If there is a story that seems to suggest that Jesus thinks little of animals and even Creation itself, this is it. And this is how most interpreters over the centuries, like St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, have understood it. They have asserted that this story tells us pigs are disposable beings, whose fate is not worth one iota of concern. We literally have license to kill.
When you come to this story with a mindset already formed by theologies dismissive of Creation, you will very likely come to those same conclusions. This is the story in general of how Christian theologians have assessed Creation’s significance in the whole Bible. Human-centric interpretations have built on earlier human-centric interpretations until readers’ minds and hearts can no longer actually directly experience what they encounter in Scripture nor in Creation.
I will admit that I first examined the story some years back with some trepidation. The story really did seem to suggest that the pigs did not matter to God.
But as I considered the actual data presented in the story, I found another possibility for how to read the story. This possibility – that the pigs actually resisted the demons and sacrificed their lives to eliminate the demons – is quite different from how the story is normally read. But in many ways I believe this reading actually fits the story and the context of Jesus’ life better than more traditional readings.
I am coming back to the story because there is a dimension to it that I didn’t address previously. That dimension is the connection of the story with the book of Job.
A number of other writers and theologians have pointed out the parallels. Specifically, in both Job and the New Testament story, supernatural forces of evil ask for permission from God to afflict a being part of Creation. In the case of Job, Satan asks permission to afflict Job to see if he will be righteous even if everything is taken away from him. In the case of the New Testament story, the demons (“Legion”) beg permission to enter into the nearby herd of pigs.
Is this parallel an accident? Not likely. As the following graphic details, the Bible is brimming with cross-references.
This is a graphic of the 63,779 cross references in the Bible. It was created by Chris Harrison, the Associate Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University and can be found here. Here’s how Harrison explains the chart: “The bar chart that runs along the bottom represents all of the chapters in the Bible, starting with Genesis 1 on the left. Books alternate in color between light and dark gray, with the first book of the Old and New Testaments in white. The length of each bar denotes the number of verses in that chapter (for instance, the longest bar is the longest chapter in the Bible, Psalm 119). Each of the 63,779 cross references found in the Bible are depicted by a single arc – the color corresponds to the distance between the two chapters, creating a rainbow-like effect.”
Just one example of a meaningful cross reference is when Jesus says, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” while on the cross. This is the first phrase of Psalm 22. This poem initially conveys the experience of being surrounded by those hate you and feeling an overwhelming sense of abandonment. The way this psalm describes the details of that abandonment is eerily parallel to the details of Jesus’ crucifixion. This further roots Jesus and his mission in what was the Scripture of that time. Then, in a dramatic turn, the psalmist voices hope in God’s rescue and asserts that all the families of the nations shall someday worship before God. Jesus’ reference to the psalm creates deeper resonance for the pain he is suffering while also conveying his faith and certainty in an eventual triumph of God’s love. All of this, in a concise way, adds dimensional depth and meaning to that moment.
Similarly, the parallel in the pigs and demon story with the book of Job should prompt us to look for common themes in both stories. In fact, this thematic hyperlink should actually serve as a filter for correct understanding of the story. An interpretation of the pigs and demons story that is in discord with the story of Job must be missing the boat.
There are three elements I see in the book of Job that have significance for the story of the pigs, demons, and Jesus. I detail those below and then weave those elements together with my interpretation of the pigs and demons story.
Insight #1: Creation as Revelation and Delight of God (Job 38-41)
The most dramatic point in the book of Job is when God answers Job’s calls for God to present himself. But instead of arguing with Job about his situation and why Job is suffering, God proceeds to respond with some of the most vivid, expansive Creation poetry ever heard. Here is just a sample from Job 38: 39-41:
Can you hunt the prey for the lion, Or satisfy the appetite of the young lions, When they crouch in their dens Or lie in wait in their thicket? Who provides for the raven its prey, When its youngest ones cry to God for help, And wander about for lack of food?
The book of Job asserts that by paying attention to the vast scale, complexity, beauty, and pure teemingness of life on earth and in the sea one somehow gets a sense of God and God’s transcendence. In short, Creation in its full scope is a revelation of God’s power, majesty, creativity, and mystery. If one reads this and other books of the Bible, it is clear that God is not just aware of this vibrant world but is somehow sustaining of it. A verse I find especially beautiful is Psalm 145:16 – “You open your hand; you satisfy the desire of every living thing.”
The implication is clear. For consistency with the Job-like situation, we cannot read the story of the demons and the pigs as a narrative that dismisses any part of Creation as outside of God’s concern and blessedness. In fact, I would argue this is where the demons make their fatal mistake. They may have assumed the pigs would not have their own volition and readiness to act for God’s purposes.
Insight #2: Creation Teaches Us (Job 12:7-10)
When I interviewed John Kempf and asked him what his favorite Bible verses were, he brought my attention to Job 12:7-10:
But ask the beasts, and they will teach you; the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you; or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this? In his hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of all mankind.
Interestingly, the first two verses actually foreshadow how God will respond to Job later in the story. This is ironic, because these are Job’s own words to his friends. He is telling his friends to look at Creation to be better grounded in their understanding of God. Job’s words suggest that by having the humility to listen to and to be taught by Creation, we will gain wisdom about God.
How many of us really read these words? Are we really ready to allow our hearts and minds to be impacted? We are used to dictating to Creation what we need and what we will take. Our natural human instinct is to consider ourselves the crown of Creation. What can “dumb” nature teach us, we who are “superior” beings?
And what we learn in Job 12:9-10 is the humbling realization that humanity and the rest of Creation share a common identity. We all exist by the creative power and sustaining grace of God. We do not have ultimate power over ourselves.
The appropriate response to this insight is profound humility before God and a sense of existential kinship with the rest of Creation.
As we consider the story of the pigs and the demons, we must bring humble openness to learning from Creation.
Insight #3: Job’s Righteousness Revealed in Selfless Act (Job 42:7-10)
Reread the last chapter of Job. In our abbreviated memory of the story, we make a beeline from Job’s submission in the face of God’s overwhelming grandeur and hidden purposes to Job’s renewal and restoration.
That misses a crucial section of the story.
