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Tending Tomorrow: Courageous Change for People and Planet
The future is uncertain. But flourishing doesn’t have to be. We know without a doubt the power of humans to change the earth in lasting ways. Climate change is not a niche it is the unfolding story of our embodied lives. As we join in with the groaning of creation, we wonder, How will we and coming generations make our home in an inhospitable future? In the face of environmental and social upheaval, Tending Tomorrow lays out a path for Christians worried about our collective future and seeking courage and inspiration for the journey ahead. Drawing on metaphors from the natural world, author Leah Reesor-Keller offers foundational, transformative practices for leaders and communities to foster healthier cultures during a time of ecological devastation. When we dig into the roots of faith and culture, and envision new interactions and patterns, we plant seeds of change. Seeds that ignite courageous imagination. Seeds that repair injustice. Seeds that nurture a tomorrow where possibilities bloom and people and planet flourish. Like mycorrhizal networks of fungi in a forest, we can build nourishing webs of connection to sustain ourselves and future generations. As we bravely and humbly cultivate healing and reconciliation, good, liberating, and flourishing things will emerge.
208 pages, Paperback
Published June 25, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
August 18, 2024
This is a beautiful book! I enjoyed its mix of personal stories and wisdom from elsewhere. I have many things in common with Leah (Mennonite faith tradition, currently living in KW, etc.), so I wasn’t necessarily challenged by all of this. It served mostly to keep me hopeful and to remind me to keep showing up to live into the future I want for our planet.
April 5, 2025
Tending Tomorrow encourages the reader to contemplate the past and the future, and to bask in the beauty of the world presently. It asks not what we will do in the face of global upheaval, but who we will be. Author Leah Reesor-Keller invites us to reimagine the future of the church. Her project is clear: she is painting a landscape in which readers can make sense of themselves and where they are coming from in such a way as to propel them forward in the direction of communal flourishing. She calls the project “a rewilding that seeds many possibilities, creating space for different visions of flourishing to take root.”
Reesor-Keller structures the book through re-words: Redreaming, Retelling, Renewing, Reimagining, and Rewilding. Each thematic section brings the reader into a new facet of looking back to look forward, dreaming of a future where all creation flourishes. This is not a naive image. She lays the groundwork for the reader to dream of such a future and actually see an active path that might lead there.
Tending Tomorrow is a lyrically written wander through important themes and questions. Though I was occasionally annoyed by its lack of clear thesis, I nonetheless thoroughly enjoyed the read. This book has made me reflect on my own Russian Mennonite heritage and imagine new ways forward in the church, the environment, and society more broadly. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to engage these questions honestly, and especially to groups or pairs who are ready to work through it together.
Reesor-Keller structures the book through re-words: Redreaming, Retelling, Renewing, Reimagining, and Rewilding. Each thematic section brings the reader into a new facet of looking back to look forward, dreaming of a future where all creation flourishes. This is not a naive image. She lays the groundwork for the reader to dream of such a future and actually see an active path that might lead there.
Tending Tomorrow is a lyrically written wander through important themes and questions. Though I was occasionally annoyed by its lack of clear thesis, I nonetheless thoroughly enjoyed the read. This book has made me reflect on my own Russian Mennonite heritage and imagine new ways forward in the church, the environment, and society more broadly. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to engage these questions honestly, and especially to groups or pairs who are ready to work through it together.
June 5, 2024
This book is both challenging and hopeful. Challenging because the author holds a lens up to what we know and what we think we know about the stories we tell ourselves. It is also challenging in that who we are, what we stand for and how we interact with the world around us is so intimately woven into our lives. Hopeful because even though our world has been drastically altered by climate change and the geopolitics of our time, we can see a potential future of flourishing.
Thank you to both the author and Herald Press for an ARC of this book.
Thank you to both the author and Herald Press for an ARC of this book.
August 4, 2024
Leah Reesor-Keller offers with this book an invitation to join her in acknowledging our uncertain future in light of climate change and the growing realization that many of the dominant ways of being and knowing that we have inherited are not equipped to resolve the issues we face as a global community. Drawing from her cultural and religious legacies as well as her diverse experiences in community development, leadership, and as a mother, Leah covers an impressive range of topics in a concise manner, using her own life and experience as a through line to help the reader feel less alone on this difficult journey. Leah invites the reader to dream and explore what it might mean to live well in our current context, working for a more hopeful, sustainable , and equitable future despite the uncertainty of what the years to come will bring. This book is a gift that manages to be both humble and bold, respectful of the past and vulnerable enough to ask hard questions about our inherited legacies, hopeful that our actions can make a real difference and realistic that we have no certainty of outcome. While many questions are left unresolved the reader walks away from the book feeling they just might have glimpsed the initial sproutings of one possible pathway forward to a more hopeful future.
