Loving our neighbors, including the leafy ones

Fresh out of seminary and serving in my first ministry call, I moved three times in 18 months. That third place was a keeper. I lived there for just over two years, and one of my favorite things was watching the plants come alive in spring.

The first year was all discovery as I walked my neighborhood route each morning. “What will that bud become?” I wondered. “What is that poking up from the ground?”

The second year was like welcoming back old friends. Now I knew what that bud would become, and I couldn’t wait to see it blossom again.

I also began to learn the names of these particular neighbors. After living 18 years with a plant-enthusiast mother, I knew some already. But as a transplant to the South, I was discovering other vegetation that was completely new to me.

After Wednesday prayer meetings at church, I would ask my congregation’s resident horticulturist and native plant rescuer to name what I was watching come alive. The woody bush with unfurling fernlike leaves was an oakleaf hydrangea. The pink flowers bursting into bloom just after Ash Wednesday were Lenten roses — though, thanks to Tom, I always think of their Latin name, Helleborus, first.

I could have downloaded an app, but playing the guessing game with Tom and learning any bonus facts he shared was much more fun.

Getting to know my plant neighbors in this way came at the price that any relationship costs, however. As the seasoned Mr. Joe teaches the young nurse Jenny Lee in an early episode of the BBC series “Call the Midwife,”“If you open yourself to love, it follows you open yourself to heartache.” Loving makes us more vulnerable to pain when the person or thing we love is hurt.

And so I gasped with sorrow the first time I saw that a sturdy bystander to my evening commute, the big oak, had been cut down. The block looked so exposed now, a lonely stump the only reminder of what had grown there. I missed the unruly fig tree that had sprawled haphazardly next to an abandoned apartment building. The bees and I had shared in its sweet fruit each summer. In some small way, I felt the pain of the land when a starter home on a corner lot was demolished and replaced by a massive house with a much larger footprint.

We live in a time when the earth is crying out in pain, and the accompanying grief is real.

It can be difficult to know how to respond, our feelings of helplessness compounded when we see our carefully curated recycling comingled and trucked away with the questionable contents of a neighbor’s bin. We may feel overwhelmed in the absence of infrastructure changes that are desperately needed. Some of us may feel paralyzed. Others may teeter on the edge of despair.

Yet the gospel, the good news, never comes in general. We serve a God who is insistently particular. Out of all the people in ancient Mesopotamia, God called a particular person — Abraham. Out of all the moments in history, God dwelled among us in the flesh at a particular time — for only a few short decades. God counts the hairs on our heads (Luke 12:7) and the months until the doe gives birth (Job 39:1-3).

Those neighborhood walks — in contrast to the ineffectiveness of fear-based arguments — have made me wonder what it might look like to follow God’s example of attending to the particular as we seek to care for creation.

What if, today, we are not being asked to save the world? What if, today, we are simply being invited to learn the names of our rooted vegetable-, fruit-, and flower-bearing neighbors?

Go outside. Look around. What do you see?

Depending on where you live, there might be acres of land to explore — or a single weed in a crack of concrete, stubbornly declaring its will to live.

Either way, take a moment to meet your vegetative neighbor. Download an app. Ask a friend. Find your local arboretum.

As you come and go, begin calling your neighbors by name. Notice what happens to them as the seasons change. Offer gratitude for the oxygen they are producing and the beauty they bring.

I have a hunch that when we engage in this practice over time, something in us will begin to shift. These neighbors will become part of our realm of care and concern. We might pull back the invasive vine threatening to suffocate a friendly bush or impulsively prune a fruit tree in an abandoned lot. We might notice how the warm winter day that boosts our mood also coaxes flowers to bloom before the pollinators are ready.

As we begin to love what God loves, we begin to act in ways that seek more than our own good. Not because we are afraid. Not because we feel guilty. But because our lives have become entangled with what grows up around us. We realize that our comfort is no longer the sole objective.

With our lives and our well-being bound up with the plants that surround us, we might decide to use our voices to write our representatives or leverage our purchasing power to invest in less-wasteful products. We might spill a bit more sweat or spray fewer chemicals because our practice of noticing and naming our vegetative neighbors has reminded us that God’s work in the particular has a tendency to reach to the depths of the soil and the ends of the earth.

