by Rick Morris
Early in the morning last December I awoke to a call from my classmate Kiko. A fox had gotten into the hen house. Literally. We tromped through the field with our shovels and boots to the garden where we first became friends and where work now brought us together. We re-dug the fence, hoping our work would avert another attack on the chickens. When we returned to my apartment for a hard-earned breakfast, we talked about the connection between our food and faith, our work in the garden and our work in the classroom.
A church in Philadelphia. A youth group home in Trenton. A divinity school in Connecticut. The same thread that connected Kiko and me connects each of these diverse institutions. Each place cultivates vegetable gardens as a key part of their mission to care for and nurture human souls.
Beyond providing good food for local communities and a break from the daily grind of office life for over-worked employees, these gardens create unique spaces for relationships and reconciliation, training and action.
At Beacon, a young PC(USA) church in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, several raised-bed gardens contribute to its mission of addressing unmet needs in the neighborhood. Beacon runs an arts-based summer program for children of the neighborhood’s working families. Each day the gardens provide ingredients for the two daily meals prepared by staff, create a beautiful outdoor play space and facilitate hands-on education about healthy eating.
Fifty miles north in Trenton, N.J., between the administrative headquarters of LifeTies Inc. and Triad House (its group home for teenagers in crisis), lies a simple four-plot garden. On a spring day you might see a volunteer coming by to give a farm-to-fork cooking lesson. Or during the lunch hour you might see a spiky-haired teenager and the executive director chatting happily as they pluck cucumbers and wildflowers.
In the fall of 2010, the Yale Divinity School Farm celebrated its first harvest. As if by some magic in the soil, the farm transforms students’ excitement to simply get their hands dirty into a robust education around sustainability and environmental advocacy.
There is so much more to a garden than the food it grows or the space it brightens. There is something about the beauty of flowering plants that sparks conversation among passers-by and neighbors; there is something about the work of growing food that grows community.
More than fertile ground for reconciliation, these gardens and the countless others that have sprouted over the last few years serve as schools of transformation: As these students, volunteers, workers, and children leave their gardens, they bring new skills and a new outlook wherever they land.
For instance, just this year at Princeton Theological Seminary I’ve seen numerous student projects in the field.
In September at the first national SERV Conference (Seminarians Empowering Revolutionary Vision) on the PTS campus, dozens of students from seminaries across the country made the “food issues” break-out session one of the most well-attended of the conference.
During the same month, four students publicly launched EcoTheo.org, the web presence of a nonprofit they started to create links between ecology and faith communities. Through the website they bring together ecologists, pastors, conservationists, theologians, farmers, artists, economists and social advocates in order to incubate ideas, discussion and action.
During the winter session, a collaboration of student groups and the office of multicultural relations began work on “Food in Community,” a film and discussion series around food security and environmental justice. Once it is piloted on campus, the series will be adapted into a multimedia-based Christian education curriculum.
Whether you’re a pastor looking to engage the local community, a Christian educator searching for a connection between the faith in your head and your hands or a lay person interested in activism rooted in faith, this new movement is fertile ground. Grab a shovel and dig in.
RICK MORRIS is an inquirer for ordination in the PC(USA) and a senior at Princeton Theological Seminary where he served as the community engagement fellow of sustainability issues. He is currently apprenticing on an organic vegetable farm.
