Sweetness and Light at the McLunt Smallholding

Hi!

My name is Beth. I worked for the Methodist Church in Britain but retired due to ill health in Autumn 2018. I have Lupus, an autoimmune disease that causes rashes, makes me tired, achy, feverish, and not very good at thinking straight.

I began working as an ordained minister for the Methodist Church in Britain after a career as a Registered Nurse in the USA. I specialised in maternal-infant care and along with providing care and support for newborn babies and their mums, I taught classes on sibling preparation, breastfeeding, and newborn care. I spent the last 5 years of my nursing career as a International Board Certified Lactation Consultant, working exclusively with mums and babies who were learning to breastfeed.

I didn’t go to church as a child, but began attending in my mid-twenties. Not long after, I began to feel a pull towards God. What I learned about God and the Christian faith helped me to understand that I – that everyone, actually – have a unique role to play in making this world a better place. What role was I to play? What was I called to do?

While I was able to make the world a better place for the mums and babies I cared for, I became aware that there was a WHOLE world of need out there, women and men, babies and children of all ages. So I left nursing and began a course of Theological study and discernment. This led to my ordination as a minister.

I have led churches in rural and small town settings, preparing and leading worship services and bible studies, visiting people in hospital and at home, and doing all the admin that goes with running a church.

Not long after I was ordained I developed an odd rash. It took six months of concerted effort on the part of the NHS to diagnose me with Lupus. Though the medication I was started on then has controlled the disease very well, I will never have the same levels of energy and fitness I once had. After ten years of full-time ministry I dropped to part-time, but it soon became clear that working fewer hours was not going to make me feel well. After two years of part-time work I retired on the grounds of ill health.

Retirement has been the best thing ever. Without the pressures of meeting everyone else’s expectations (aside from the dog’s), I have been able to rest and develop my own life-rhythm. I have been well, in as much as I am ever well.

In the five years since retirement I expanded my chicken keeping hobby, and started keeping honeybees. I also used the pandemic lockdown to consider life’s priorities. This led me (and my husband) to make a move to Scotland to set up a low-carbon footprint smallholding. We moved in autumn 2021.

In autumn 2022 we welcomed our first cows to the holding. We have two rare breed heifers. Shetland (not to be confused with Highland) cattle were the original crofters’ cows – ‘hoos coos.’ The cow would provide all of the dairy needs for the family as well as some income when calves were sold and possibly meat. I hope to breed cows that are well-suited to being modern house cows.

I am second-time married, and have two adult children from my first marriage.

I love the created world and all its inhabitants. I am as happy to sit and stare into a pond as I am do to anything else. Covid lockdown changed my way of thinking about ‘church.’ Instead of church being a single place, or a group of people, I have come to see the whole world and all of creation as ‘church’ for me. I’ve been exploring the Forest Church movement for a couple of years and have started a new branch of Forest Church here in Scotland (learn more about us: https://www.facebook.com/groups/545069244007059) For me, Forest Church is less about formal worship and doctrine, more about wonder and love.

Instead of worrying about ‘saving souls’ I am now focused on saving the Earth. By becoming ‘greener’ and living closer to the Earth, working within its patterns and parameters, I hope to serve God by caring for the planet.

Welcome!