July/August 2008

How conservative, evangelical churches are finding feed-the-hungry, save-the-planet meaning in their own backyards.

When one thinks of a conservative evangelical megachurch, one generally does not picture a teeming organic garden. But the more than two thousand worshippers who attend typical Sunday services at Vineyard Christian Fellowship of Boise, Idaho, know differently. The church’s multi-structure campus stands just off the main drag of Boise’s neighbor Garden City, within a dizzying queue of RV dealers, tattoo parlors, and bars touting “beer pong” night. There, nestled onto a mere third of an acre behind the main church building, is the “Garden o’ Feedin’,” a vibrant rectangle of land that yielded more than twenty thousand pounds of fresh, organic produce last year to be shared with church members and donated to local families through the church’s own food pantry.

If contemporary faith and science clash on issues from evolution to abortion, environmental science and climate change seem to be escaping the maelstrom. “Green” is getting religion, with environmental consciousness taking root even within evangelical Christian circles, where it once was dismissed as left-wing radicalism. And in addition to recycling and installing low-energy light bulbs, churches are improving their little pieces of the planet by growing gardens on their property, creating food, community, and good green fun all in one.

Evangelical environmentalism—often referred to with the less politically charged term “creation care”—at churches like Vineyard Boise is becoming more mainstream. A recent advertisement for Al Gore’s environmental activism Web site wecansolveit.org featured 700 Club host and conservative political mainstay Reverend Pat Robertson and liberal African American preacher Reverend Al Sharpton seated next to each other, united in their support for environmental protection despite their myriad political and theological differences. In March 2008, the Southern Baptist Convention, a bulwark of conservative Christianity, released a Climate Change Initiative that accused evangelicals of being “too timid” on environmental concerns. The National Association of Evangelicals’ Richard Cizik has been an outspoken proponent of creation care since 2003, and in April, he declared in the pages of this magazine, “Evangelicals are becoming the go-to religious community on the environment.” A proliferation of books and publications, including Creation Care: A Christian Environmental Quarterly, are gaining wider circulation among evangelicals. A blog called “The Evangelical Ecologist” boasts more than three hundred thousand visitors. The word on the environment has reached the people of the Word.

Tending the Garden
The heart and soul of the Vineyard church’s operation is Bill Meeker, a seventy-two-year-old garden maven, a retired construction company owner with a short white beard and an encyclopedia of wisecracks—almost all of which end up praising God—always at the ready. Meeker’s hand tremor caused by his early stage Parkinson’s Disease does not stop him from tirelessly overseeing the daily operations of a garden that produces steadily throughout a 150-day growing season.

Though conventional wisdom around here states that if there’s still snow on the nearby mountain peaks, it’s too early to plant a garden, Meeker turns over the church’s soil on Valentine’s Day every year. By May, it’s time to harvest radishes and lettuce, and the bounty continues all the way through to November’s pumpkins and kale.

The garden also yields strawberries, raspberries, cabbages, cantaloupes, eggplant, turnips, cucumbers, and virtually every other kind of produce imaginable (none of Idaho’s famous potatoes, though—they are so inexpensive and prolific that Meeker doesn’t think they warrant precious garden space). “We use compost and God’s help,” Meeker says to sum up his gardening methods.

Other than in Meeker’s pocket of town, Garden City seems oddly named, given its concrete-heavy boulevard. But in the 1860s, when Boise was settled by gold prospectors and Chinese mine workers, the area’s soil, which Meeker describes as “river bottom,” became home to a number of Chinese gardens. The city also housed saloons and other unsavory establishments, and later it became something of an industrial dumpsite for Boise.

Environmental degradation almost stopped the Vineyard church from getting “planted”—a classic evangelical term for new churches—in the first place. In 1994, the nascent congregation was outgrowing the section of an old grocery store it was meeting in and was ready to purchase its own land. The twenty-two acres they were interested in was seriously contaminated with toxic waste after years of chemical dumping by a dry cleaning company, and an airfield on the property had leaked fuel into the soil. The Environmental Protection Agency declared the water table tainted, the land un-buildable. 