In the end, Job is called upon, despite having suffered in so many ways, to pray for Eliphaz and the other two friends who had made Job’s suffering worse. Those friends and the theologies they applied to Job’s situation had not correctly discerned what was happening to Job nor why. Their mistakes and the harm those mistakes caused to Job needed some kind of atonement. Job is called upon to pray to God to forgive those three friends.
And even here we must read carefully. Job agrees to pray for his friends without knowing whether his fortunes will be restored.
Think of that. It is Job who has suffered from what God has allowed Satan to do to him. Not only that, his friends’ arguments compounded the suffering he was already experiencing. He is still, presumably, suffering from the physical afflictions Satan unleashed on him. God has just overwhelmed him and reprimanded him. And Job is asked to act for others with no promise of his own life condition being changed.
And what does Job do? He prays for his friends.
He likely does so out of compassion. He probably does so, too, because he hears from his friends that God had dictated that Job’s prayers were necessary.
And God accepts his prayers. We can assume, I believe, that the prayer is accepted because Job has a new level of humility and faithfulness to God.
The importance of this act of praying is emphasized in Job 42:8-10 by four references to Job’s prayer.
“Now therefore take seven bulls and seven rams and go to my servant Job and offer up a burnt offering for yourselves. And my servant Job shall pray for you, for I will accept his prayer not to deal with you according to your folly. For you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has. So Eliphiz the Temanite and Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite went and did what the Lord has told them, and the Lord accepted Job’s prayer. And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job, when he had prayed for his friends. And the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before.”
Again, Job does not know that his fortunes will be restored when he decides to pray and acts on that decision. Only after he prays does God restore Job’s fortunes.
That act of selfless prayer resolves Satan’s challenge that had launched the whole drama. Job, Satan asserts, would not stay righteous even when he has almost everything taken away. In other words, the moment when God’s grandeur overwhelms Job is not the resolution of the story question. Job’s willingness to act for his friends and for God’s purposes is the resolution.
Job’s demonstrates his resilient righteousness by the selfless compassion and obedience that God is calling upon to him to have.
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Looking Again at the Story of the Demons and Pigs
There are multiple ways in which the thematic hyperlink in the demons and pigs story to the book of Job helps us better understand the underlying meaning of the New Testament story.
Let’s start at the highest and most obvious level – the fact that the demon legion must beg permission of Jesus parallels the situation in Job where Satan needs to ask permission before he can do anything to Job. This establishes Jesus as possessing the power and position of God.
Let’s go to the next level – the drama in each of the two stories.
In Job, the wandering Satan wants permission to torment Job to discredit God by asserting that Job only is righteous because he has been richly blessed by God. This gives Job’s situation cosmic stakes. If Job will stray from righteousness, then Satan will not just have damaged Job but will have proven that God failed when he created humanity. Why? Because God’s hope of having right relationship with humanity out of humanity’s free devotion to God, even when devotion to God is not accompanied by material comfort, had failed.
In the New Testament story, the demons desperately seek to continue to exist in this world by being allowed to move into a herd of pigs. There are cosmic stakes here, too. One is whether Creation, in the form of the pigs, can be twisted and perverted away from its goodness, the goodness that God endowed it with. Another is whether Jesus will allow the demons to continue to be a threat in the region. Will Jesus allow evil to persist?
So, as we read this story and specifically this element of testing, we should read the story like we read the story of Job for the first time. As we wondered if Job’s faith will falter, we must also wonder if the pigs, as surprising representatives of sentient Creation, will falter and allow the demon legion to prevail by permitting them to stay in this plane of existence.
(Here it is important to remember, as I asserted in my earlier piece, that the goal of the demons was to continue in existence in this existence. They would have had no reason to want to cause their hosts – the pigs – to die.)
This is where the three insights from Job come to bear.
Creation in all of its grandeur, epic scale, and mystery is a revelation of God. Pigs, despite being considered unclean animals, are in their own way part of that revelation of a boundlessly creative Creator God. Just one distinctive feature of pigs is their intelligence. Another is their sensitive snout which allows them to root about in the soil, which can be either ecologically valuable or highly damaging, depending on the situation.
Joel Salatin has written this challenging and compelling book in his inimitable style about his Christian faith, his farming, and, yes, his pigs. Here is an essay of his that explores briefly some of the themes he more deeply engages with in the book.
Neither the Romans, for whom pigs were an essential part of their culinary culture, nor the Jews saw pigs in the way God sees them. As Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz writes, “Jews associated the pig with the Roman empire, and the pig was the food of the enemy.”
How deeply unsettling and provocative would it be for both Romans and Jews to consider the possibility of pigs defeating a “Legion?”
How you choose to see pigs in the story reflects how you consider God’s earth. If you see pigs as lowly, dirty, expendable creatures, then you will tend to interpret the story in a way that degrades God’s Creation. But that stance towards Creation is in complete contradiction with the book of Job. If you take the book of Job seriously, then your interpretation of the story of the demons and pigs must begin with acknowledging that pigs are distinctive parts of Creation that have God’s attention and have their own desires.
Just as Job’s selflessness and obedience to God’s purposes with no promise of restoration ultimately proved his righteousness, I would assert that the pigs acted out of selfless service to God’s goodness by refusing to allow the demons twist them and use them for their own purposes. The spirit in which the pigs chose to do what they did is in the same chord as Job’s decision to pray for his friends. And their refusal, an act of spiritual struggle, caused them to lose their lives. You could even say the pigs’ decision prefigures Jesus’ own sacrificial death..
And there is precedence in the Bible for animals acting selflessly and having a better understanding of the spiritual realities around them than humans. We see those traits in Balaam’s donkey.
Paying attention to the thematic cross reference of the pigs and demons story to the book of Job should compel us to do three things. First, see the pigs as creatures, like the wild donkeys and ravens of God’s monologue in Job, that God sustains and cares about and who reflect God in some way. Second, we must shake off the theologies that have built up around this story, like a thick layer of barnacles on a ship’s hull, so that we can see the very real possibility that the pigs were ready to sacrifice their lives to be part of the cosmos-level struggle against evil and chaos. Third, we must pray to God for hearts humble enough to learn from the pigs.
If we do those three things, our minds and hearts will be open to the true spiritual significance of the story. And that will have implications for how we live out the joys and responsibilities of taking care of God’s earth.
My post about the Bible story involving the pigs, demons, amd Jesus has somehow ended up being the most popular article I have written.