In an inconspicuous corner of the campus of Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri, a gathering of leaders considers what will rise in this spot later this year. But this is no contruction site. This is a garden.

It is now a patch of bare earth, with no sign of the greens, tomatoes and other food that will sprout there. But as the Rev. Dr. Kristen Leslie points out to the group, it’s warmed by full, direct sun, even on this chilly April day.

“The okra really love that,” says Leslie, the Harold Peters Schultz Professor of Pastoral Theology and Care at Eden and co-director of the garden project.

By late summer, the gorgeous, conical okra pods will be silhouetted against the blue of the late afternoon sky, their organic architecture echoing the spires of the seminary’s main academic building.

“This was all a parking lot, so we had to bring in truckloads of soil to get started, but we add a little more each year,” Leslie says to the group, which includes the Rev. Dr. Heber Brown III, the founder of the Black Church Food Security Network; the Rev. Karen Pepmeier, co-director of the project; and a smattering of Eden alumni and students.

They’re looking at the garden of Eden — or, officially, the Eden Gleaning and Garden Project.

In 2022, through the efforts of dozens of volunteers and a handful of farmers, the project grew, gleaned and delivered over 14,000 pounds of fresh produce for distribution by feeding ministries and food banks in St. Louis.

But the four-year-old project is about more than fresh veggies. It is about the restorative work of entire systems through relationship and collective imagination.

What began as a simple garden now includes gleaning efforts with farmers two states away, as well as local community support through teaching new gardeners basic skills and providing supplies for simple container gardens.

Its latest commitment is to support a pastor in nearby Herculaneum, Missouri, who plans to turn the site of her town’s historic racially segregated schoolhouse into a center for place-based witness and healing.

Underlying all of this is a shared belief that local efforts by faith communities present a unique opportunity for relationships — to food, land and each other — to lead the way toward restorative justice in the mending of creation.

During their remarks at Eden’s annual spring convocation the previous day, Leslie and Brown, who is a national leader in creating Black food ecosystems, highlighted the connections among food security, pastoral care and grassroots efforts to offer healthy food to people in need.

“We’re not interested in creating new infrastructures,” Leslie said. “Instead, we work with preexisting organizations and build relationships. By operating through a relational network, … we can respond to the actual needs of our community and to the offerings of those with gifts to give.”

It started with an email

On Aug. 25, 2019, Pepmeier, then an Eden student, sent an email to Leslie wondering whether Leslie would be able to distribute some potatoes. One thousand pounds of potatoes were going to rot if someone didn’t claim them.

Pepmeier, who is from a rural farming community in Vincennes, Indiana, knew that Leslie worked with unhoused populations in St. Louis. She hoped to connect to a food ministry where the produce wouldn’t go to waste.

Plowing unharvested crops into the ground is common practice for many of the farmers, who grow produce for grocery chains, Pepmeier said.

In these operations, migrant workers harvest the crops once during a growing season, then move on to other areas of the country. Farmers lack the workers or the money for additional harvests, even though the plants keep producing enough for two or three, she said.

“All that produce is just left in the field to be tilled into the ground at the end of the season,” Pepmeier said.

Leslie had no difficulty finding food ministries that were thrilled to offer the potatoes. A seed was planted: How could Leslie and Pepmeier find ways to get more fresh produce to those who need it most?

They began a two-pronged approach in 2020. First they began conversations with farmers and restaurants to glean produce and perishables such as eggs and bread. By summer 2020, they made their first trip to Indiana to glean corn and potatoes.

They also planted a vegetable garden on Eden’s campus. Located next to the maintenance sheds, the garden site had only a thin layer of topsoil on top of a former parking lot. Leslie credits Pepmeier’s gardening experience and wisdom with their growing success.

“The first year, we planted what we wanted, gifting it to local food ministries I knew of through my work with unhoused folks,” Leslie said. “The second year, we asked the food ministries directly, ‘What would you like us to grow for you?’”

Produce is donated to preexisting ministries, such as the robust feeding ministry through Centennial Christian Church, where vegetables from the project make their way into free, balanced meals for the community.