April 14, 2025
Summary: Facing an uncertain ecological future by drawing on one’s faith and learning from creation, to re-vision how we may live.
Many of us are convinced that our warming earth poses a threat to the flourishing of life on our planet. More deeply troubling is the awareness that our own patterns of consuming earth’s resources are a causative factor. In fact, that influence is so decided that scientists have named our epoch in global natural history the Anthropocene.
I’m a Christian who believes God loves his creation but observes a world responding inadequately to the threat. The question then arises of how then should we live into an uncertain ecological future without giving way to despair. Christians are people of hope. Leah Reesor-Keller wrestles with these questions in Tending Tomorrow. Her response to the uncertain future is to dig into the roots of her faith in five “thematic actions”: redreaming, retelling, renewing, reimagining, and rewilding.
Redreaming involves re-examining one’s religious and cultural roots and is foundational to the author’s project. It means recognizing the things worth embracing and the harmful trajectories it is time to re-direct, all with an eye toward what we would hope for the world in 2100. This leads to looking at our origin stories. The author illustrates with the story of her Mennonite family and how they settled in Canada. She learned that it was a story of colonization. A future might involve acknowledging that Indigenous presence and drawing upon Indigenous wisdom rather than dominionist theology for how one lives on the land.
Then renewing involves reflecting on how one has found hope in past challenges and suffering. One lesson in hope is that we don’t need to see all the steps to the end but just the next ones. Likewise, we nurture hope in community by continuing to show up for each other.
But the “re” word Reesor-Keller gives the greatest attention is reimagining. She begins with reimagining leadership, not as the hero leading the charge, but as an interconnected network of people. This is exemplified in the interconnected character of forests. She recognizes that the flow of power is always a reality of leadership in community. She describes her own leadership and use of Power Mapping to empower marginalized community voices. Then she turns to re-imagining accountability and repairing harm, both within the community, and in the wider Canadian culture with Indigenous people. Finally, she returns to Anabaptist roots to reimagine church communities as people movements rather than institutions.
As she concludes, Reesor-Keller meditates on re-wilding her yard and is reminded that such a project can go in a number of directions. Re-visioning the future has no singular outcome. Rather, we strive to create a flourishing space for many visions while taking the next steps we need to take.
The approach to this book was far more holistic than I expected. The author addresses our origin stories, our blind spots, marginalized people, redemptive community, as well as our care for creation. But in doing so, she shows us her understanding of what it is to be the church in the world. This both addresses our crisis of hope and vision and needs for culture change. She offers no silver bullets. But she offers a vision of how we might live into the uncertain future.
____________________
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.
Many of us are convinced that our warming earth poses a threat to the flourishing of life on our planet. More deeply troubling is the awareness that our own patterns of consuming earth’s resources are a causative factor. In fact, that influence is so decided that scientists have named our epoch in global natural history the Anthropocene.
I’m a Christian who believes God loves his creation but observes a world responding inadequately to the threat. The question then arises of how then should we live into an uncertain ecological future without giving way to despair. Christians are people of hope. Leah Reesor-Keller wrestles with these questions in Tending Tomorrow. Her response to the uncertain future is to dig into the roots of her faith in five “thematic actions”: redreaming, retelling, renewing, reimagining, and rewilding.
Redreaming involves re-examining one’s religious and cultural roots and is foundational to the author’s project. It means recognizing the things worth embracing and the harmful trajectories it is time to re-direct, all with an eye toward what we would hope for the world in 2100. This leads to looking at our origin stories. The author illustrates with the story of her Mennonite family and how they settled in Canada. She learned that it was a story of colonization. A future might involve acknowledging that Indigenous presence and drawing upon Indigenous wisdom rather than dominionist theology for how one lives on the land.
Then renewing involves reflecting on how one has found hope in past challenges and suffering. One lesson in hope is that we don’t need to see all the steps to the end but just the next ones. Likewise, we nurture hope in community by continuing to show up for each other.
But the “re” word Reesor-Keller gives the greatest attention is reimagining. She begins with reimagining leadership, not as the hero leading the charge, but as an interconnected network of people. This is exemplified in the interconnected character of forests. She recognizes that the flow of power is always a reality of leadership in community. She describes her own leadership and use of Power Mapping to empower marginalized community voices. Then she turns to re-imagining accountability and repairing harm, both within the community, and in the wider Canadian culture with Indigenous people. Finally, she returns to Anabaptist roots to reimagine church communities as people movements rather than institutions.
