Spring Gate: A training center for organic farming

Worried about the quality of our food supply?

Want to find a way to live more healthily?

I hear people talking about how our lifestyles are unsustainable. They say that our debt load is too high. Our energy use is too high. In many western communities they ration water as the water table declines.

My friend Marty Schoffstall have been talking about these issues for years. Marty is a great one to discuss these kinds of things with. He reads more than anyone I know. And this past year, we felt led to provide a positive response – to create a training center on his 60 acre bucolic vineyard and farm called Spring Gate in central Pennsylvania.

Spring Gate is a training center whose goal is to create missional communities centered on food production. We do so by  investing in the storage of water, creating energy, using inexpensive transportation, and building housing in a sustainable manner using local materials wherever possible. These missional communities will not only provision the local geographical community, but also provide living conversational crossroads populated with food and spirited people.

The property is unique insofar as it is just three minutes from Costco and Best Buy while being thousands of cultural miles distant in thought and practice from a self-centered consumerist indoor lifestyle.

Just as wells in the Holy Land were the intersections of people and commerce, we will learn to build and operate these intersections and transplant them where we settle to do and to teach others.

The program will holistically disciple its apprentices, presenting them with questions on stewardship of the land, the limits of our responsibility to others outside of community. We will spend time deconstructing “The American Dream” and comparing it to “The Gospel Dream”.

The program is exclusive (8 total starting in January '13) and we have arranged to scholarship students for 75% of the costs. If you're interested and want more info, check out the web site or contact me. I believe that it will be an amazing program.