Creating A Faith Based Community Garden – Much to Reflect On

Time to plant seeds

Garden season is underway here in the Pacific NW. I have already planted lettuce, spinach, Chinese greens, mesculin mix, cabbages, cauliflowers and peas inside on the front porch. This morning I emailed our burgeoning garden community of those keen to get their hands in the dirt. (If you would like to join us once a month for fellowship and a shared time of gardening please let me know.)

All of this has meant I am doing a lot of reflecting on creating a faith based community garden. There are some excellent websites and articles out there to help with this and I have blogged about them in previous years

More Resources for Creating a Faith Based Community Garden

Tips for Creating a Faith Based Community Garden – part 1

Tips For Creating a Faith Based Community Garden – part 2

This year my thoughts have revolved around the concept of community garden, especially in faith based gardens. So few encourage community. Sometimes the plots are even surrounded by fences that say in no uncertain terms – this is mine.  Often the work for tending the plots falls to one or two people who often religiously tend everyone else’s space. Sometimes the produce goes bad because people are too busy to harvest it.

For me there are three must do requirements for a faith based community garden:

1. Create community. One church I heard of invited the congregation out into the garden once a month after the morning service to help weed and tend the crops. That truly is a community garden. For us at the Mustard Seed House inviting others to our monthly garden days has increased the feel of community and extended it to a broader community as well. Sometimes we can also create a deeper sense of community with our neighbours just by being out in the front yard, and when a church plants a garden in its front yard and the neighbours walk past it makes a statement about the congregation’s concern for their community too.
2. Create a sacred space. Every garden should have a sacred space. At the least this should be a place that invites us to sit and enjoy the beauty of God’s creation. It should stir all the senses of sight, sound, taste, feel and smell. I will reflect on this more later in the week
3. Provide opportunities to share. The garden has taught me much about the economic views of our God who provides abundantly far more than we can ever use on our own. This abundance is meant to be shared – with the marginalized in gifts to food banks and community kitchens as well as with our friends and neighbours in harvest celebrations. So make sure that you plan at least one garden party this year where the garden produce has pride of place in the food on the table.

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Tips For Creating a Faith Based Community Garden – part 2

Here is the second part of the article I wrote for Patheos.com  And don’t forget to check out the resource list here.  Please email me or leave a comment if you have suggestions on other resources.

Labyrinth at Northgate community garden

I also think that incorporating sacred spaces within the garden is an essential part of this initial discussion.  Depending on the size of the garden, places for people to sit and meditate, prayer walks, community gathering spaces, even the inclusion of a labyrinth are all possible ways to strengthen peoples’ faith beyond the activities associated with food production.  Early monastic communities created walled gardens that were rich with biblical imagery, often centered around an apple tree, representing both the tree of Life in Genesis and the Cross of Christ.  Northgate community garden in Seattle surrounds a small hill on which a labyrinth has been created as a place for meditation.

Establishing these connections between our faith and the garden are essential.   In fact I am concerned that this faith based community garden movement may not be sustainable unless we learn how to connect our new found passions to our understanding of God and God’s world.

Once the basic garden plan has been moved through the appropriate church organizational process, it is usually fairly easy to recruit additional help, money and in-kind donations.  Every Sunday after the 10:30 am service parishioners at St Mary’s in Cadillac, Michigan, take turns weeding and tending the community garden.  Other churches have recruited their youth groups and retirees as volunteers or asked for donations like soil and building materials from businesses owned by church members.

Those outside the church may be interested in being involved too.  Sonlight Community Christian Reformed Church, also in Lynden went door to door asking neighbors if they would like to participate.  The Pumpkin Patch Community Garden at Millwood Presbyterian Church in Spokane Washington intentionally used Facebook and Twitter to help get the word out and had a Twitter inspired flash mob at there first big work day this year.  Or you might like to contact other environmental organizations that work in the area and may be interested in partnering with your efforts.  Third Christian Reformed Church in Lynden partnered with AROCHA, to develop a show garden that grows new and different varieties, provide teaching to help establish other community gardens, and hand out food to neighbors.

You may also like to approach your local Master Gardener’s association who are usually more than willing to provide expert advice if not labour and skills.  Local high school or community college students may also be interested in volunteering as a way to earn their required Service Learning credits.

Another important discussion for your planning group concerns the use of garden produce.  Many churches designate all or part of their harvest to local food banks and other organizations that feed the marginalized.  For example, Grace Church in Old Saybrook, CT gardens a quarter acre of land and donates its produce to the local Shoreline Soup Kitchens and Pantries helping to feed 2,000 needy families each month.  Last year the garden provided about 17,000 lbs of produce for the season.  Other churches distribute the food amongst church members or invite neighbors to freely harvest from the garden encouraging a sense of community that goes far beyond the church congregation.

