Who We Are
The Good Earth Church of the Divine is an Interfaith Community in Southeast Wisconsin. It grew out of the United Church of Christ, a mainline Protestant Denomination, with deep roots in the first century life and works of Jesus. With the founders of monotheistic faiths, we respond to the great commands:
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.
And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Matthew 22: 37-39
In following these guidelines, we look around to see which among all God’s Creation are the most vulnerable and imperiled. We see human beings as one part of Creation, some in need of our care. We regret that many fellow mortals are in distress and danger—neighbors in the air, under the water, on the snow and soil. We believe the Book of Genesis commands us, as human beings lately arrived in the creation drama, to serve and preserve God’s good creation, our planet home. This is also a command of the Qu’ran and an increasingly urgent invitation from Interfaith organizations.
We look at decreasing our resource demands on fragile eco-systems and increasing our response to the Divine invitation to care for one another in the single interconnected web of all life.
Our Bible study uses the Green Bible, New Revised Standard Version. Some Bibles are called red-letter editions, because they have statements believed to be those of Jesus printed in red. The green-letter edition highlights in green the more than 1,000 passages that teach us to care for God’s good Earth, found from beginning to end of our Scriptures.
Our Study Groups also follow the Interactivity Foundation for contemporary policy issues as well as many Interfaith Readings and Guest
Speakers.
We can resist the lures of our “must-have-more” culture through developing lives of prayer. Our prayer takes forms old and new. We grow a wide awareness of the Divine that empowers us in living courageous and loving lives. The prosperity we seek is for the thriving
of all God’s creatures.
Good Earth Church of the Divine is led by Pastor Simone Nathan, Master of Arts DePaul University; Master of Divinity Chicago Theological Seminary. She brought a background in private school education to her career in public relations and development work with the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, followed by a management position at the Chicago Sun-Times, then ownership of her own public relations firm. She served corporations, institutions and non-profit organizations in medicine, the arts and education. She was received by the United Church of Christ in 2006 and called to be a church planter in 2012 by Emmanuel United Church of Christ in Dousman, WI.
Pastor Simone and her husband Roger, with various domestic animal companions have made their home in Southeast Wisconsin for many years.
The Founding Council of the Good Earth Church of the Divine includes Bruce and Mary Bradshaw, Mary Bramson, Len Butkus, Ellie Buckingham,
Dr. Ann Esarco, Caroline McGawn Morris, Harold Morris, Janice Peterson, and Member-at-Large Barbara Black. Their gifts are being loaned by three different UCC congregations and by no church at all but life’s rich experiences.
