OUR STORY
Follow the Wild Goose
Wild Goose Montana Company exists to develop beneficially interconnected properties that yield natural products in ways that value and facilitate provision, restoration, gathering together, and the celebration of goodness, life, and beauty.
The company was founded through the inspiration of a shared vision to bring people and communities into beneficial, harmonious, and restorative relationships with each other in the context of engaging life, creation, and wisdom as found in the design of the natural world – all while pursuing as a guide the unpredictable and wild Spirit of God. Legend has it that the Celts experienced this pursuit more like chasing a wild goose than being wooed by a gentle dove. In the creation of Wild Goose Montana Company, our leaders have committed to pursuing the Wild Goose, allowing the Spirit to lead in their mission of establishing, directing, and maintaining a group of properties, organizations, and people with common goals of provision, restoration, celebrating life, and valuing community.
OUR VALUES
Facilitate Provision
Finding ways to provide for the needs of our subsidiary organizations, their employees, and local communities is core to Wild Goose Montana Company fulfilling its mission.
Maintain Simplicity
A “less is more” type of simplicity is to be a distinctive feature of Wild Goose Montana Company.
Cultivate Restoration
Restoration is essential to maintaining a balance that leads to health and wellness. The restoration of people, environments, and communities is to be a guiding principle for Wild Goose Montana Company to the greatest extent possible.
Partner with Nature
The interaction with and experience of nature is to be a central element to the operations of Wild Goose Montana Company.
Value Community
Where isolation and unilateral operations are liabilities, the value and support of community and cooperation is an invaluable asset to Wild Goose Montana Company within, among, and outside the Corporation and its subsidiaries, their members, customers, guests, and communities.
Steve grew up in Nevada where he spent his early years working with his father’s contracting company in Las Vegas, remodeling banks and building custom homes. He came to believe that his passion for creativity and desire to build a life around God’s kingdom could not be compatible with a life of construction or business management. This initiated a season of exploration which lasted longer than intended, leading him through missionary work in Asia and studies at Berklee College of Music in Boston before returning him to study biology and psychology at the University of Nevada in Reno. Here, after more than 10 years and over 200 credit hours, he at last earned a Bachelor of General Studies.
During this season, Steve developed a passion for supporting the integrated health and wellness of the whole person. While working at a yoga studio in Reno in exchange for classes, he was invited into a business management role, which he accepted reluctantly. Soon, he discovered great enjoyment in this role where his love of order, design, and process merged with his passions for creativity and restorative health and wellness. In this context, he learned how creativity and relationships are essential to not only successful business management, but to all worthwhile endeavors. Steve spent a number of years as head of operations, building relationships with clients while learning to creatively bring simplicity to chaos, solve problems, and accomplish goals.
Steve left this role in 2013 when he married Elizabeth, whose work required a move to California. After a year, they both returned to Reno where Steve worked as a project superintendent for his father’s contracting company before cofounding a cabinetry remodeling business with him in 2017. Under Steve’s leadership, both the yoga studio and the cabinetry remodeling companies developed into highly-rated and successful businesses through a focus on helping clients realize their goals.
While in Reno, Steve pursued a long-held desire to serve in the military and enlisted with the Nevada Air National Guard. He attended basic military and technical training at the height of the COVID pandemic in 2020 at the age of 37. His desire to make the most of the experience resulted in graduating at the top of his class with honors and earning the AETC Commander’s Excellence Award as well as the peer-selected Outstanding Contributor award for helping others succeed.
In 2021, Steve and Elizabeth followed the call of the Wild Goose into the next stage of their lives. They sold their home in Nevada and ventured to Northwest Montana, answering an invitation to learn a whole new way of being. This venture led them to a life of simplicity, focus, and a deeper dependence on God. From this place, a vision developed that would become Wild Goose Montana Company and its three subsidiaries, which Steve founded in 2022.
Steve currently works to plant the “Wild Goose Project” while focusing on building relationships, learning the art and science of winemaking, and discovering how our lives, like wine, are so deeply affected by story and terroir. He is also active in an Anglican Church plant, appreciating the grounded connection to an ancient faith that it provides. In all things, he finds most joy in being led by the Wild Goose on an unpredictable and fulfilling journey of becoming.
If you ask Steve what he does, he prefers to start with what he loves: seasons, mountains, and trees; food, wine, and cooking; gathering, celebration, and story; order, process, and design; natural elements and light; restoration, health, and wellness; problem solving, simplicity, and quiet spaces. Whatever he may do, Steve works to be found somewhere on a wild journey of becoming that includes as many of these things as he can fit in.
John Busch
Jaime grew up in Las Vegas, NV and began playing violin in middle school. She graduated from Interlochen Arts Academy High School (Interlochen, MI) and earned a BS in violin performance at University of Nevada, Las Vegas and a MM in violin performance at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
During college, Jaime spent multiple summers at Garth Newel Music Center (Hot Springs, VA) in the Summer Fellowship Program and decided to make Bath County, VA her home in 2007. In 2010 she worked with Garth Newel Music Center to develop the first private not for profit comprehensive strings education program in the Alleghany Highlands of Virginia. The Allegheny Mountain String Project (AMSP) covers three rural counties and through grants and donations the program is financially accessible to all. Jaime is currently Program Director and Instructor for the AMSP as well as Adjunct Professor of violin and chamber music at Washington and Lee University (Lexington, VA) where she performs with the Marlbrook Chamber Players.