The Gleaning and Garden Project makes fresh produce more readily available to the over 18% of St. Louis residents who, according to the USDA, live in a food desert, with no easy access to grocery stores.

As Leslie and Pepmeier were attempting to cultivate an oasis, the national conversation around food insecurity offered new language that clarified the scope of their work.

Food justice activist Karen Washington coined the term “food apartheid” — reflecting the racial, geographical, religious and economic aspects of food systems — to replace the term “food desert.”

And Brown’s work with the Black Church Food Security Network helped illuminate the racial dimension of food insecurity across the country, including in St. Louis.

According to a 2019 report by the Interdisciplinary Environmental Clinic at Washington University School of Law, Black residents of St. Louis are more than twice as likely as white residents to have limited access to healthy food, a fact that the report authors cite as an act of environmental racism.

“Pastoral care takes place in the public arena,” Leslie said. “When we engage in community and with the land, we engage directly with unjust systems. When we garden and glean, we interrupt those systems. That is healing work. Transformative work.”

‘Let’s think bigger …’

As the project evolved, Leslie and Pepmeier began to see how transformative it could be.

They continued to focus on the relationships and connections that came from gleaning and gardening in community. “We were doing good work, but Kristen said, ‘Let’s think bigger!’” Pepmeier said.

It was around this time that Leslie asked the Rev. Gabrielle Kennedy whether the project could partner with Faith HEALS, an organization dedicated to improving the health and well-being of African Americans in St. Louis.

The idea: distribute produce to people coming to pop-up COVID testing sites Kennedy coordinated in the early months of the pandemic.

An Eden graduate, Kennedy also was serving as pastor at Buren Chapel AME in Herculaneum, Missouri, a town about a half-hour drive south of the seminary on the Mississippi River.

As Kennedy saw firsthand the ways that organizations and churches could partner with communities around food, health and wellness, she felt something click.

“This could be it,” she remembers thinking when she toured the Eden garden and gleaned with other volunteers.

Under her leadership, Buren Chapel joined the Black Church Food Security Network and built three raised garden beds on a long strip of mown grass leading up to Buren Chapel’s tidy sanctuary — soon to be expanded to 10 beds.

The garden would sustain the congregation through the lockdown days of the pandemic.

“That garden has kept our church alive,” Kennedy said. “It was something we could do safely when we couldn’t gather indoors. It gave us something to look forward to, to rally around, and everyone in our community could get involved.”

Through the garden, the church has fostered partnerships with local schools, people in Herculaneum and the Cooperative Extension of Lincoln University, an HBCU in Mid-Missouri.

But Kennedy’s vision is much larger. In 2022, she helped launch the Buren-Douglass Healing Center. As their first task, they acquired the historic Douglass Schoolhouse and adjoining property. The school, named after Frederick Douglass, was founded in 1912 as the school for Black students, which it served in two locations until desegregation in 1957.

“I have congregation members who were the last kindergarten class to attend there before the schools were desegregated, so its history really means something to us,” Kennedy said. “We don’t want that forgotten.”

Another part of the community’s story is one of ecological degradation.

For more than 100 years, the town was the site of one of the largest lead smelting operations in the country. The Doe Run Company’s Herculaneum smelter closed in 2013 in compliance with an agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Herculaneum underwent a mandated remediation, which included razing houses and removing topsoil contaminated with lead dust. Because the pollution most affected historically Black-owned and Black-occupied properties in town, the remediation also deeply disrupted the Black community.

Kennedy wants the new center to be a place that is “ecologically grounded, honors natural resources, and invites people to come and spend time.”

“We want to honor the history of the land and the people who lived here, to tell the stories of harm,” Kennedy said, “but also to offer the community an experience of a place that is being healed.”

Kennedy said she sees her work in creation care as a reversal of historical and institutional stresses placed on Black Americans. And doing so in community offers Kennedy glimpses of grace.

“There are few examples of God’s love as pure and straightforward as watching a garden grow, as watching the provision of food in real time,” she said. “And justice is woven into it all when a person can see how they participated in some aspect of bringing their own food into being. There is a deep dignity there.”

Connections and community

As a community organizer, Kennedy ensured that the seeds of the Buren-Douglass Healing Center were rooted in local resources.

