Winding through Farm Days and Vigils, the path at The Local Academy is one that students undertake individually and as a fellowship, requiring from them discipline, attention, and care throughout the journey, as we seek to cultivate love.

Consisting of a guys group and a girls group, the fellowship of The Local Academy is led by Guides, shepherds who walk the journey with students.

The Guides

Cooper Pinson: Cooper and his wife have been married for fourteen years and have a brood of four children. As Founder/Director of the program, The Local Academy was born from his desire to love his homeplace and take students along a journey into our communion with one another, creation, and the risen God-man. His own journey has taken him from local church ministry through the academy, and now, best of all, back home, to its people and its three rivers and seven hills. He will gladly spend time reading all manner of books to his children or to himself, grafting apple trees and mulching a garden, writing, or sitting down to coffee with friends. He holds MPhil and PhD degrees in Christian Theology from the University of Cambridge.

Clay Barnett: Clay’s family has been in Rome, Ga for six generations now. He is married to Emily, and together they have one daughter, Nora, and a second daughter on the way. Clay is a proud graduate of Reformed Theological Seminary, where he was taught not only about the Christian faith but what it looks like to walk it out in love. He enjoys hanging out with his family; playing all kinds of sports and games; being anywhere outdoors where there is sunshine, water, and music; teaching; and hosting football parties for people to celebrate together. In all of these hobbies and places, he loves being a part of the work of the Lord in bringing people to Christ and deepening our love and faith in Him.

Olivia Shepherd: Olivia has been married to her husband, Thomas, for five years and leads the girls’ program at The Local Academy. She holds a BA in Religion & Philosophy from Berry College and has studied abroad with Creation Care Study Program in New Zealand, interned with an urban teaching farm in North Carolina, worked on various farms and plant nurseries, and worked with FoodCorps, leading a school garden and teaching students how to connect with the natural world. She also was an interim youth director for a season and deeply loves walking alongside students in knowing and loving our Creator.

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 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 the created world in our local place, from animal husbandry and regenerative gardening to 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 beyond ourselves and foster postures of attention, care, and prayer in the midst of that which is difficult. Greek is a honing stone for our fellowship.

Our fellowship also practices an intentional time of honesty and humility with one another in small 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 listening to, reading, 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. Students also prepare a baked good each week for one another as an effort of love.

Students end the day having come full-circle, 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.