Jaime enjoys traveling and still considers her time in Turkey as the most memorable. The ancient sites and the hand carved caves in the desert made a significant impression on her. In January 2020 Jaime traveled to Tizimin, Mexico (a high poverty area of the Yucatan) where she used her violin to participate in worship and share Bible stories with children, handed out food and eye glasses with local pastors, and prayed in neighborhoods. In February 2022, she had the opportunity to visit a former violin student in Jinja, Uganda who works for the Amazima Ministries school. There she connected with Ibrahim Lincoln, director of the Situka Foundation, and serves as an advisor, helping with fundraising that focuses on a small village in Southern Uganda. The main priority of Situka is to make it possible for the at risk children in the village to stay in school. Situka also brings in medical site visits to the village and is working on a vision to help single mothers in the village have a skill and a trade with textiles.
Aside from traveling when possible and a career in music education, Jaime enjoys living in the second most rural county in Virginia where there is not one traffic light and 75% of the land is national forest. Her greatest passion is spending time with her small herd of three horses. Jaime competes in equine endurance riding at the single-day 50 mile event level with the goal of a single-day 100 mile ride on the feral horse she started and trained herself. She started the small business Hope Horsemanship in 2020 where she coaches on communication and relationship with horses. Jaime has a vision to develop a center for rescue horses, where people and horses are brought together to learn about the Father heart of God, discover identity, and experience healing. An avid blogger, Jaime manages multiple blog sites and is pleased to share her first published book, The Jael Finishing School for Ladies: Etiquette for Dangerous Women.
John received a B.S. in Geology in 1974 and an M.S. in Geology in 1976 from the University of Nebraska. He held exploration geology positions in several mid-size and small independent oil companies from 1976 through 1993. In 1995 he was employed as a trainer in Denver by a major petroleum exploration software provider to the petroleum industry. In 1996 he was promoted to Manager of Training, where he was responsible for all training services worldwide. He later became a petroleum exploration consultant to major and independent oil companies, both domestically and internationally, providing software training to geologists, geophysicists, engineers and geotechnical support personnel.
In 1994, John completed an M. A. In Biblical Counseling from Colorado Christian University and in 2003 moved to a career in ministry when hired as Director of Prayer and Spiritual Direction by a large church in Golden, Colorado, where he served for 6 years. Subsequent to this, he and his wife Elaine owned and operated a sewing business for 10 years. In 2021, John and his wife were hired as Pastors of Inner Healing and Spiritual Direction for a church in Reno, Nevada and continue to serve there today. They also offer pastoral care/spiritual direction ministry, as well as multiple day prayer intensives, for people from around the country who seek healing regarding the deep wounds of the soul.
John is an avid woodworker and loves hiking, the outdoors and fly fishing. He has also recently taken up drawing and painting.
Jaime Hope McArdle
OUR TEAM OF DIRECTORS
Steve Letourneau
Lisa Batzle
Lisa was born and raised in Dallas, TX. While attending Texas A&M University (BS, Chemical Engineering, 1980) she co-op-ed at Dow Chemical in Freeport, TX. In 1981, she completed the A&M Church of Christ’s School of World Evangelism training and went to Mons, Belgium, for 18 months as an apprentice missionary. Returning to Dallas, she taught 8th grade science at the Greenhill School for a year, and then went to ARCO Oil & Gas Company’s Technical Information Center as an Information Specialist. At ARCO, she met her future husband, a geophysicist named Mike Batzle, and they were married in 1988. Meanwhile, she became interested in computers as a result of a library automation project, and became an IMS/DB2 systems programmer, while attending the University of Texas at Dallas (MS, Computer Science, 1993) at night.
In 1995, she and Mike and his rock physics lab moved to Golden, CO, where Mike taught and did research at the Colorado School of Mines. Lisa was employed as a systems programmer at Nissan followed by Lockheed-Martin until 2001, at which time she went back to school full time, obtaining an MA in Classics in 2005 from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She played the organ for a year at Christ Episcopal Church in Denver, and then rejoined Calvary Episcopal Church in Golden, participating in many volunteer activities there – teaching Greek and other adult classes, helping to maintain the website, and serving as lector, acolyte, etc., as well as on the Vestry.
After the death of her husband, Lisa moved back to Dallas. She joined the (Episcopal) Church of the Incarnation in Dallas, and started two Greek Reading Groups there, as well as serving as a Lector.
In 2021, deciding it was no part of her duty to endure Texas summers, she chose Kalispell, MT, as a good place to escape them. She continues working via Zoom with the two Incarnation Greek groups, and pursues various other projects at home. As she makes contacts in her new community, she hopes to become involved there as well.