Clearwater Forest

The goal of Christian Education is to help children and adults become disciples of Jesus -- to become a people that seek and follow the way of God first in their lives in the world. Our goal is to nurture holy souls within a holy community.

Will our children will become disciples of Jesus Christ?

Places form communities. We need holy places to form holy communities. We need places set aside from the dominant rules of our secular society; places that are different, places that are somewhat remote, that are special.

We need special places to know God.

Last weekend families from my church enjoyed time in a special place -- Presbyterian Clearwater Forest. We stayed in two lodges and ate in the dinning hall. We canoed, boated, swam, hiked, walked, biked, played games, prayed, worshiped, did crafts, took naps, and tried to sleep while the loons called.

Holy places are set aside to experience the Divine.

More important than what we did is how we did these activities together as families with other families and as a church with other churches.

Holy places are unlike other places in our lives.

Presbyterian Clearwater Forest is helping to form Union Presbyterian into a special, yea, a holy community.

Holy places form holy community.

Upon this Kasota Stone

Theologians, pastors, and Christian historians spend much effort in describing the, well, theological, ecclesial, and historical foundations of Christianity. In doing so, we think of the church as an idea which has been formed by prior ideas. There is the Liberal church, the Evangelical church, the Roman Catholic church, etc.

However, church members typically describe going to worship as, "Going to church." And by "church" they don't mean an idea. They mean a building -- a place. Wouldn't it therefore be of some use to describe the physical foundations of a local congregation?

For example, Union Presbyterian Church of Saint Peter, Minnesota is a Presbyterian Church. Its theology and worship practices are within a North American derivation of the Reformed Christian tradition. It is also a church made out of stone.

What you see there is Kasota stone. Kasota stone is limestone quarried from the nearby town of Kasota, Minnesota. Limestone is a sedimentary rock formed when this area of the world was a sea. It is still being quarried today.

Kasota stone was also used to construct the new Twins baseball stadium:

In the same way that Union Presbyterian Church has a particular theological history, it also has a particular geological history. It is a place formed by a strand of ideas that started in places like Jerusalem and Geneva, as well as by a sea that has long since disappeared. We have a responsibility to our theological fore-bearers like Paul and Calvin, as well as a responsibility to the valley from which our church was hewn.

Geography is the study of how human cultures interact with their environment. To understand the geography of Union Presbyterian Church of Saint Peter we need to know much more than its location on a map -- we have to understand how a people informed by Reformed thought interacted with their environment in the Minnesota Valley to build a church in 1871.