Lifelines – Hedgerow Planting in London, UK

Lifelines – Hedgerow Planting in London, UK

Since 2022, I’ve taken part in Lifelines, an interfaith hedgerow planting project run by St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace (www.stethelburgas.org). As a group leader, I recruited ten Bahá’ís and friends, and we were partnered with another community or faith group on a farm. The days are spent planting trees, while mornings and evenings are dedicated to worship and getting to know one another through activities such as arts, yoga, and campfires.

Lifelines is run by St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace, an established interfaith organisation based in London. I already had links with them, having previously participated in their interfaith leadership programme for young people and later worked with them in other contexts. They reached out to me looking for a Bahá’í representative, and I volunteered — a lovely moment of networks and serendipity.

This most recent season (winter 2024/25), my Lifelines weekend took place at a Christian community called Othona, on the Essex coast. I was partnered with a group from the Brahma Kumaris, and together we shared an incredible weekend. I’ve found that being partnered with another faith community, rather than a community group, is particularly valuable — especially as I’ve brought both Bahá’í friends and others. We discovered many similarities with the Brahma Kumari group, and our faith practices worked well together. They were open and inclusive, yet clearly rooted in their faith context.

Overall, the weekend was an incredibly nourishing spiritual experience. It is a powerful example of rooting spirituality in service and allowing people to experience a twofold moral purpose. It is also very accessible to invite friends to, and to share an open experience of faith — particularly because it is interfaith, so participants arrive open to learning from a variety of spiritual traditions. Those without a spiritual background can easily connect to spirit through nature, and the activities are designed to enable this. Group leaders also have full freedom to adapt the programme to their participants.

Across every group I’ve taken away, I’ve seen people form lasting friendships within and across faith communities, and with the farms they work on. There is a strong sense of being part of a wider network of people of faith engaging in this work every weekend throughout the winter. On 5 June 2025, we also took part in an overnight pilgrimage walk, visiting different faith sites across the City of London while praying and planting trees — another layer of the programme rippling outward.

Lifelines is a powerful space for engaging in discourse on spiritual ecology, offering a context specifically designed for these conversations. It is interfaith action rooted in service rather than simply dialogue, and it responds directly to “the exigencies of the day in which we live.”