In Yamhill, Oregon, on an unassuming farm tucked among the Willamette Valley’s vineyards and nurseries, something quietly radical has been taking shape for the last six years. The Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice is a nonprofit that aims to be more of a different way of life than an organization. Eloheh (“Ay-luh-hay”) hosts retreats, sells seeds, and also houses a farm and solar array on its 10 acres. The center is run by Randy and Edith Woodley, who have devoted their lives to bringing together their Indigenous cultural values and their understanding of Christianity.
“We’re Native followers of Jesus,” Randy said. “But we don’t subscribe to Western Christianity’s culture. We follow Jesus through our own ceremonies, our own cultural ways.”
Eloheh is a way for the Woodleys to preserve and spread traditional Indigenous knowledge. Randy is a Keetoowah Cherokee and Edith is Eastern Shoshone. They have done advocacy, leadership formation, cultural consulting and farming under the banner of Eloheh, which they founded in 1999 and moved to its present location in 2020. At the heart of Eloheh is their holistic approach and a commitment to learning from the land. They encourage their visitors, most of whom are Christians, to slow down enough to listen to the wisdom the earth is trying to teach.
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“My time at Eloheh was a significant milestone in my journey of learning to reconnect with the land and learn from Indigenous elders,” said Cathy Norman Peterson, the editorial director for the Evangelical Covenant Church. Peterson participated in a three-day learning experience with several other churchgoers. “I know it was a holy privilege to sit at their feet and listen to their wisdom and their stories,” she said.
Randy and Edith hope that by introducing people to their way of seeing, they can do their small part in redressing big societal problems like racism and climate change. And after stints in Oklahoma, Nevada, Kentucky and nearby Newberg, Oregon, they have settled in Yamhill, where their work has taken root.
“Here on the traditional lands of the Kalapuyan people, we finally have everything we need to do it right,” Randy said.
How does your organization listen to the land?
A place and a path
“Eloheh” is the Cherokee word for harmony. For the Woodleys, harmony means something deeper than just the absence of conflict. It implies being in right relationship with all living things. Randy has likened it to the biblical concept of shalom — it’s a cosmic wholeness, an abiding sense of balance and peace.
When he and Edith were developing this idea, Randy was getting his doctorate in intercultural studies. He worked with representatives from more than 45 Native American tribes and nations, surveying them on their beliefs and values. From these conversations he identified 10 core values that showed up in each group — principles like harmony, authenticity, history, humor, equality and community.
These values form the ethical framework that’s at work whenever a community is functioning at its highest level. And it’s the organizing concept for everything the Woodleys do.
Their vision of harmony has not always been welcomed. Both spent years in churches of various denominations and found themselves repeatedly alienated by leaders, missionaries, parishioners and, ultimately, by the very faith they were trying to practice.
What does harmony look like in your context?
As a younger man, Randy worked as a missionary in Alaska, where he often felt like his job was to get Alaska Natives to turn their backs on their culture.
“The message was simple,” he writes in the Woodleys’ cowritten book “Journey to Eloheh.” “Choose to be Christian or choose to be Indian, but you can’t be both.”
Randy returned from that experience determined never to be the agent of that kind of aggression. He learned to stop treating his Native American heritage as a problem and has instead studied how the Western worldview became the problem. In his forthcoming book, “How Western Christianity Got It Wrong: Replacing the God of Fear with a Spirituality of Healing,” he traces how Western Christianity became a proponent of colonization and proposes the corrective of the Indigenous Jesus. Not the figure of European paintings, not the Christ of empire and conquest, but a teacher who drew his lessons from fig trees and fishing nets, who understood that nature itself was a text worth reading.
“Jesus was a tribal man of the land,” he said. “He talked constantly about seeds, birds, trees, fields, crops. He didn’t talk about Roman aqueducts or chariots. He talked like our elders.”
Like Randy, Edith grew up going to church, but after trying to fit in for years, she found that she couldn’t feel God’s love in those spaces.
“I took a real look at my own life and thought, ‘I don’t even want to be called a Christian anymore,’” she said. “Not because of my own experience only, but because of the negative impact that word carries for so many people — Native people, Black people, people of color, white people. So many people have been hurt. What we’re living out here is the exact dream Randy had in 1998. People who are tired of that world come here and encounter God in a different way — through the land, the animals, each other.”
For the Woodleys, the biggest problems we face as a society — ecological destruction, racial injustice, widespread spiritual disconnection — all share the common root cause: the exploitative foundation of our Western worldview. And solving these radical problems will require a radical solution, a new way of being. Eloheh isn’t a philosophy, exactly, but a path.
“It’s an integration of land, history, religion, and culture,” Randy said.
How can you de-Westernize your vision of Christ?
What happens under the oak
There are several oaks on the Eloheh farm, but there’s one that serves as the theater for the retreats the Woodleys host. Under the Mother Oak, you’ll find a dozen tree rounds arranged in a circle, not far from the small outdoor kitchen and the igloo-shaped sweat lodge — the “Jesus Sweat,” they call it. From this central spot, you can see the teepees and the yurts, where visitors sleep, and the large barn, where the Woodleys store the seeds they sell.