This popularity, along with the the diversity of comments, tells me two things. First, this story from an ancient time and from three of the gospels is still profoundly provocative. In it, Jesus shows powers and a beyond-human presence. He is no mere wise man. Demons, which for 21st century readers raise all kinds of questions, also appear.
And there are the pigs.
Interestingly, we don’t see Jesus interacting with animals very much in the Gospels (although the story from Mark 1:12-13 is very significant), and even here he does not directly do so. We want to ask Jesus, “Do animals matter to you?” I want to ask him, “As someone from a Jewish agrarian society, what did you think when you saw the pigs?”
We have complicated perceptions of pigs, too. In Charlotte’s Web, we sympathize with a gentle, intelligent animal. Yet, we also associate pigs with many negative attributes. We don’t want to be called a pig.
In the story, the massive herd of pigs die suddenly and violently. Their death is clearly connected with the demons being allowed to go into them. But here it’s not clear from the story whether the pigs are passive creatures who are only acted upon in the story or whether they have volition of their own.
Even more strangely, as I have already written, we know pigs can swim. So how could they drown?
And this is where Biblical storytelling creates mystery as well. The story gives us discrete data points. It doesn’t give us a clear statement that explains how those data points fit together. It is up to the reader of the story to discern what that interpretive thread should be.
The second conclusion I gather from the interest in what I have written is that people are not convinced by the standard theological explanations of the story. Despite what many theologians and pastors have said, people with common sense and a heart for God’s Creation have a hard time accepting that Jesus would care nothing about the pigs.
All of this has made me even more curious about alternative readings of the story.
So when I came across one such interpretation in the book by Norman Wirzba entitled This Sacred Life, I wanted to share it with you.
Norman Wirzba is, by the way, someone I deeply admire. He is the Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Christian Theology at Duke University and Senior Fellow at Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics. He has also written books like Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land and From Nature to Creation: A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World. And I am just scratching the surface of the attention he gives to Creation in his thinking and writing.
So I was surprised to find myself disagreeing with one key element of his interpretation.
Let’s have you judge for yourself. Wirzba’s interpretation appears in a footnote that is just one large paragraph on page 171 of This Sacred Life. I’m sharing it below and have taken the liberty of dividing it into paragraphs for easier digestion:
“Readers of this story are often puzzled and dismayed that Jesus allows the demons (at their own request) to enter a large herd of swine that numbered around 2,000. Upon entering the swine, the whole herd ran down a steep bank and into the sea (or lake) where they drowned.
Why did Jesus allow this? Does Jesus really hate pigs? It is, of course, difficult to know exactly what Jesus was thinking at this moment, but one plausible interpretation would suggest that the death of the herd was Jesus’ indictment of intensive and abusive forms of ancient Roman agriculture practiced on latifundia in the provinces and around the Mediterranean that were known to degrade the land, creatures, and farm workers (many of whom were slaves). To raise a herd that size, the best that a pig can do is register as a “unit of production” (to borrow a term from today’s industrial agriculture).
It is important to note that Jesus did not send the demons into the pigs. The demons asked to be located there, sensing (perhaps) in the pigs’ abusive condition a place where their violent, demonic ways would be at home. If this interpretation is correct, then this story expands the scope of Jesus’s concern for the integrity and value of creaturely life beyond the man to include the pigs as well. Jesus, in other words, seeks to undo the powers that degrade people and pigs.”
There is much in Wirzba’s book that has enriched my understanding of the connection between God, humanity, and the rest of Creation. In particular, he highlights our “creatureliness.” We, like the rest of Creation, have been created. We are created kin. And the life we and all other creatures enjoy is sustained by God. Life, in other words, truly is a gift that we share in common with the rest of Creation.
It is out of that view of Creation that Wirzba’s theory comes.
I’m completely in alignment with that frame of thinking. I do believe that Jesus’ ultimate mission and purpose is to undo and defeat the evil in the world that degrades people and other living things. Jesus redeems people in part so they can be the stewards and humble shepherds of Creation they were meant to be.
Yet, I ultimately disagree with this interpretation of this specific story. Essentially, his interpretation asserts that by permitting the destruction of the pigs by demons Jesus was indicting the inhumane treatment of the pigs within the Roman latifundia system.
That, to borrow a phrase from the Vietnam war, is like bombing a village to save it.
Wirzba’s thinking seems to be based on the assumption that the size of the pig herd was unusually large and abusive. In fact, from what I can tell, large flocks and herds were not unusual in ancient times. As this blog post from the website The Theology of Work reminds us, Jacob made a gift of at least 550 animals to Esau in advance of them meeting again after many years of being apart (Genesis 32:13-15). From the fact that in the story the pigs did not appear to be fenced in, the pigs very likely had the ability to move about and enjoy fresh air and sunlight. This is completely unlike factory farms today.
Nor are large numbers of animals on a landscape inherently damaging to the land. An example of this is White Oak Pastures in rural Georgia, a farm run by Will Harris. View this video to get a sense of the scale of the thoughtful stewardship going on.
I don’t mean to be critical of Wirzba’s concerns and sensitivity to the pigs in the story at all. We have a tendency to bring our current concerns with us when we venture into the texts of the Bible. That’s not wrong. It’s entirely human. I’ll admit I do the same thing. But what we need to do is ask hard questions. Are, for example, the ancient texts and contexts of the Bible addressing those concerns in the ways we are thinking about them?
In this regard and in connection with this particular story, I have much more of a problem with the cultural blndness of Saint Augustine of Hippo than I do with Wirzba’s suggestion.
Here is a quotation I’ve found attributed to Saint Augustine in several places on the Internet (yes, I know i need to get a more specific notation) in regard to this story:
Christ himself shows that to refrain from the killing of animals and the destroying of plants is the height of superstition, for judging that there are no common rights between us and the beasts and trees, he sent the devils into a herd of swine and with a curse withered the tree on which he found no fruit.
The lack of nuance in this statement is breathtaking. The cruel callousness towards the life of God’s world is stunning.
A key nuance that Saint Augustine missed and that Norman Wirzba and others have noticed is that the demons asked to be allowed to go into the pigs. They were not driven there. How could Saint Augustine make the argument he did? I’m convinced that the forces of culture around him prejudiced his judgement against what is actually in the 66 books of the Bible and what open hearts can tell us.