“We want to build this place through connections and community,” she said. “People think the work we’re doing is about building a garden, but the real work is about building trust.”

Kennedy reached out to the Eden Gleaning and Garden Project to serve as a hub for generative conversations about resource sharing, visions for the center and future endeavors.

Leslie sees the project’s role as a supporting one.

“I can’t step in as an expert,” she said; community members are the experts of their own contexts. “But I can share what we’ve done and foster conversations where folks can share dreams, connections and resources while building relationships.”

In the fall of 2022, the project hosted a meal and space for Kennedy and seven other Black women to gather at the garden at the seminary.

“We’re moving at the speed of trust,” Leslie said. “But already, there’s so much energy and excitement around the healing potential of connecting to others and to the land in liberative ways.”

Kennedy agreed, confident that new partnerships will continue to emerge.

“Really, anyone is welcome at the table. There are so many doorways into this work, which tells me that it’s not just about one kind of people’s liberation; it’s about collective liberation,” she said.

Less tangible harvests

While Kennedy prepares the soil in Herculaneum, Leslie and Pepmeier have continued to lead gleaning trips, workshops and a community course on the project through Eden.

Participants read the gleaning codes of Deuteronomy and Leviticus alongside the history of United States land policy, such as the Homestead Act of 1862 and the swift 1865 overturn of the “40 acres and a mule” promise to former slaves.

Reflecting on the less tangible harvests of the project, Pepmeier noted the instantaneous yet deep-rooted connections that have emerged among volunteers who were strangers prior to meeting in the fields.

“I can even see a change in the farmers,” Pepmeier said. She got a call in 2022 from a farmer she had known for years, she said. She’d gleaned his fields earlier that season.

But now he wanted to help in another way. He had paid his workers to harvest a field for a second time, knowing that the crops would be donated, not sold to market.

“He self-initiated a food distribution. That never would have happened before,” she said.

It’s one example of how the Eden Gleaning and Garden Project has become a kind of farm-to-table fellowship, where good, nourishing meals are blessed by many on their way to the plate.

“A garden is a resource,” said Pat Pendleton, of Centennial Christian Church. “But is a garden just resource for produce? Or is it also for connection? Healing? Relationship?”

As the son of an itinerant Baptist minister, Ambrose Carroll moved with his family from city to city as his father felt called to serve new churches: Atlanta, St. Louis, Compton, Santa Ana and finally, Oakland, California.

But there was one constant in the lives of the six Carroll siblings. Summers and holidays were spent back on the family homestead in the tiny community of Holly, Louisiana.

In that African American hamlet, 30 miles south of Shreveport, Carroll’s grandfather plowed the land, grew vegetables and raised livestock. It was a hardscrabble life — the family had no running water until 1979 — but it was rooted in conserving resources and caring for the Earth.

Years later, when Carroll began his own itinerant Baptist ministry, the memory of his family’s ecological roots tugged at him.

“Even though we grew up in the inner city and experienced blight and areas of disconnect, we grew up with a certain respect and reverence for the land,” he said.

In his own ministry — he now lives in Oakland, California, and pastors The Church by the Side of the Road in Berkeley — the Rev. Ambrose Carroll has made care for the Earth his signal calling.

Through his nonprofit organization Green The Church, he and his siblings, three of whom also are ministers, encourage African American congregations to commit to an environmental theology that promotes sustainable practices and helps build economic and political change.

With a small annual budget of about $150,000, the organization has helped some 1,000 churches consider taking small steps toward environmental healing, mostly through its annual summits and its continued work to build a core of advocates promoting green theology in African American congregations.

Environmental awareness has sometimes taken a back seat to other issues in Black communities, including economic and health care disparities, Carroll and others acknowledge. Those have been especially evident in the COVID-19 pandemic, which has affected African Americans in disproportionate numbers.

But pastors such as Carroll and a growing cadre of others point out that many racial disparities are rooted in environmental degradation, from exposure to lead paint and mold to an absence of nearby supermarkets — a phenomenon some have labeled “food apartheid.” National leaders such as the Rev. William J. Barber are supporters of the growing movement.

Through its national summits (this year’s has been postponed to 2021 because of the pandemic), Green The Church is educating Black congregations about ways they can strengthen their communities by performing energy audits, installing solar panels, starting healthy food programs and lobbying for green jobs and investments in poor communities.