You can see their impressive new solar array, the many raised beds, and the pond that Randy has made by clearing a long-clogged spring. The Woodleys have spent years restoring the land to its original character as an oak savanna, where camas and wapato push up through native wildflowers, where you can find a rich array of fauna, like deer, elk, coyotes, hawks and kestrels.
Eloheh offers three-day immersive community experiences where visitors — mostly church groups — come to work on the farm and listen to stories and tell their own.
“We call them Teaching and Learning Times,” Randy said. “Because we’re both teaching and learning.”
The Woodleys now work with two other people on these events. Jim Sequeira is a Hawaiian spiritualist and pastor, and Lenore Three Stars is a Lakota elder. The team doesn’t have a syllabus or follow a script. They’ll hit certain themes and ideas, but they allow the weekends to unfold organically.
“I’m more a mix of head-and-heart knowledge,” Randy said. “I’ll talk about Platonic dualism with one group and do a Bible study with another. Edith teaches from experience.”
A line attributed to Lenore Three Stars has become something of a touchstone for everyone who works at Eloheh: “If my theology doesn’t help me be a good relative, I need better theology.” The relatives in question include the birds, the trees, the soil — the whole web of life that Western thought has spent centuries insisting is a resource rather than a community.
“There’s a reciprocal relationship, a belonging that goes both ways,” Randy said. “That’s not something you can get from a lecture. It’s something you have to feel, with your hands in the dirt, sitting around a fire.”
Who are the local tribes or Indigenous people to learn from in your context?
The experience is holistic by design.
“We don’t want a formula,” Edith said. “We just want to keep doing it.”
And the response has been positive. Even months after a weekend of teaching, the Woodleys have received letters from guests expressing their gratitude for helping them see that they don’t need a special building to find God, and for teaching them to think differently about the land. Randy takes this as evidence that people already have the capacity to see things as interconnected and harmonious, and they have a hunger to reconnect with the Earth and its Creator.
“We tell people from cities: You’re not alienated from nature,” he said. “You’re part of it. Grow a tomato plant on your balcony, share seeds with your neighbor. That’s community. That’s reciprocity.”
What feedback do you get from your constituents? What are they learning from your organization?
Guests on the land
The Woodleys are quick to point out that they’re not welcoming visitors to their land so much as extending a kind of secondary hospitality, one rooted in how they grew up.
“Both our families had people coming and going all the time,” Edith said. “You always feed people. You give them a place to sleep. But it’s really about making them feel like they’re worth your time.”
Unfortunately, they haven’t always been treated with the same grace and generosity they try to extend to their guests. Back in Kentucky, where the vision for Eloheh first took hold, they lived on 50 acres of land. Their farm and their schools were flourishing until they attended a county meeting where their neighbors made their true feelings known.
“They basically said, ‘We don’t want Indians here,’” Randy said.
After that meeting, they started hearing regular gunfire on their property, which the Woodleys recognized as a part of a systematic campaign of intimidation. With three small children then, they decided to put the farm up for sale in 2006. Between the collapsed market, two refinancings, and two years of waiting to sell, they lost roughly $350,000 in equity.
The Woodleys thought they’d put controversy behind them when they moved to Oregon in 2008. Unfortunately, that was not the case. They’ve recently been involved in a zoning dispute with Yamhill County. They’ve had to pay more than $16,000 in legal fees trying to establish the right to hold their retreats on their own land.
“The system was built for people who go to church from 11 to noon,” Randy said. “There’s no pathway for ceremonies that require you to be on the land overnight, or for three days. Native people cannot practice our own spirituality on our own land.”
“We’ve been given permission from the people who have been on this land for tens of thousands of years,” Edith said. “We just don’t have permission from the newcomers.”
The zoning dispute with the county is still unresolved. But representatives from 15 denominations of various faiths testified on their behalf at a hearing in February. “I am a better Christian, a better pastor, a more faithful follower of Jesus because of them,” testified Solveig Nilsen-Goodin, a pastor at Resurrection Lutheran Church in Portland.
They also received more than 200 letters of support. The community they’ve built through their generosity, authenticity and grace showed up when they needed it most.
Randy likes to describe the Indigenous tradition of the giveaway: When you are honored publicly, you don’t receive gifts — you give them away. The honor is shared. It is a way of understanding what the Woodleys do here that cuts past the language of curricula and frameworks and nonprofit mission statements.
“Whatever gifts we have, we give away,” he said. “Whatever you give away is what you take with you.”
Questions to consider
- How does your organization listen to the land?
- What does harmony look like in your context?
- How can you de-Westernize your vision of Christ?
- Who are the local tribes or Indigenous people to learn from in your context?
- What feedback do you get from your constituents? What are they learning from your organization?
