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Sensing the Garden

Have you ever touched, smelled, listened, gazed, and tasted your way through a garden? It’s a moving experience, one that we’re delighted to share with any willing friends and neighbors on Kinship Plot. What we discover together as we peer into the cucumber bramble, squeeze warm cherry tomatoes between our teeth, rub Lamb’s Ear leaves on our cheeks, and pulverize fragrant lavender between our fingers is that the garden is a gift to be experienced, not merely a resource to be harvested. The garden graces our lives for communion and kinship before it offers itself freely for nourishment.

Kinship as Joining

We are learning from Dr. Willie James Jennings that kinship is about the radical joining of people still separate from God, each other, and the land as a result of pride, violence, race, displacement, and other divisive forces. As Jennings writes in The Christian Imagination, this joining requires a new commitment to place and a commitment to “build actual life together, lives enfolded and kinship networks established through the worship and service to the God of Israel in Jesus Christ.” We need the courage to imagine new spaces for the joining of particular lives to particular places permeated by the particular presence of God. That’s why Kinship Plot exists.

We Love Our Team!

We are overwhelmed with gratitude for the amazing people who have joined the Kinship Plot Board of Directors and Wisdom Council.

Melanee Marshall (Board of Directors, Secretary) describes herself as a Multi-Passionate Hyper-Creative, which in essence means she is interested in doing and/or learning just about everything! Her current endeavor is Founder and Chief Creative Liberator of Closet Creatives Experience. Since childhood, Melanee has alway been intrigued by people, language, culture and how they impact their understanding of the world around them. She loves engaging thought conversations and fostering connections.

Angelica Acosta Garnett (Wisdom Council) was born in Bogota, Colombia and moved to the US with her family after high school. Angelica is an immigration advocate working to engage and inform the community with accurate information and first hand experiences. In Charlotte she has worked as a high school teacher, a site coordinator with Communities in School, a bilingual paralegal working with immigrant petitions, an instructor at the Mecklenburg County Detention Center, and a board member with Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy. She believes in God’s call to care for the vulnerable and is on a journey to understand and follow Jesus’ radical hospitality toward those who are pushed to the margins.

Dr. James Krohn (Wisdom Council) is a theological educator, former pastor, and the founder-director of KRUX, a Christian formation centre situated in the university town of Stellenbosch, South Africa. He studied visual arts and theology and has served on the faculties of the Bible Institute of South Africa, George Whitefield College, and Regent College in Vancouver. James is honored to be a Fellow of the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology in Cambridge and continues to serve as pastoral advisor to many past students in ministry across the world.

If you know anyone else who would be interested in joining our kinship network, please let us know or pass this email along. Next time, we plan to tell the story of our logo, provide an update on a performance art commission, and keep sharing what we’re learning. As always, we would love to hear from you, too.

With joy,
Wes and Stephanie