This brings us back to a central theme of my past years of study and writing. Christians have demonstrated a lack of discernment in reading the whole Bible in relation to Creation for centuries now. We have also had a weak, shallow, narrow idea of what we are redeemed by Jesus for and for what role humanity was originally created. The result is that we ignore Creation or, even worse, rationalize the grinding of Creation under our heels.
This, I’m coming to believe, is why the interpretation of this puzzling, provocative story matters so much.
As I have been reading my way through Genesis, I came upon Genesis 27:27 in which, in the middle of a chapter focused on blessing, we read that God blesses fields.
The drama of the moment comes from Isaac blessing Jacob when he seemingly intends to be blessing Esau. This holds the reader’s mind and heart. It held mine. Then, in this verse which begins Isaac’s blessing of Jacob, Isaac says something remarkable. He says, “See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field that the LORD has blessed!”
It’s so easy to just keep on reading because of the Jacob-Esau drama.
I’ve done so many times. It’s so easy to overlook.
But this time the phrase caught my eye. I saw it anew.
What does it mean? What would God’s blessing of a field look like? What would a blessed field smell like?
In the story, Jacob is wearing the best garments of Esau who was a skilled hunter and “a man of the field.” So, presumably, Esau’s clothing smelled of the outdoors. Of wind and sun. Soil. Flowers. Soil. Dung. Perhaps of animals he had caught and carried. Complex odors of the outdoors. Creation.
Our tendency here is to focus on the deception taking place and to think of the reference to the odors only in connection with the deception. In fact, in my online research, I could find no commentary or reference that actually focused on the concept of God blessing fields.
You could make the argument that Isaac’s words in this verse are a rhetorical flourish. They transtion us smoothly into the next verse in which Isaac declares that Jacob will receive the dew of heaven and the fatness of the earth and plenty of grain and wine. You could make the argument that that is all this phrase is.
But I can’t just flick the significance of this verse away so easily. I’ve meditated on this for awhile and come away with two simple conclusions.
First, landscapes are blessed by God. I don’t know exactly what that means. Does that mean there are landscapes that aren’t blessed or receive lesser blessings like Esau did in the end? I don’t know.
But what we do know is that humanity is not the only element of Creation that God cares about. This is another reminder of that. Interestingly enough, the first blessing of the Bible comes in Genesis 1:22. It is not God blessing humanity. It is God blessing the life of the waters and the birds. So the idea of God lavishing attention on the life of this world is not new.
And that leads to the second point – if we are paying attention, we see that the life of God’s earth is part of the thread of the Biblical narrative, even the crucifixion.
This is yet another. The whole 27th chapter of Genesis is centered on who Isaac will bless first and the drama that follows. In this chapter about blessing, verse 27 serves as a small but strategic reminder. It reminds us that Creation is, from Genesis to Revelation, part of the arc of the Story of God’s intentions and work. This, in my mind, is ultimately about the unity of all things through Jesus that is mentioned in Ephesians 1:7-10.
You may be saying to yourself – is this reading too much into this verse? Is Nathan reaching here?
I’ve asked myself that question.
This is where the BibleProject has helped me. This non-profit ed-tech organization and animation studio helps people understand the literary design and core themes of the Bible in creative, clear ways.
In one of their booklets, they state their thesis – “The Bible tells one expertly crafted story from beginning to end.” Later, in the same booklet, they explain what that story is. “It’s a beautiful story about God’s plan to restore humans to their lost calling through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.”
It’s pretty clear to me that Genesis 27:27 could so easily have been written without a reference to God blessing a field.
But it wasn’t.
And in light of the careful, artful writing and editing of the Bible, we can’t believe that was an accident. Or a throwaway line.
Genesis 27:27 is, I believe, yet another intentionally placed signpost in the Bible. It is a signpost that reminds us that the life of God’s earth matters to God. I have experienced, as I know you have, the awe, fear, and reverence of God through encounters with Creation. Those encounters are also signposts of truth.
All of those signposts point us towards one of our lost callings.
That lost calling is for us to live out our human exceptionalism in the way God intended. This means enabling Creation to foster, keeping God’s earth like we would keep our own family.
P.S. When was the last time you smelled a field or a forest or some other landscape full of God’s life? Make a point of making that happen in 2022.
P.P.S. The story of the Jacob and Esau is far more complex and interesting than I originally realized. This essay by David J. Zucker about whether Jacob’s deception of his father was really the main deception going on is very provocative. And this thesis by Il-Sueng Chung gave me a whole different understanding of Esau. How often the Bible rewards close and careful reading!
I’ve forgotten how I first became aware of John Kempf, but I do know that fairly quickly I realized that he was a gifted man of deep faith following his calling with all of his heart, soul, strength, and mind. His calling is to change agriculture. He believes it is possible to grow crops in such a way that nature is renewed, healing food is produced, and farmers prosper. He is a leader in the regenerative agriculture world that is all about working within the template of how God’s amazing earth works when given the chance. Through the founding of Advancing Eco Agriculture, speaking, and his podcast, he has directly and indirectly impacted thousands of farmers and their families.
I’ve come to know him best through his Regenerative Agriculture Podcast through which I’ve learned a great deal and been profoundly inspired. So I had long hoped to interview him for this blog and was delighted when he accepted my invitation. You will find his story and words wise, surprising, provocative, and abundant in Christian faith.
John is a man of paradoxes. He is Amish and has been fundamentally formed by that unique Chrsitian culture. (You’ll note how easily he can quote Bible verse from memory, translating them effortlessly from the Pennsylvania German in which he first learned them into English.) Yet, he has a global perspective and spiritual gifts that most Christians might not know what to do with. To the best of my knowledge, he has not attended college but is one of the most erudite agricultural experts in the world. Despite his knowledge and having the entrepreneurial gumption to found Advancing Eco Agriculture and three other organizations, John is humble. In his podcasts, he genuinely seeks to learn all he can from every guest and gives them ample time to speak and tell their stories. He is a man of strong ideals and speaks his mind with blade-like precision. Yet, he is compassionate and has a delightful sense of humor.
John spoke to me from his front porch of his family’s new house with his new orchard in the background. It is one of the most stimulating conversations I’ve ever had. Enjoy.