As evangelicals do, the congregation turned to their Bibles for inspiration. One morning, a church member read in his daily devotions 2 Kings 2:19-22, in which the men of Jericho tell the prophet Elisha, “Look, the town is a pleasant place to live in, as my lord can see; but the water is bad and the land causes bereavement.” Elisha responds by asking the men to bring him a new bowl filled with salt, which he casts down into the town’s spring, miraculously purifying it.

Though the idea “at first seemed a bit out there” for the church’s senior pastor, Reverend Tri Robinson, he soon agreed that the few dollars it would cost to buy some salt could be more than worth it. So a dozen members gathered on a cold spring morning to pray and pour boxes full of Morton’s salt into the three holes the EPA had dug to test the property. When the agency returned to retest the water, it was declared safe for use. Construction began, and today the main building is a sprawling, 95,000 square foot structure that houses a 1,200-seat sanctuary, bookstore, coffee bar, baptismal pool, and youth chapel.

Reading the Bible with ‘Green Glasses’
In those early days, biblical earth-healings notwithstanding, an organic garden was the furthest thing from the minds of the growing congregation and Robinson. Evangelical Christianity was about planting churches, winning souls, and preparing for the end times. Environmentalism was part of a “liberal agenda,” irrelevant to the life, practice, and faith of Christians.

But over the next number of years, Robinson experienced a conversion of sorts. First, during the 2000 presidential election, his grown children told him they felt conflicted as to who to vote for because they felt they would be voting against either the sanctity of life or the environment. “Why do Christians have to make that choice?” they asked their father. Then, shortly afterwards, a guest at a wedding Robinson was officiating confronted him, saying that the church should be ashamed that it did not offer a single recycling bin for soda cans or plastic.

Robinson thought about it, and realized that not a single one of the more than two hundred churches he’d been in during his lifetime used recycling bins. Without telling anyone in the congregation, he began to re-read the Bible wearing what he calls his “green glasses,” and after six months of study, he was fully convinced.

“I saw it everywhere,” said Robinson, cowboy boot-clad feet resting on a table in his office, a large set of horns from an elk that he hunted mounted on the wall opposite him. “The commission of Genesis is to be stewards of creation,” he said.

He saw the message in the Book of Romans as well, explaining, “Creation is the revelation of God; His divine nature, His eternal power, it’s all revealed in what He’s created. So He’s given us creation to know Him. And I went, whoa—if there’s something an evangelical should care about, it’s revealing God to the world. And if the environment is the way He’s done that, and we’ve turned our back on the environment, that’s really kind of an atrocity for us.”

In 2005, Robinson stood up, feeling nervous about the community’s reaction, and delivered a Sunday sermon entitled “The Neglected Assurance,” in which he exhorted the congregation to take up the commission to protect the earth that God gave them. In twenty-five years of preaching, he recalls, it is the only standing ovation he has ever received for a sermon. Within a week, the church had put out recycling bins (left), bulletins and programs were printed on recycled paper, and an environmental stewardship ministry, called “Let’s Tend the Garden,” had been born.

Robinson, who then wrote a book called Saving God’s Green Earth (Ampelon, 2006), was on the leading edge of a fundamental theological shift that has spread throughout evangelical circles. Instead of a theology of an imminent end time when believers are taken to heaven and the rest of the world is left to burn, Robinson says he embraces “kingdom theology,” in which human beings have a responsibility to protect Earth in anticipation of the second coming of Christ. Under kingdom theology, Jesus’ return to Earth will be a “restoration,” Robinson said, and with it, “we have a responsibility.”

Just Don’t Call Them ‘Tree Huggers’
In the Garden o’ Feedin,’ that responsibility to be stewards of the planet converges with their responsibility to feed the hungry; the harvest from the garden fed 1,281 families last year, and 115 volunteers logged over 3,700 hours of work.

