A while back, I took a year long course called “Organic Ministry” offered through what was then the Des Moines Pastoral Counseling Center.
Once a month, nearly a dozen of us gathered at Taproot Garden south of the Des Moines area.
We would spend our mornings getting centered and discussing one of our resources.
Then we engaged on some kind of task on the farm. We sharpened tools. We planted seeds. We pulled weeds. We tended the chickens.
We would gather for a meal together with incredible food from the farm and then had some time in the afternoon for reflection, before coming back together to connect the dots between what we had seen and practiced, read and heard.
One of our primary texts for the class was The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food by Dan Barber.
Barber is not an environmentalist or a theologian, but a chef, and he has grown to believe that “good farming and delicious food are inseparable.”
What he has discovered along his journey is that the future of food lies in activity that builds a sustainable food production system from the ground up.
When we care for every part of the process, from the soil to the water to the seed, we are in fact creating more delicious and healthier food.
I was amazed, every time we gathered, at the faith connections that we were making.
One of the things that we so often lament in the church is the loss of vitality in our communities. People are less engaged and our impact upon the world seems to be fading.
What if, in the church, we need to remember that “good farming and delicious food are inseparable?”
What if we need to remember that tending the soil of our faith and the fruitfulness of our ministry are inseparable?
One of the things that Bishop Kennetha has consistently shared with us is that she wants to help us go deeper, rather than wider.
A mile deep and an inch wide, she has often said.
And I know some of us have wondered… what does that mean?
In my Organic Ministry class, we learned a lot about wheat.
This photo shows you the difference between roots that are shallow and roots that run deep.
And both of them are varieties of wheat.
One the conventional annual wheat that goes into our food system today… and the other a perennial variety that once covered these lands.
Can you see the difference?
The plains used to be a prairie with incredible biodiversity.
Grasses, shrubs, flowering plants covered the landscape and it was all sustained by an incredible root system.
Basically, roots are like fingers.
They dig down deep into the ground and give the earth the support it needs.
The roots had held the soil together and helped prevent erosion and they also loosened up the soil so that oxygen could filter through the ground, helping to provide fertile and sustainable land.
“The root systems’ ability to store energy and nutrients ensure that the prairie grass could always grow back quickly. And the grass, in turn, kept the rich soil in place as millions of bison fertilized it over thousands of years, depositing more nutrients into the soil’s natural fertility bank.”
The whole system was interconnected.
We wanted to live and grow food on the prairie.
We broke up the deep roots of the perennial grasses with farm equipment and replaced them with the shallow root systems of annual wheat and other grains that we could more easily control and cultivate.
Wendell Berry once wrote, “We came with visions, but not with sight. We did not see or understand where we were or what was there, but destroyed what was there for the sake of what we desired.”
The goal became the mass production of food, which in many ways fought against nature.
We stripped the land of its nutrients and lost the root systems that sustained future growth.
And annual crops, with their shallower root systems require more water, because they can’t reach deep into the ground to reach it.
We thought success was abundant production, but we weren’t paying attention to what we were sacrificing.
So in the 1930s, without the deep prairie roots to hold the earth in place, we become susceptible to disaster.
Nearly 75% of the United States experienced a decade of drought that devastated agriculture.
The shallow vegetation shriveled up, and the winds of what became known as the Dust Bowl blew away an estimated 850 million tons of topsoil in the Southern Plains alone.
Sometimes, it feels like the church is experiencing a kind of Dust Bowl.
And I wonder if for too long we were focused on growth, and cookie cutter ministries that were designed for mass production, and if we had vision but not sight…
If we did what seemed quicker and easier, rather than the much harder work of tending our root systems.
So maybe it is no wonder that when the winds of disruption and change and awareness of systemic problems came along that fruitfulness began to shrivel and the topsoil blow away.
One of the lessons maybe the church can take from agriculture today is a focus on reclaiming our identity and strengthening our root systems.
You see, this image isn’t simply a comparison of conventional vs. perennial wheat.
It shows the work and research that is being done to develop new commercial varieties of perennial wheat that can come back in and revitalize our food system.
The Land Institute has been working for decades on this project and this variety, Kernza, a wild relative of annual wheat, is now being incorporated into the Cascadian Farm brand from General Mills.
Dr. Lee DeHaan from The Land Institute describes what they have seen as ecological benefits already, “The length, size, and long life of the roots enable the grain to provide measurable soil health benefits and drought resistance while preventing soil erosion and storing critical nutrients – potentially turning agriculture into a soil-forming ecosystem.” (https://climatecrocks.com/2018/04/11/for-drawing-carbon-down-perennial-grains/)
Don’t we, too, want to be transformed into the kind of ecosystem that can sustain a more vital church?
Don’t we want to be able to be resilient in times of drought and winds of change?
Don’t we want to be a faith-forming ecosystem?
Well, the good news is, just like with the formation of this new variety of wheat, we have the tools we need already.
We simply need to go back and reclaim and remember how we were designed and who we are.
Colossians 2:6-7 (MSG)
My counsel for you is simple and straightforward:
Just go ahead with what you’ve been given.
You received Christ Jesus, the Master; now live him.
You’re deeply rooted in him.
You’re well constructed upon him.
You know your way around the faith.
Now do what you’ve been taught.
School’s out; quit studying the subject and start living it!
And let your living spill over into thanksgiving.