As she concludes, Reesor-Keller meditates on re-wilding her yard and is reminded that such a project can go in a number of directions. Re-visioning the future has no singular outcome. Rather, we strive to create a flourishing space for many visions while taking the next steps we need to take.
The approach to this book was far more holistic than I expected. The author addresses our origin stories, our blind spots, marginalized people, redemptive community, as well as our care for creation. But in doing so, she shows us her understanding of what it is to be the church in the world. This both addresses our crisis of hope and vision and needs for culture change. She offers no silver bullets. But she offers a vision of how we might live into the uncertain future.
____________________
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.
September 23, 2024
Plenty of writing on what ails our societies – persistent inequalities and injustices, destructive methods of power, corrosive models of leadership, climate related crises – provides food for thought.
Tending Tomorrow offers that, and also food for action.
How? Right from its opening pages, it builds a compelling case for possibility; possibility in the sense of a thing within our reach, rather than what may or may not come to be.
The possibility here is that of a different world. But what is imagined is not what might result from the kind of upheaval that brings even more injustices and sufferings upon the most vulnerable and exploited. It is what could be created from shifting mindsets among those of us who have been the most powerful and privileged; from changing personal perspectives (definitely possible) to break ground towards a kind of coexistence (a plausible next step) that helps build a world of mutual flourishing for all creation.
We can remake culture, recreate it, the author convinces us, because we have created it the way it is, and because we know of real alternatives, individual and interpersonal, human-scaled and demonstrable. Tending Tomorrow submits this proposal in a blend of real world examples, a breadth of personal experience, and a diversity of wisdom collected from relationships, communities, conversations, observations, personal faith, and close study.
This finely wrought book rewards the reader with plenty to work through, but like work that we love, it’s not a tiring chore, it’s a pleasure. Although I'm generally a slow reader, Tending Tomorrow drew me quickly along, thanks to well-proportioned chapters and sections, well-connected stories and ideas, a strong sense of direction from start to finish, a constructive disposition, and direct yet elegant prose (there are passages and sentences imbued with a kind of poetry, delightful to take in).
Here is a call to action. Embrace what we already know within our core: that interconnectedness is a fact of existence, interdependence flows from it, and to behave otherwise is senseless, even fatalistic.
One reader alone may not be able to change the world, but Tending Tomorrow reminds us we are not alone, and that a change of heart, the best first step, is well within our reach.
Tending Tomorrow offers that, and also food for action.
How? Right from its opening pages, it builds a compelling case for possibility; possibility in the sense of a thing within our reach, rather than what may or may not come to be.
The possibility here is that of a different world. But what is imagined is not what might result from the kind of upheaval that brings even more injustices and sufferings upon the most vulnerable and exploited. It is what could be created from shifting mindsets among those of us who have been the most powerful and privileged; from changing personal perspectives (definitely possible) to break ground towards a kind of coexistence (a plausible next step) that helps build a world of mutual flourishing for all creation.
We can remake culture, recreate it, the author convinces us, because we have created it the way it is, and because we know of real alternatives, individual and interpersonal, human-scaled and demonstrable. Tending Tomorrow submits this proposal in a blend of real world examples, a breadth of personal experience, and a diversity of wisdom collected from relationships, communities, conversations, observations, personal faith, and close study.
This finely wrought book rewards the reader with plenty to work through, but like work that we love, it’s not a tiring chore, it’s a pleasure. Although I'm generally a slow reader, Tending Tomorrow drew me quickly along, thanks to well-proportioned chapters and sections, well-connected stories and ideas, a strong sense of direction from start to finish, a constructive disposition, and direct yet elegant prose (there are passages and sentences imbued with a kind of poetry, delightful to take in).
Here is a call to action. Embrace what we already know within our core: that interconnectedness is a fact of existence, interdependence flows from it, and to behave otherwise is senseless, even fatalistic.
One reader alone may not be able to change the world, but Tending Tomorrow reminds us we are not alone, and that a change of heart, the best first step, is well within our reach.
July 9, 2024
I'm feeling frustrated.
As a Christian, I feel passionately about taking care of God's world. The Creation account is a call to stewardship of that world, and it is something that I am personally called to, in addition to reviewing books. (My mom and I welcome the animals, and we've filled our little suburban plot, Meadow Arc, with plants).
I feel hopeful when I see environmental titles from a Christian perspective. Unfortunately, most such books I've read come with baggage. This title and the last one I read from the publisher convey a cultural Christianity. I agree with grieving the wicked things done in Jesus' name. I disagree with authors treating Scripture as more of a cultural document, to be used when convenient, to be overruled when necessary. I was hoping the author was arguing against incorrect interpretations of the Bible, but I felt increasingly uncomfortable as she began detouring from the call of stewardship that is very clearly in Scripture.
