Congratulations to EcoFaith Recovery’s Pastor/Organizer, Robyn Hartwig, and St. Andrew Lutheran Church in Beaverton, Oregon who were just awarded a Lilly National Clergy Renewal grant. St. Andrew Lutheran Church is the other ministry Pastor Hartwig serves part-time. This Lilly Endowment funded grant will directly benefit the EcoFaith Recovery community as St. Andrew has elected to partner with EcoFaith in putting on three retreats that will be funded by the grant!
The grant will fund retreat presenters (Lutheran Bishop Dave Brauer-Rieke, Pastor Solveig Nilsen-Goodin of the Wilderness Way Community, and Pastor Terry Moe) as well as administrative support provided by EcoFaith’s own Rachael Johnson. The retreats will be hosted at St. Andrew Lutheran church to take advantage of St. Andrew’s chapel, wetlands and Sanctuary of the Fir trees.
The theme of the retreats and Pastor Hartwig’s three month sabbatical will be “Returning to the Rhythms of God.” This renewal theme will engage Pastor Hartwig, St. Andrew, and all who desire in Practice #4 of EcoFaith’s Practices for Awakening Leadership: “Rhythms of Engagement through which we realign the rhythms of our lives with the regenerative cycles of God’s creation.
The entire EcoFaith Recovery community will be invited to participate in these retreats and to consider initiating their own congregational Lent/Easter practice groups that will engage their members in Returning to the Rhythms of God through engagement with EcoFaith’s Practices for Awakening Leadership.
Robyn is featured in the Beaverton Valley Times article “St. Andrew’s pastor Robyn Hartwig finds God’s rhythms” by Miles Vance.
“I’ve been a drummer since I was 8 … but many times, because of the busy life of a pastor, I’ve had to leave the drums behind, she said, noting that she often tries to work drums into the children’s ministry at St. Andrew. Now, I’m asking, “how can we reconnect with rhythm and come up with a way to return to the rhythm of God’s creation?”
Part of her sabbatical mission, too, is to figure out how to slow some of the “other rhythms that drum in all our heads.”
“You would think I, of all people, might know how to lead God’s people in flowing with the rhythms of life, Hartwig wrote in the pastor’s statement included in her grant application. “Yet I hear another rhythm. A singular monotonous rhythm: machinery pounding 24 hours a day, devices chiming with one electronic message after another, footsteps of busy people moving quickly across artificial floors barely noticing the beauty around them. … As a pastor, I have long been humbled by the realization that I am just as susceptible to an unsustainable rhythm as the people I serve.