Nathan: I’ve been grateful for all that you have done for regenerative agriculture. The fact that your podcast allows so many people to hear from so many people with knowledge and experience in the field is a great gift. I appreciate, too, how you tease out of the guests’ stories and insights. It’s especially interesting to me how woven into your conversations from time to time are clear indications that your faith is part and parcel of who you are. You don’t beat anybody up over the head with it, but it comes through. That’s a powerful witness.
John: Thank you, I’m glad for that feedback. I’m glad that it does come through. I am hesitant to make it overt. I want to lead people to that gracefully without beating them over the head with it. There have been times when I’ve wondered whether I need to be a bit more overt about it.
Nathan: It’s fun to hear you on other people’s podcasts as well. You were on the Thriving Farmer podcast back in 2020, and the podcaster asked you, “What books do you recommend,” and you said, “Secrets of the Millionaire Mind.” My wife and I were driving in the car, and I remember saying to my wife, “That doesn’t sound like John at all. It wasn’t about agriculture, and the title sounded a little gimmicky.” But because you recommended it, we bought the book. Well, it’s so good we’ve now shared it with some family and farmer friends. Thank you for recommending it.
John: What I’ve found particularly intriguing about the book is that it’s framed around money, which is a turnoff to some people. That’s unfortunate, because I think the digging that he does into our subconscious patterning is so important. It’s relevant and important for all of us to dig into that, and not just about money, but about all the facets of our life. That is what I really came away from the book with. Financial management is one window into understanding our subconscious biases, but what if we evaluated our approach to health, food, and medicine through a similar lens?
It’s been very humbling for me that the podcast and the work that we’re doing are having an impact. On the one hand I always had this dream of having a global impact and really being able to impact the entire beautiful planet that God has created, that he has put us here to be stewards of. But it’s still something to see that actually happening in reality. Some days I’m like, “Oh my goodness, is this actually happening?”
Nathan: Since your faith is clearly a part of what you do and why you do it, I thought it’d be wonderful to ask you questions and to share your answers with people who read the blog. So would you mind, first of all, John, just sharing some insights into your own spiritual development? You’ve often shared about what opened your eyes to a different paradigm of farming, but would you feel comfortable sharing anything about your spiritual development?
John: So I’m going to give you a very different narrative than of what I’m sure you might be anticipating. Growing up on the farm, I always felt very connected to nature, to wildlife and particularly to plants. And for me, being out in nature and observing plants and kind of communing with nature was worship. And in many ways I got as much or more out of that and developing a relationship with God than I did from reading the Bible. To me, the outdoors really was my Bible in some ways. Not that it was a replacement for the Bible obviously, but it really was a very worshipful experience.
There aren’t good words to describe this, so I’ll try my best. I’m going to use the terms observe. I was able to observe kind of the hidden nature of things. I was able to observe what the mature plant would look like when it was still only a seedling, even though I hadn’t ever encountered the mature plant before. Or vice versa. I was able to look at a landscape and just kind of have this intuitive knowing, this spiritual knowing, of what was the highest and best use for this landscape and how it would like to develop and to evolve. And as a part of this, I was also able to have a very strong connection to individual plants and groups of plants. Out on the farm, if we were growing a cantaloupe crop or a cucumber crop, if we made a foliar application of fertilizers, or pesticides, or whatever the case might be, or even not having made an application, I could walk into a field and kind of intuitively, instinctively feel what those plants were feeling. In some cases, I was even able to observe the energy flow around them.
You may have heard the interview that I had with Pascal Fafard where he spoke about actively fostering that ability, and developing the capacity to communicate with plants. I think this is a capacity that all humans have to varying degrees. It’s really Spirit-led communication through the Holy Spirit with God’s creation.
Associated with that ability to observe, there were also some really amazing experiences where I was able to work with plants that were unhealthy, or were perhaps being consumed by diseases and insects. Just by being able to be present with that plant for just a few moments and intend a different outcome and intend for this plant to recover and to express gratitude for the gifts that this plant was bringing into the world and by expressing love and appreciation, I would have problems completely resolve. In a few cases within hours or certainly within days. And then shifting that from plants to entire landscapes and having experiences with entire landscapes where I would ask certain pests to leave and they would leave, they would all move. I would designate one part of the field or one corner of the field and say, “You can come over here, but I need you to leave everything else alone.” And they would do that.
So, that then led to a deep study, because I grew up within the Amish culture in which those types of conversations were not considered acceptable or appropriate. I wanted to deeply understand what is happening, what’s going on here, from a spiritual perspective. And that really led to an in-depth study of the gifts of the Holy Spirit and what they really mean. Some of the things that Jesus meant when he said (I’m used to reading this in German, so I’ll paraphrase in English, and I’m sure you’ll pick up the reference), “Be perfect as I have been perfect,” which I think is in Mark. Our understanding of the word “perfect” is to mean without fault, but that’s not actually what Jesus meant in the original Hebrew. He did not mean to be without fault or without sin. What He meant was to be fully functional in all the gifts of the spirit.
Because that is what He was. He was fully functional in all the gifts of the Spirit, the nine different gifts (1 Corinthians 12: 1, 8-11). And so, to the best of my knowledge, he’s the only person that was fully functional in all nine of the gifts of the Spirit. And so I think when we read the parable of the talents and we read the parable of the different things that we are given, those to me are really an expression of the different gifts of the Spirit that we have been given.
And so we have this perception that the gifts of the Spirit are something that were active in the early Church, but are not active today. And yet there is no good rationale or justification for that. And in fact, there are many people who experience those gifts of the Spirit on a routine basis. And so, that really was what led me into kind of a deep spiritual search initially and was also kind of the foundation for what led to my scientific inquiry.
I then started trying to have this conversation with my family and parents and people around me about the gifts of the Spirit, about what I was experiencing and observing in working with plants in a spiritual framework, in a spiritual context. But that was not an acceptable conversation. I was misled and lots of other things, but that has now dramatically shifted. My family has come to a very different perspective over the last decade.
Nathan: As a result of your experience and what you’ve explained?
John: That may have been a contributing factor, but I think they were on their own personal journeys. So they’ve come to their own realizations as well. I think they’ve been led by the Spirit also. So, since that was not an acceptable context and not an acceptable framework, that then led me into a deep scientific pursuit to try to kind of work myself out of the corner that they thought they had worked me into. By being able to describe these phenomena from a scientific perspective… (I thought I could do that).
