Woven into Farm Days and Vigils, the path at The Local Academy is one that students undertake individually and as a fellowship, requiring from them a high level of discipline, attention, and care throughout, as we seek to cultivate a local, embodied love. During the year, we also do a number of other activities to nourish our fellowship, from retreats and days of work and story to“family dinners” and a river excursion.

The fellowship is led by guides, shepherds who walk the journey with students.

Students gather on a local farm once a week, where the day is structured by a liturgy that, as we enter it, also shapes us. The work of our fellowship is a rhythm of prayer interwoven into various disciplines and practices, all of which together help to cultivate an embodied, local love.

The love of God, neighbor, and creation is one. Learning as neighbors from local homesteaders, and as a discipline of love, we seek to practice care for creation in our local place, from milking dairy cows, organic beekeeping, and apple-tree grafting to regenerative gardening, composting, and exploring the beauties and threats to local ecology.

As a discipline aiding love, our fellowship embarks on the learning of Koine (Biblical Greek), to move us outside of ourselves and foster postures of attention, care, and prayer in the midst of that which is difficult.

Our fellowship also practices an intentional time of honesty and humility with one another in smaller, prayer circles, where students bear one another before God. This time merges with a time of solitude, as each student aims to be prayerfully alone and silently attentive in creation, and, if need be, to seek reconciliation with one another.

Because our imaginations foster our love, our fellowship also practices the discipline of reading, listening to, and discussing powerful literature around a fire, for literature as word—like the Word himself—can be wood on the fire within a student, gifting warmth in the cold and light in the darkness. The literature we enter helps us reach beyond what is merely seen, to see afresh the reality in which we live and so live more intently within it. At times, students also practice the discipline of conversation and enter into discussion on what is read, cultivating a richer neighborliness around the deepest realities. Students also prepare a baked good each week for one another as an effort of love, and tea is served.

As part of the rhythm of the day, and coming full-circle, students end the day in further care for the created world and in evening prayer.

Because of its commitment to sustainable agriculture, The Local Academy is proud to participate as civic scientists in The Land Institute’s Perennial Atlas Project, a three-year project growing and researching perennial grain crops and their annual counterparts.