The congregation’s organic garden enthusiasm is even more amazing considering that even beyond theological considerations, environmentalism has long had a bad reputation in evangelical circles. Called “tree huggers” and associated with the hippie movement of the 1960s and liberal ideals including the right to an abortion, environmentalism was demonized in theologically and politically conservative communities, sometimes from the pulpit.
 
“When I grew up, environmentalists were the bad guys,” said Emily Hopping, twenty-seven, the coordinator of the Let’s Tend the Garden program. Growing up in Boise, she heard sermons ridiculing environmentalists, scoffing at news reports of groups that “want to save a bug, so they shut down fifty thousand acres of someone’s land.”

The change in her church culture has been palpable, Hopping said, which is seen in the eager participation of scores of volunteers whenever a new initiative is announced.

The Garden o’ Feedin’ couldn’t exist without volunteers. A steady stream of people—alone, with their spouses and kids, on their days off, after work, or on Saturdays—come several days a week.

Vonda Sellers, her husband Aaron, and her six-year-old son Timmy are at the garden every Tuesday. A few years back, when Aaron was out of work, Vonda found a way to feed the whole family for just $50 to 100 per week by supplementing her grocery staples with fresh food harvested from the church’s garden. With Aaron working again, the family still comes to the garden, continuing to enjoy the fruits of their labors, but also relishing the idea of helping others at a time when a recent Gallup poll shows 73 percent of American consumers are concerned about the rising costs of food. “It’s been a blessing personally, but we’ve been able to help other people too,” Vonda said.

The Forrester family—Mike, Cathy, their thirteen-year-old daughter Kassi, their eleven-year-old twins Jacquie and Tina, and their six-year-old son A.J.—has literally taken the lessons they learned from Meeker in the church garden home with them. Cathy homeschools the children, and the family uses the seventeen-by-seventeen-foot garden plot on their property to teach lessons from botany to economics. (What is the total cost of growing our own food as compared to what we pay when we buy it from the grocery store?) The family is also gardening on the property of a neighbor who is a single mother living on disability; their labor allows the woman to sell produce at a local farmer’s market.

For Cathy, there’s a profoundly spiritual element to gardening. “It has to do with the amazement with how God created the soil,” she said. “A little seed can go into it and produce literally a harvest. That is represented in not just filling our bellies, but in the harvest of everything that He has provided, in the small ways that seem so insignificant to our lives. It’s not unlike holding your baby for the first time, and seeing the little toes and fingernails,” she said.

On any given day, comments and reflections like this intermingle with Meeker’s distribution of leadership tasks and the daily work of weeding, watering, sowing, and harvesting. The garden is a happy circus of volunteer labor, plus an abundance of donated topsoil, compost, seedlings, tools, and fencing. Meeker, accompanied always by his two Bichon Frisee dogs Chloe and Cosmo, oversees it all from the garden’s tiny greenhouse (named “Blessed Day Greenhouse” after the Day family that donated it ... Meeker’s sly way around their insistence on not receiving any credit for the donation).

The garden operates using organic methods as well as time-tested garden tricks, from planting marigolds that attract beneficial ladybugs to spraying a non-toxic soap solution to repel aphids to mixing organic fertilizer with the right ratio of water so as not to “burn” plants to plucking squash bugs off of plants by hand. A weekly garden e-newsletter, distributed to 125 people, lists coming projects for the week, donations—many anonymous—and touts events like a recent Saturday morning “prayer-in” to be held in the garden. “It’s important that we pray for those that come to the garden to work, those that come to be fed, and the garden itself,” wrote Meeker.

There are big plans for the garden to grow, with five acres slated for garden expansion over the next couple of seasons. Already, one of the new plots is being dug and built up into the mounds that form the garden’s neat rows of raised beds. The project is being overseen by Meeker (left, with a volunteer), but is also serving as the Eagle Scout project of a local Mormon.

Mormons and evangelicals are often at odds because of disagreements over scripture and other theological issues, but Austin Griffiths, sixteen, has found that his contributions are welcomed at Vineyard. He recruited more than one hundred volunteers from his church to help with the project and looked forward to the opportunity to interact with the evangelical community.