Nathan: So, it sounds like you had these personal experiences while also being immersed in the Amish culture of Christian faith. One of the things that strikes me about the Amish approach to Christianity is that it ties faith and life together. That was part of the fabric of your life.
John: It’s absolutely supposed to be a lived faith. It is not supposed to be something that you practice on Sunday and then you do something else the rest of the week.
Nathan: Exactly. In John 3:16, which is often used as the Gospel in a nutshell, Jesus declares that God loves the world. And then, Jesus states that whoever believes in him will have eternal life. From my understanding “eternal life” is describing a very abundant, full, complete whole life rather than only a life that goes on after death. I believe Jesus meant for us to make a connection in the verse that he did not spell out explicitly. He loves the world so much that helping people to have eternal life now, providing them all the gifts of the spirit to live out a full God inspired life now will actually help heal the world. His way of loving the world is to get more people to care for the world. Does that make any sense?
John: It makes perfect sense. And I think it aligns with another very common, incomplete understanding of what was Jesus really here for. You ask people a question, “What was He here for? What did He come here for?” The first answer is for the purpose of salvation. But, I think that’s only a third of the answer in my understanding. Yes, He did come for salvation. And salvation was a part of a much bigger piece, which was establishing His Kingdom here on earth. And not just here on earth, but also in heaven. Jesus had a kingdom message. We are actually here to be in His Kingdom while we are here on Earth.
Another aspect is He came to heal us physically. Not just at that moment in time, and not just spiritually, but He came to heal us spiritually and physically, then and now. So He was the great physician. He was the healer. And there’s so much reference to this when you start digging into it.
When we look at the gifts of the Spirit and when we look at, really having His Kingdom here on earth, and you talked about the aspect of eternal life in John 3:16, there’s a very simple question – “When does eternity begin? Does it begin when we die?” No, it is now present in this moment. This is a part of eternity.
Nathan: Absolutely. We’ve already talked about some Bible verses, do you have any favorite Bible verses or stories that kind of connect with this theme of the fact that being a Christian is about being here now and also caring for the Earth?
John: I have lots of favorites. One of them that I really enjoy is in Job 12:7-8 which says something like, “But ask the beasts, and they will teach you; the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you; or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will explain to you.” And to me, that is an expression of God’s capacity to speak to us through His Creation, and to have His Creation teach us if we are willing to learn and to adapt the insights that we gain to our own spiritual development.
I’ll give you one example. When I look at the process of photosynthesis, there are so many incredible parallels between plant growth and development and our own spiritual growth. In the process of photosynthesis, plants collect light energy, while the sun is shining, and they store that energy temporarily for a short period of time. And then they use that energy to grow at the darkest time of the night and at dawn. So 80% of plant growth, 80% of cell division, happens between 3:00 AM and 8:00 AM. So think about the spiritual parallels for that. We are also to collect energy from God’s light while the sun is shining on in our lives, so that we have the energy to grow during our trials and tribulations.
Nathan: How has reading the Bible and thinking about faith informed your farming and the agricultural consulting, and how has farming and consulting effected the way you read the Bible?
John: So it’s difficult in retrospect, to look back and see how our perception or how our frame of reference has evolved. But I think one of the foundational reasons for our success in our work at AEA and our consulting work is that I always try to deeply understand what are the root causes of why we have a certain symptom. And, of course, we must try to identify the root cause at different levels.
So if you look at an individual green bean plant, you ask the question, “Why does this green bean plant have aphids?” you will arrive at a certain set of answers that include mineral nutrition and the microbiome and how the soil was managed. And then you can back up and ask that question one level higher – “Why is this field being managed in a way that produces plants which are conducive to aphids?” And you go to another level, and you ask, “What is it that this farmer believes to be true that has led him to managing this field in this way?”
If you keep backing up and you keep digging deeper, this then leads to the question – “How is it that we, the farming community, profess to be composed primarily of Christians and yet we have this incredibly destructive model of agriculture?”
And so I tried to dig into that by asking these root cause questions of why? What is it that we as farmers believe to be true that has allowed us to adopt this destructive model of agriculture that is so degrading to God’s creation?
I believe that there are two fundamental misbeliefs or two beliefs that are fundamentally incorrect about the Christian worldview. And one of them is the belief that the Earth is cursed. We will always have diseases and insects. We will always struggle against nature. The second is the incorrect belief that we are here to dominate, we are here to have dominion over.
This, of course, leads to the verses in Genesis, where it says that we are to have dominion over all these animals. But when you look at what was intended to be communicated there in the original Hebrew, there’s actually a very different meaning than the way we perceive the English word dominion today. It is really meant to convey “to minister” or “to be a steward of.” And this is obviously reflected very clearly in Jesus’s New Testament teachings. We are here to be a minister. We’re here to be a steward. And I think on a kind of an intuitive soul level, on a spirit level, we all instinctively know that we are here to be stewards. It is not the correct framing for us to think that we are here to subjugate and to dominate.
But when you think about mainstream agriculture that has so tremendously degraded the environment and ecosystems and a planet that God has created, it is really based on this ethos of domination and subjugation.
The second misconception I noted earlier is that the Earth is cursed. And anyone who believes that the Earth is cursed and always will be cursed has not fully read and appreciated Genesis 8:21. Genesis 8:21 takes place after Noah emerged from the Ark, and he offered a burnt offering to God. The first part of the verse goes, “The Lord smelled the sweet savor and said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground any more for man’s sake for the thoughts and imaginations of a man’s heart are evil from the days of his youth.”
We all are, at least in my experience, taught and hammered in the second half of that verse: “the thoughts and imaginations of a man’s heart are evil from the days of his youth.” But we missed the first sentence, which is, “I will never again curse the ground any more for man’s sake.” It’s right there.
So if we’re a farmer and we believe that the land is cursed, then it is for us (despite what the Bible says.) That belief will create the reality that we are farming within. I think there is, in fact, a third belief that is also perhaps inaccurate or incomplete, but I don’t yet have the arguments to refute it, and so I’m not quite ready to tackle it yet.
The third belief is that it’s all going to burn up anyway. This belief, in combination with the other two beliefs I’ve mentioned, gives people permission to pillage and destroy.