One way to do that is to connect to the African American experience.

“I got so tired of people saying, ‘African Americans don’t engage in nature or don’t appreciate the great outdoors,’” said Veronica Kyle, the statewide outreach director for Faith in Place, an Illinois-based interfaith organization that works on environmental stewardship and has partnered with Green The Church.

“No one ever talks about our bittersweet relationship with nature,” she said. “We have been both picking the fruit and strange fruit.”

Reconnecting African Americans with their personal and often traumatic history with the land lies at the heart of Carroll’s ministry, too. Often, he has found, those stories begin or end with the Great Migration that led some 6 million Black people to leave a life of sharecropping in the Jim Crow South for industrial jobs in the North, Midwest and West.

“Our ability to tell these stories is what I’m excited about,” said Carroll, 51. “The stories are here for us. We want to spend time building a repository of them.”

The pain of dislocation

Like many African Americans, Carroll himself has a story rooted in the pain of dislocation.

Before being called to the ministry, Carroll’s father, Benjamin Carroll Sr., was an agriculture major at Southern University and A&M College in Baton Rouge.

The elder Carroll planted gardens wherever the family lived, enriching their meals with homegrown vegetables. He kept a freezer stocked with beef or pork he bought through local farmers to avoid the industrial meat chain.

One day, Ambrose Carroll remembered, his father walked through the door with live chickens.

But when the Carrolls left the South, they relocated to mostly poor, urban neighborhoods. By the time Ambrose was a teen, they were living in Oakland in the shadow of the Granny Goose potato chip factory.

Apart from summers back in Holly, Louisiana, the Carrolls had become city dwellers. It took a toll on their health. In 1983, Benjamin Carroll traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, to attend a National Baptist Convention and collapsed in the pulpit of First Baptist Church. He died at 44, having suffered a stroke. In later years, his wife, Ambrose’s mother, was treated for cancer. (She has since retired in Louisiana.)

Ambrose Carroll followed his father into the ministry, earning a master of divinity from the Interdenominational Theological Center’s Morehouse School of Religion in Atlanta, as had his father. It was there in the early 1990s that Carroll first heard about creation care, the theological approach that emphasizes the restoration and conservation of the Earth and its ecosystem as a central teaching of the Christian faith. Carroll believes that creation care can also reconnect Christian communities with the healing cultures of Native Americans and with humanity more broadly.

He returned to Oakland, was ordained in an American Baptist church, served in various churches and then completed a doctorate in ministry at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio.

“I learned much about liberation theology and the battle for justice,” Carroll said. “But I always wondered, what would be the issue of our day?”

He was aware of the growing use of the term “environmental racism.” The idea began to crystalize in the 1980s in recognition of how communities of color are disproportionately affected by government or corporate rules, regulations and policies that deliberately or through neglect expose Black people to environmental hazards.

But what brought the issue home for Carroll was a book he picked up while serving a church in Denver, Colorado. The 2008 volume is called “The Green Collar Economy,” by former Obama administration adviser and now CNN political contributor Van Jones. In it, Jones argues for solving the ecological crisis in a way that lifts people out of poverty by creating well-paying green jobs in their communities.

Jones’ clear-eyed urgency about the ecological crisis is coupled with a conviction that a new green economy should provide equal opportunity and protect workers’ civil rights.

For the first time that Carroll could see, this was an attempt to bridge the divide between affluent, mostly white people who cared about saving polar bears and rainforests with working-class Black communities whose needs were far more immediate: living wages, good schools, a lower prison population.

“The language of environmentalism always seemed like something other,” Carroll said. “The book helped me to see it was not something we had to learn externally but internally, as a part of our identity.”

In taking up the cause of environmentalism, he would try to show his flock — then in Denver — how caring for the environment was part of their story, too.

‘The Black church needs its own voice’

It was at a meeting in Washington, D.C., in 2010 that Carroll’s vision grew.

Carroll had been accepted for a fellowship with Green For All, a training program started by Jones to cultivate leaders of color who could advocate for equitable green solutions in low-income communities. (Green For All has since merged with Dream Corps, an organization that works to close prisons.)

