Refugia Rising: CPC Annual Gathering 2025
In biology, refugia are pockets of life from which more life can spring -- a bit of moss sheltered from a volcano blast, a small and dark reservoir of water in a bright desert landscape, or perhaps an energy-filled Kin-dom Seed in the midst of an earthly kingdom.
At this fall's Annual Gathering, come shelter with other people and churches who are living as refugia in their communities. Reconnect, remember, and re-energize so you can go home ready to continue being refugia in your communities.
The Details:
Onsite: September 26th-28th in Medford
Online: October 4th, 9am-1pm PT (10am-2pm MT)
Friday night and Saturday will be at the HIlton Garden Inn Medford, and Sunday morning will be at Medford UCC.
We also have a block of rooms at the SpringHill Suites ($134+tax), which is a five-minute drive from the Hilton Garden Inn. And we're expecting to have some Church hosts from Medford UCC and Ashland UCC (more on that later).
The registration site will be sent out in August.
More about refugia from the book Refugia Faith by Debra Rienstra:
When Mount Saint Helens erupted in May of 1980, it lost 1,300 feet of elevation and gained a new mile-and-a-half-wide crater. The debris and ashfall from the volcanic blast devastated the mountain and its surroundings for miles, crushing, burning, killing, and coating everything in hot ash. Everyone assumed life could return to this apocalyptic death zone only very slowly, maybe over several human lifetimes.
Instead, forty years later, the mountainsides are covered with lush grasses, prairie lupines, alders. Critters scamper, streams flow. It will take a few hundred more years for the vegetation to return to something like old-growth forest. But still. Why did life come back with such vigor, and so quickly? As Kathleen Dean Moore explains in her book Great Tide Rising, “What scientists know now, but didn’t understand then, is that when the mountain blasted ash and rock across the landscape, the devastation passed over some small places hidden in the lee of rocks and trees. Here, a bed of moss and deer fern under a rotting log. There, under a boulder, a patch of pearly everlasting and the tunnel to a vole’s musty nest.” These little pockets of safety are called refugia. They are tiny coverts where plants and creatures hide from destruction, hidden shelters where life persists and out of which new life emerges.
