Stop begging for Sunday School teachers. Start training farmers. (Part 4 of Five Modest Proposals for Post-Covid Churches)

This is part four of a five-part series of suggestions for churches after the Coronavirus pandemic.

Modest Proposal #4. Stop begging for Sunday School teachers. Start training farmers.

The pandemic has exposed huge food insecurities in this country. People are afraid to go to the grocery store. Supply chains are cracking. Piles of eggs and vegetables are going to waste and not getting to tables. As the economy wobbles, some people can’t afford groceries. The meat industry is blubbering.

Churches have land, green space, yards.

What if every church in America turned their available green space into a farm?* (And this proposal is a great place for mosques, temples, and synagogues to join in.) Green space doesn’t need to be an expansive yard. It can be a courtyard, window sill, or a container garden.

The church I serve pays thousands of dollars a year for a landscaping company to tend and mow our yard. It’s nice. Green grass, azaleas, boxwood hedges, some indigenous plants. It feels pretty English garden-y.  

What if we plowed under the grass and grew corn, beans, potatoes, strawberries? Beets and kale and spinach and watermelons? Arugala, lettuce, okra and peas?

What if we grew food all over our church property and gave the produce away to local food pantries?

What if we quit teaching Sunday School to children and had adults farm with kids instead every week? Sure they could sing songs while they dug in the dirt. “For the Beauty of the Earth” would be great. And they could talk about Bible stories—how the scriptures say God created a beautiful garden where everything was good, what a Promised Land feels like between your fingers, how wheat and grapes come from the ground and make their way to Jesus’ table.

Sure, it would be a mess. Sure, it would be dirty. Sure, some kids would be terrible at it. Sure, some adults would be awful farmers. Sure, it would take more than an hour on Sundays. (Church time is not limited to that, btw.) Sure, some Sundays it would rain or snow. (And those are still good days to go outside. Or to sit inside and mend tools or plan for the next season. That’s all part of farming.)

So that’s Modest Proposal #4 for post-Covid churches. Stop begging for Sunday School teachers and start training farmers.

*If you’re interested in a community of faith that’s doing this take a look at Farm Church in Durham, North Carolina.