Some days, it’s easy to feel despair about the world we live in. We’re inclined to helplessness, believing our individual efforts make no difference.
Leah Reesor-Keller, a former executive minister of Mennonite Church Eastern Canada, thinks acting individually is part of the problem. She believes the climate crisis, social upheaval and political division can be transformed by working together in new ways.
This hope-filled idea is at the heart of Tending Tomorrow. Reesor-Keller calls readers to a future where we “adapt and change as people looking to live well together and in harmony with the natural world, finding meaning in new and old ways to sustain ourselves and our descendants in the coming decades and unimaginable centuries and millennia ahead.”
Reesor-Kellor offers five themes to direct her inquiry: redreaming, retelling, renewing, reimagining and rewilding. She explores these themes through personal narrative, as well as her heritage as a Mennonite; through biblical interpretation; through her understanding of science; and through her work as a leader and with social justice movements.
Taken together, these themes provide a framework for Reesor-Kellor’s challenge to her readers: to understand the Anthropocene era (the relatively recent time in the Earth’s history when human-driven activity has had an observable impact on the planet) while working collectively to enact necessary change for the survival of us all.
To fully grasp this human-driven activity and its impact, Reesor-Kellor advocates a reconsideration of the stories we tell about our history. We need to be aware of how those stories have shaped our relationship to each other and to the Earth itself. She uses her family’s story of immigration to Ontario to suggest that we might better honor those stories by exploring what is not mentioned. In her case, narratives about the Mennonites’ settlement in North America often fail to acknowledge the Indigenous people exiled from the presumably “empty land” Mennonites were promised.
Challenging and retelling that story might complicate Mennonite identity, Reesor-Kellor writes. She convincingly argues that by speaking truthfully about our past, we “tend tomorrow.” In retelling our stories, we change our relationship to others, because we acknowledge the harm that has generationally impacted others — most notably Indigenous people — and we open the way for reconciliation.
We also change our relationship to the Earth itself, as the Mennonite story of immigration reveals the misplaced values we’ve placed on land as a commodity to be acquired and conquered rather than a gift to be cultivated and shared.
The notion of retelling extends to the Genesis accounts of creation. When we understand the Genesis story as one where God gives humans dominion over creation, we accept a stewardship duty that has too often meant seeing the Earth as a treasure chest to be plundered, its resources ours to consume without limit.
Reesor-Kellor suggests we apply a different lens to Genesis, one that encourages mutual flourishing and interdependence, because we are called to live in harmony with all creation. Nature already reflects this interdependence, manifest in the “tree networks that support the strength of the forest” by sharing information, water and nutrients through an underground “wood wide web.”
That metaphor works well to reimagine our lives together, driven not by competition, individualism or scarcity but by “bigger and broader coalitions of people who learn from and challenge each other to go deeper into care and possibility, weaving together the fabric of community we need to live the alternative futures we imagine into being.” To do this, we need to rethink our concept of leadership, placing more value on collaboration than on a hero-leader honored by most Western societies.
Similar kinds of change need to occur in churches mired in old ways. Reesor-Keller advocates understanding the church as a movement, focused not on singular congregations (with hero-leader pastors) but on connectedness among congregations, faith-based institutions and individuals.
She imagines a world being created for her daughter Ava where the seeds of justice, peace and well-being will bear fruit.
She calls on her readers to “remember the belovedness” of the universe, the intricacy of creation and the world’s remarkable diversity. As we do this, we tend the seeds that shape beautiful tomorrows.
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