“Since it was with another church, it would be nice to share on the relationship side,” he said, “We all believe in the same God.”

Faith-Based Gardens: A Big Picture
Christian denominations across the theological spectrum come to the local food movement and community gardening because it presents such an appealing amalgam of personal spiritual practice, communal unity, social justice, and environmental stewardship.

Griffiths’ Eagle Scout project taps into a long-standing tradition among Mormons called “provident living,” which urges members to be prepared with stores of water, canned fruits and vegetables, and grains in case of disasters from unemployment to earthquakes to religious persecution. The church owns one hundred farms in the United States, half of which are nonprofit, and also encourages members to grow their own gardens.

On a smaller, congregational scale, an Episcopal church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a Catholic church in Houston, Texas, and an Eastern Orthodox church in Bloomington, Indiana, are among the many that put their flocks to use tending gardens. Each church has a story of connection and community building to share.

At Crescent Hill Presbyterian Church in Louisville, Kentucky, leader Stephen Bartlett urges congregants to cultivate “an agrarian mind” through a Bible study program and a garden plot on church property. Crescent Hill also offers a summer camp, where fifteen to seventeen children per week learn to garden using hand tools, cook using fresh produce, and can the tomato salsas that the garden has become famous for, all while they’re learning to work together in teams.

The congregation at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Canton, New York, did not agree to launch a garden initiative until the project had unanimous member support and pledges for involvement in ways from actually planting, weeding, and watering, to feeding the hungry garden volunteers, to driving the harvested produce to needy families and farmers’ markets that accept food stamps.

In Iowa, a cluster of Lutheran and Catholic churches made their own statement about the importance of supporting local food sources when they started using local wine in 2000 for their celebration of the Eucharist; two years later, at least twenty congregations were participating. Of course, it’s not only Christians who are getting their hands dirty. From the Philadelphia-area Jewish Farm School to the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in California, faith communities of all stripes are out in the garden.

But Is Local Better?
At the end of the day, though, after all of the theology and spirituality, the prayers and community good will, the question inevitably arises: What’s better about eating locally grown food?

Crunching into a carrot that you grew yourself might taste sweeter for the effort, but nutritionists debate whether it is actually healthier. “It’s perfectly possible for fruits and vegetables to retain nutrients over long distances as long as the cold chain is maintained,” said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition and food studies at New York University, “Locally grown foods are fresher and taste better, but the nutritional benefits, if any, will be small.”

But countless studies show that eating locally can have a tremendous environmental impact. Gary Nabhan, an Arizona-based agricultural scientist and founder of the nonprofit organization Renewing America’s Food Traditions, estimates that Americans eat food that has traveled between 1,200 and 1,500 miles before it hits their plates. In fact, he says, over 20 percent of the energy used in the U.S. food production system is expended after the food has been harvested. For each calorie of food Americans consume, ten calories of energy are expended in the course of getting that food to the table. And that’s not even counting the costs of pesticides and fertilizers that non-organic farms may use in growing their produce.

More “locavores” are emerging all the time. For those who don’t garden themselves, the market is rising to meet the growing demand. In the early 1990s, says Nabhan, there were 1,755 farmers’ markets in the United States; by 2007, that number had risen to 4,400. In 2002, local food sales constituted a $2 billion industry; last year, it topped $5 billion.

So it hardly surprises Nabhan that churches, which already serve as anchors of their local communities, are taking up the mantle of eating locally and participating in the food economy with their own gardens. “If eating is our direct interaction with creation every day—we’re literally taking God’s creation into our mouths—then eating responsibly in a way that benefits the environment and doesn’t do damage in transit is a fundamental ethical and spiritual choice,” he said. Meeker would most certainly agree with Nabhan’s assessment. Anyone who wants to ask him can find him in the garden, watching prayerfully over his growing beds.  

Holly Lebowitz Rossi is a freelance writer in Arlington, Massachusetts. Her Web site is http://www.hollyrossi.com.

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