Nathan: Have you read anything by N.T. Wright?
John: No. I have not.
Nathan: He’s an Anglican bishop, and he has written a book called Surprised By Hope, which is primarily about what happens to the world and us when we die. It is very biblically based and also very rich in a very different understanding. One of the points he makes is that the real point of the Bible is not whether you and I go to heaven. The real point of the Bible is that God is out to restore and recreate all creation. That’s His goal. There’s going to be a new heaven and a new earth according to N.T. Wright. Wright even notes that Paul at one point refers to us as being fellow workers with God. So there’s some positive role for us to play with using our human creativity and innovation to do things that God wants only us to be able to do.
John: I think that is such a very important point. I believe that creation is not something that happened at one moment in time in the beginning, but creation is something that happens new each and every moment. And that if we believe that we are the sons and daughters of God and brothers of Christ, then that means that we are co-creators with Him of the new reality each moment in time. And I think it is accepting that it’s a responsibility and accepting that ministry and that calling is really what gives us the capacity to create a new reality, to create a new future. Within that, I believe that as the sons and daughters of God, the integrity of our intentions, what we intend is what we create and what we intend is also what we become. Going back to where we started this conversation with our subconscious beliefs, the intentions of our hearts are ultimately who and what we become in our lives.
Nathan: And the faith that we have in Jesus and the Spirit that God sends us helps us to have different intentions?
John: Yes. I’m using the word intentions because it’s a word that a popular audience can relate to, but you could also use the word prayer. You could also use the word or the thought process of being led by the Spirit because I’m not excluding the Spirit from this. I think that we have to be Spirit-led and when we have Spirit-led intentions, we are the co-creators of what is happening here on this planet.
Nathan: I think this is a good segue into your work with Advancing Eco Agriculture. Can you share just a little bit about what AEA does? And if you wouldn’t mind, do you have a story of how AEA has helped a particular farm family and how that has changed not only their agriculture but maybe even the spirit of their family?
John: Yes. I have many of those stories. They’re so powerful and they’re often very emotional. So what does AEA do? Well, it’s difficult because we do many things. We are agronomists. We are crop scouts. We do consulting for plant nutrition. We do consulting for microbiology. We make recommendations on nutrition management and microbial management. And we have products. So it’s this really multifaceted approach.
It all came together for me in a flash of insight when I realized that what we actually do as a company is we redefine relationships in a farming operation. We redefine the relationships between farmers and their soil, between soil and plants, between plants and insects, and we help to facilitate and bring all those relationships back again closer to what they were originally intended and created to be. So that may not be a very clear answer for your audience, but I’ll expand on that just a bit further.
We have demonstrated that it is possible for plants to be completely resistant to all diseases and all insects and completely eliminate the need for pesticides when we manage nutrition and biology differently. Particularly, when we manage nutrition and biology, where the primary consideration is health rather than exclusively yield. When we do that, when we manage nutrition and biology differently and we produce plants that are completely resistant to diseases and insects, they can also transfer this immunity to livestock and to people. We can then have a legitimate conversation about growing food as medicine. Ultimately, this is about a return to a deeper understanding of God’s design and allowing God’s creation to fully express itself the way that it was designed to rather than trying to force it and direct it and manipulate it into unnatural directions.
Here’s a story of a farmer that perhaps might be a clear description of this process, of what this relationship process looks like. About seven or eight years ago, we started working with a cherry grower. He had heard about us, and he came to visit our exhibit at a trade show. He stood at our trade show table and he said, “I have no desire to be organic. I don’t want to reduce fertilizer applications and don’t have a conversation with me about reducing pesticides. What I really want to do is I want to grow large firm cherries that qualify for the export market, and I’ve heard that you can help me do that.”
And that’s where we started. So we started working with this grower to help him produce large firm cherries from about 370 acres in Oregon that qualified for the export market. On this path, he was very open-minded and very engaged. He started using compost. He started using cover crops, started managing nutrition and biology.
Obviously, the transition doesn’t happen in the field first. It first happens in our hearts and minds and then the fields follow that. At the end of three years, we sat across his desk for an annual review meeting and he looked at us for a moment. He was just silent. And then he said, “When I first met you, I told you that I have no desire to be organic, but I don’t have powdery mildew anymore. I don’t have bacterial tinker anymore. If I wanted to, I could be organic.”
This was a farmer that over the course of three years had shifted from being one of the most intensive fertilizer and pesticide applicators in the region to applying none. And his yields had increased. His profitability has significantly increased. And his relationship with his farm and with his land had changed as well.
As we work with farmers, we specifically seek to develop an empathy in them for the landscape and empathy for the crops. I think people are specifically here to minister. The function of administering and being a steward is a function of having empathy with the landscape.
There is this characteristic that is considered to be perfectly appropriate or normal for livestock farmers, but not for crop farmers. This is the characteristic of being intuitively connected to their livestock. So when you have a dairy farmer, a smaller scale dairy farmer, a hundred or a few hundred cows, or perhaps even less, there’s the expectation that a good dairy farmer will be able to walk into a herd of dairy cows and say, “Something is off with that cow,” when there is nothing visually observable that you can point to. It’s an intuitive, spiritual if you will, process that they just know. So we consider that to be appropriate for livestock farmers, but that hasn’t been considered to be a part of the required stewardship lexicon for crop farmers.
But yet when we work with growers who make this transition the most rapidly, and this cherry grower’s one example, they move very quickly to having that intuitive empathy and understanding. Three years is a rapid transition for the type of crop that he was working with. But we would walk with him through his orchard, and we would walk into a block of trees and he would say something like, “There’s something off with this block. I don’t know what it is, but it doesn’t feel right.”
Nathan: Wow.
John: And it’s when you have that empathic connection and you start sensing where the crop is and where the plants are and that they need something, that you get these extraordinary responses and turnarounds. So that is really, I think, one example of us helping to transition the relationships that farmers have with their crops and with the landscape.
Nathan: That’s really interesting because I’ve been reading some Jewish thought as well and one of the Jewish tenants or principles is that sometimes the doing of things can actually shape our spiritual character. I think sometimes in the Christian tradition, we believe we have to think our way to things and new behaviors and new understanding, and in the Jewish tradition, whether it’s ceremony or ritual or doing the right thing, doing those things in real life can reshape our hearts and build new understanding. That seems like in a way that that’s happening right there.