I stopped reading on page 75, which is when she started to cite a "trans theologian" to support the idea of interdependence.
Again, I'm frustrated with the baggage in books about an issue I do believe that God has called His people to address.
Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of the book from the publisher. Opinions expressed are my own.
As a Christian, I feel passionately about taking care of God's world. The Creation account is a call to stewardship of that world, and it is something that I am personally called to, in addition to reviewing books. (My mom and I welcome the animals, and we've filled our little suburban plot, Meadow Arc, with plants).
I feel hopeful when I see environmental titles from a Christian perspective. Unfortunately, most such books I've read come with baggage. This title and the last one I read from the publisher convey a cultural Christianity. I agree with grieving the wicked things done in Jesus' name. I disagree with authors treating Scripture as more of a cultural document, to be used when convenient, to be overruled when necessary. I was hoping the author was arguing against incorrect interpretations of the Bible, but I felt increasingly uncomfortable as she began detouring from the call of stewardship that is very clearly in Scripture.
I stopped reading on page 75, which is when she started to cite a "trans theologian" to support the idea of interdependence.
Again, I'm frustrated with the baggage in books about an issue I do believe that God has called His people to address.
Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of the book from the publisher. Opinions expressed are my own.
July 22, 2024
This is like a hearty potluck dish. I liked Leah Reesor-Keller’s stories, the questions and the combining of many different areas of interest. I’d describe her writing as moist with good flavours, not overly sweet, and dense with local, personal and world ingredients.
Parts of this book sat heavy for me during and after consumption—that’s more to do with the grief, uncertainty and challenge that its subjects bring up. Some of these remind me of necessary medicine. However this book is much more hopeful than heavy, more fresh than fearful. I liked the beautiful finish with hope for our communities and our future.
I finished it with a strong desire to bring others to the table. I liked the further questions for discussion at the back. This will be very good for groups wishing to talk about community, climate change, leadership, the church and the future. And maybe gardening.
Parts of this book sat heavy for me during and after consumption—that’s more to do with the grief, uncertainty and challenge that its subjects bring up. Some of these remind me of necessary medicine. However this book is much more hopeful than heavy, more fresh than fearful. I liked the beautiful finish with hope for our communities and our future.
I finished it with a strong desire to bring others to the table. I liked the further questions for discussion at the back. This will be very good for groups wishing to talk about community, climate change, leadership, the church and the future. And maybe gardening.
September 20, 2024
Tending Tomorrow offers a vision for how to step into relationship with the climate crisis as individuals, communities, and as a human race. Grounded in her own context, identity and ancestry, Leah weaves her story together with facts and statistics to shape a path forward for engaging transformative action. While her message is bold and she acknowledges the dire need for change, Leah's call to action is invitational, energizing and full of promise. I'm left wondering whether tending to tomorrow can be more than just a journey of loss and sacrifice but also of healing, right-relationship and reimagined abundance.
December 19, 2024
I loved this book. It is well researched and weaves the authors own story in beautiful and lyrical ways. Any book where the author owns that the work of relearning their history “exhausting and uncomfortable”, is a true testament to the work it takes to make change in a perilous world. Her articulation of seeking wisdom from the forest, respect for and honour of Indigenous oral traditions and histories are apparent. In this changing time, she provides hope for the next seven generations and calls us to action, specifically to create pathways to healing ourselves, communities and the planet.
June 5, 2024
I appreciate the hopefulness that Reesor-Keller offers in her book. The climate crises and social upheaval we're experiencing is reason to despair, but Reesor-Keller offers hope: that our collective wisdom, and our collective action, can plant seeds of peace and justice that will help our world flourish into the future.
October 9, 2024
Reesor-Keller strikes a balance between the stark reality of our current world and how we got here and a deeply rooted hope for the future. The book encourages us to learn our histories, acknowledge our privileges, and be accountable for our actions. The personal anecdotes woven in throughout were beautiful illustrations of the author’s message.
February 5, 2026
I really enjoyed reading about Leah's global experience and her local connection for me living in Canada. The idea of "reimagining" is explored in terms of climate action, community and churches and inspired me to reflect on the harder What if questions.
..."Leaders must seek to get it right, not to be right."
..."Leaders must seek to get it right, not to be right."
November 22, 2024
"Tending Tomorrow" lays out a path for Christians worried about our collective future and seeking courage and inspiration for the journey ahead."
Great job, Leah!!
Great job, Leah!!
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews