give me is here.

I get no farther and still I find you,

I want to be where my feet are.”