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The Walled Garden

The Walled Garden is a house-church within Valley Friends Church. It’s located about a half-mile south of Sedro-Woolley, Washington on 3rd Street. This house-church is a 70-acre organic vegetable farm, where we raise fruits, vegetables and livestock. Though farming is a beautiful thing, farming is simply our tool for accomplishing the goals we have in mind. The farm is our team act of kindness, which is a vocational program for those who need to start all over.

Our program is designed to help people leap that chasm from the chronic struggle in which they find themselves, back into the mainstream of society. We wish to equip them with the discipline of a home’s routine and to train them with job skills for the work place. Job skills are the basic disciplines of showing up to work on time, doing your best and not cutting corners, taking instructions and so on. We’ve found these are often missing in those that we are trying to help. With the generic break-down of the family unit, that has traditionally been the training ground for such things, we see more and more people in a vacuum when it comes to having been prepared with basic home and work skills. Then once job skills are in place, technical training can be developed elsewhere.

We chose the farm environment because as a business it can be very diversified, lending itself to multi-levels of work related responsibilities. While at the same time is a healthy, natural place for people to start over. A place where they can make some mistakes and learn to work through those mistakes among a people who won’t cast them away because they’re not measuring up as they should. Where they live among a people who will help them develop responsibilities and be held accountable for their actions. In this environment it becomes very natural to help them process the Gospel. Where we can be there for those little windows of opportunity. Opportunities that you can’t plan, but must be, as a staff, prepared for.

A ‘walled garden’ is an old Jewish concept of the family. Where the young mature and the old decline, protected by a living wall; a hedge. God is this hedge around us. He’s not only a protection but also a gardener of those within the garden. A walled garden is like an oasis, a paradise compared to the desert around us. It’s not a place of isolation set off from the world, but a place where the world can come and go, finding refreshment and strength in time of need. That’s why we’ve called the farm the Walled Garden, a house-church of people who wish to develop an act of kindness as an environment where we can help people process the truth of the Gospel.