As part of his fellowship, Carroll met in the nation’s capital with a group of people strategizing how to bring environmental awareness to their communities.

Someone from West Virginia talked of “greening” the coal-mining community. A Native American man talked of “greening” the reservation. That’s when Carroll decided he would found an organization called “Green The Church.”

“When I was working with Green For All, there were a lot of people of color working on environmental issues, but there were not a lot of Black church leaders,” Carroll said. “The church is seen as conservative and not forward thinking.”

What was missing was clear, he said — “the Black church needs its own voice on the issue.” And he would provide it.

Green The Church, which was set up under the auspices of his family’s nonprofit, Carroll Ministries International, works with several state affiliate chapters to encourage church projects that strengthen the local food economy, plant community gardens, conduct energy audits and install rooftop solar panels and rainwater cisterns.

It now wants to move beyond its annual summits and start an online “ambassador’s course,” which will train 100 church members to help form “green teams” in local congregations and develop a core of 500 allies in those churches.

Already, it has seen some Black churches take bold green initiatives.

In Baltimore, the Rev. Heber Brown III has started the Black Church Food Security Network out of his Pleasant Hope Baptist Church. It works with Black farmers to deliver their bounty to the city’s hard-hit neighborhoods.

In Chicago, Trinity United Church of Christ has retrofitted its building to make it environmentally sustainable, and in 2017 the church dedicated the site of a 27-acre “green” intergenerational community called Imani Village.

The project already includes a medical center and will eventually offer affordable housing, a healing garden and a 5-acre farm.

The Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III, Trinity’s pastor, said he believes liberation is directly connected to creation care. As a result, the church has a commitment to awarding jobs to minority contractors who will hire the formerly incarcerated and commit to green practices.

Carroll’s own church has taken steps to change the culture. The Church by the Side of the Road offers water stations for Berkeley bikers. It composts, recycles, uses silverware instead of plastic utensils and serves lean, nutrient-rich foods at its congregational meals. It is transitioning away from printing programs and bulletins and is planning to build an herb garden. Photos of the natural world hang on the church walls.

The work of “greening” can be demanding, and making the case for the environment may be especially hard in the current context, as Black communities struggle with biased and violent policing and systemic racism.

“It’s a very tough area,” said the Rev. Gerald Durley, the national board chair of Interfaith Power & Light and a longtime Baptist pastor from Atlanta. “We have so many other priorities. But Ambrose is good at showing all of this is interconnected.”

Recently, the Rev. William J. Barber’s Poor People’s Campaign listed “ecological devastation” as one of the top societal evils behind its demands for change (alongside racism, poverty and militarism). Barber, one of the nation’s foremost civil rights leaders, sees the threat of climate change as one of the main injustices affecting the nation’s poor.

Sharing the stories of connection and dislocation

One way to break through, Carroll is convinced, is to engage with people’s own personal stories.

“Ambrose has recognized the need to culturalize the conversation so it would have more impact in the African American community,” said Kyle, the Chicago-based activist with Faith in Place.

By “culturalize,” Kyle means to make the conversation relevant to an American Black context, a strategy that has also worked with her Migration & Me program, which encourages African Americans to share their migration stories — often out in nature.

Moss said he also tries to make these connections.

“I share with people, ‘Your grandmother had a garden in the back. Your grandmother made quilts, which is a form of recycling. Our ancestors created gumbo, which is a creative use of things people thought could not be used,’” he said.

“When you explain those pieces, people are like, ‘Oh yes. We came from Mississippi and Arkansas. We were people connected to the land and to the soil, and coming into an urban environment disconnected us from the soil.’ We’re seeing a reemergence of people reconnected to the soil in Northern urban environments.”

Carroll doesn’t flinch from the pain of those stories. He has often spoken of how his ancestors bought their land in 1878, only to lose it during the period following Reconstruction when they became sharecroppers tilling other people’s land.

Still, his ancestors’ legacy of good stewardship, thrift and hard work was part of the inheritance they passed down to their descendants.

Carroll hopes that in time, other African Americans might see their stories as part of a longer narrative about care for the Earth.

“The more you tell the story,” Carroll said, “the more others can come alongside you.”