Community gardens can also form the basis for other church related activities.  Classes in gardening, cooking and preserving can arise out of garden related activities.  Other classes on health and nutrition, healing the earth and other environmental issues and even spiritual formation can have their origins in such endeavors.  My own venture into conducting seminars on The Spirituality of Gardening grew out of constant prodding from friends who wanted to learn more about not just how to grow vegetables but also about how to connect their experiences to their faith.

Mongomery Victory Gardens in Silver Spring MD offers the following great advice for anyone contemplating starting a faith based community garden:

start with a small group of committed individuals, but work hard to involve the entire congregation in some way; look for ways to make the process educational, and to make connections to your faith tradition; enlist people, especially young people from the community outside the congregation; start small and do realistic planning, especially when it comes to people’s crops in the beginning; keep a garden log and update the congregation throughout the process; expect surprises and have fun.

Faith based community gardens, like any community project are not without their challenges.  People are concerned about safety and liability issues, whether the project is sustainable for the long run, who will do the weeding and harvesting, where the water and electricity will come from.  Even what to do with the sometimes overwhelming abundance that explodes over the summer can be a problem.   All of these are issues that need to be discussed and planned for.

No matter how many challenges there are, nothing can take away from the deep satisfaction of getting one’s hands into the earth, digging, planting and harvesting the bounty of God’s good creation.  Nor can they detract from the joy that engulfs as as we experience the awe inspiring generosity of a God who wants to provide abundantly for all of humankind.  The garden is a place of healing, of wholeness and of deeply spiritual encounters where God restores our bodies and our spirits in a way that is truly miraculous.

Tips for Creating a Faith Based Community Garden – part 1

I mentioned a few days ago when I posted the list of resources for developing a faith based community garden, that I would post the article I had written for Patheos.com in parts.  This is the first part of the article – part 2 will be posted tomorrow:

Community garden Lynden Washington

Vegetable gardening has been one major response to the economic recession. Tough economic times have sent people everywhere scurrying for garden books and packets of seed.  In 2009 an estimated 9 million Americans started gardens to supplement their diets. Even the White House planted an organic garden to supplement the presidential salads.  Community gardens are springing up in church parking lots, housing projects, and school playgrounds.  And in some urban areas on vacant blocks of land that have stood empty for years.

There are many reasons to start a church based community garden.  The most common motivation for faith-based community gardens is the opportunity to help those in need, especially during these turbulent times.  Others are concerned for their young and want to provide locally grown organic food and enable them to develop healthy eating habits.  Still others are motivated by the desire to heal our earth or want to provide a beautiful green space for their congregations and neighbors to enjoy God’s good creation.

A community garden is not just a place to grow food.  It is a way to express our faith and interact with God and God’s good creation.   Perhaps one reason God created human beings to tend the garden is because God knew that it is in the midst of a garden that we connect most intimately to the character and ways of our Creator.  Edythe Neumann who is helping Highland Community Church in Abbotsford British Columbia establish a garden commented:

The act of gardening can teach us something about ourselves, about our interdependence with the world of nature, about the relationships between work and creativity, and about how we might begin to discern those spiritual facts that elude us in other aspects of life.  Gardening can also be an expression of community and conversation – another way to say that God is with us on the earth, a way to picture God’s presence with us – through the gifts of nature and gardening together.

Church based community gardens require a lot of planning.  Bring together a small group of passionate individuals who really want to see this happen.  Before getting into discussions about garden logistics, talk about why you feel this is important as a church activity.  What are the benefits you hope the congregation and the neighborhood will gain?  How will it help people connect more intimately to each other and to God? What are the values and characteristics of God’s kingdom that this garden could portray?

Jeff showing off tomatoes at Five Loaves Farm Lynden

Jeff Littleton, who helped establish Five Loaves farm which is developing a network of community gardens on church properties in Lynden Washington told me:

The garden teaches at least two key messages beyond that of vegetables or lady bugs.  One is for our church: to share, to cooperate with, to relax, to enjoy each and everybody whatever faith or worldview.  The other is for our community: their capturing that these “church people” can be trusted, they do live out what they say, they love us… and ‘I want to know why.’  Somehow, some way this joint experience will transform lives and transform communities under God’s care.”

For me personally, the garden is a constant unfolding of new revelations about God.  Fostering community  and generosity are probably the most important kingdom values I have learned from involvement in community gardens.

Working together as a church community provides a wonderful sense of accomplishment and offers tremendous opportunity to strengthen intergenerational ties as young and old work side by side, weeding, watering and planting.  You may even like to designate a special area as a children’s garden where children are allowed to choose what grows and when it is harvested.  At our small intentional community, the Mustard Seed House we grow about 50% of our own vegetables.  Seven year old Catie not only gets a chance to introduce new vegetable varieties each year, she is also my best year round helper.  A few weeks ago she practiced her newly developed writing skills making markers for our tomato seedlings.

Catie decorates markers for tomato seedlings