John: Yes.
Nathan: John, you have a remarkable breadth and depth of knowledge, and you’re able to articulate and communicate so clearly. Clearly, learning is a fundamental part of who you are. What have you learned about learning? What can you share with people? Because it seems to me anyone can benefit from learning. But this is especially true of farmers who are working with so much interrelated complexity. Do you have any tips or any advice or insights about how to learn?
John: Oh, my. I’ve got so many I don’t know where to begin. Well, I’m actually not going to talk about the process of learning. Instead, I want to talk about the types of learners. There is a difference between heart knowing and head learning. And there have been many times where as I was working in the field, being closely led by the Spirit, where I knew something to be true, but I did not know how to describe it scientifically, only to have it validated scientifically some period of time later, sometimes a decade later. I think it has been harmful to us that we have given so much credence to the scientific method and to mechanistic, linear, logical learning, because that is not really how the Spirit works. The Spirit speaks to our heart, not to our minds.
I think being open to and actively seeking that spiritual knowing will bring us to answers and to places that intellectual knowledge learning never can and never will. And in some ways, this is almost a parallel conversation to the discussion of indigenous peoples and their indigenous knowledge of knowing and grasping the complexity of a whole without knowing all the intricate details of the whole. So that’s one thought that comes to mind.
I frequently hear people make the comment that, “You are so smart. You’ve learned so much.” They’ll also say I have such a depth of knowledge. And there’s actually a part of that that really distresses me, and the reason it distresses me is because I was born with the same potential, although perhaps with different innate skills and talents, as anyone. Each one of us is unique. Each one of us has our own skills and talents, but we all have the same or a similar raw potential. And I don’t believe that the potential for intellectual knowledge that I have been given is significantly greater than a large majority of the population. And again, we’re all on a spectrum, but I don’t have a particularly extraordinarily high IQ for that matter, or EQ or whatever parameters you want to use to describe it.
The point that I’m trying to make is that every one of us has incredible potential that we consistently fail to tap because we don’t believe we can. We believe it’s beyond our capacity.
Nathan: Yes.
John: We should actively cultivate a desire to constantly expose ourselves to new situations and new ideas. Many of us prefer comfort, and we find the exposure to new ideas that challenge our preconceived ideas or beliefs to be uncomfortable. But it would be wonderful for us to shift and become comfortable in those contexts, because it’s in that manner that we can expand our breadth and depth of intellectual knowledge. So I don’t know. I’ve not really spoken to this before, and I don’t know how much sense I’m making, but…
Nathan: You’re making a lot of sense. In your podcasts you often ask your guests something like, “What question didn’t I ask that you wish I would have?” So I’ll ask that question.
John: That’s my question. And you can’t do that. (Laughter)
Nathan: I will pay you whatever copyright fees there are. (More laughter)
John: Give me a moment to consider. Well, a question that you didn’t ask that is perhaps worth digging into a bit more is that the distinction between heart knowledge and mind knowledge and the distinction between spirit and soul and heart versus mind. It’s very clear in the Bible. It’s hidden, but it’s very clear once you know what you’re looking for.
Let me give me a moment to paraphrase this verse from German to English. “The Word of God is like a two-edged sword; so sharp that it divides heart and mind.” (Hebrews 4:12) Rather than going too deep into the scriptural explanations for it, we know that there is a clear distinction. It is sometimes difficult for us in our world today where Greco-Roman thought dominates, and we have become so consumed by this mechanistic, linear, science-based belief that it is sometimes difficult for us to really capture or to really feel what heart-based knowledge is actually like and to learn more about it.
I would suggest that if people want to dig into this topic more deeply, I would recommend an author, Stephen Harrod Buhner. He’s written quite a number of books. Unfortunately, I do not believe that he’s a Christian. He is a very talented author, and he’s one of my favorites for his writing style, but he has written a trilogy of three books that I think if people were to read those and internalize them, would completely shift the way they see the world. The first one is titled The Lost Language of Plants. The second is titled The Secret Teachings of Plants, and the third is Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm. In each of his books, he approaches each topic from both a heart and mind perspective in alternating chapters.
I find the topics themselves to be incredibly, incredibly fascinating, but the way he approaches the conversations is a really incredible as well.
(Above is an episode of John Kempf’s Regenerative Agriculture Podcast you will enjoy. In the episode, he interviews Ray Archuelata, who is a tireless and dynamic educator for a soil-life-building approach to farming and whose faiht also comes across loud and clear. Here is the podcast link for the interview.)
Nathan: Excellent. You might take this as a strange diversion, but I don’t think it is. If you look at websites for a lot of more mainstream Christian churches, there’s an incredible focus on this intellectual theology of what they believe and what they don’t believe, and there’s really no sense of what their heart is or how they’re trying to live with a heart-led faith in God. I don’t know if mainstream Christianity knows how to help shape people’s hearts so they have open hearts, that they fully have empathy. Maybe that’s part of the missing link.
John: Well, I think modern Christianity for the most part, at least what I’ve been exposed to (and this is a very strong statement and I’m almost hesitant to make it and yet I do believe it to be true) has largely denied the gifts of the Spirit. Because that’s really what we’re talking about and we’re using the language of the heart right now. Most people today don’t believe that those gifts of the Spirit are relevant for us in this day and this moment in time. So they disavow the gifts of the Spirit. And as a result, they are never going to experience what you and I are talking about.
Nathan: Wouldn’t it be interesting if you had a spreadsheet, and you had the fruits of the Spirit each in their own columns, and each agricultural practice (like prophylactic use of antibiotics) was a row? And you considered whether each practice exhibited each fruit of the Spirit by checking or not checking the appropriate column.
John: That’s fascinating.
Nathan: So let me come to a close here with sort of two related questions. One is – how dire is the situation we face in terms of how we currently do agriculture and how it affects the health of people and the planet? And what can non-farming people who want to live out a God-fearing, God-focused life, do about it?
John: If we were to approach the question of how dire is the situation from a purely secular point of view, then it appears to be exceedingly dire. We are actually insulated from the majority of the severe climactic changes that are happening around the world here in North America. We actually see some climactic fluctuations and weather fluctuations, but we don’t actually see what is happening in the world’s oceans and what is happening in large forested areas around the world. We are, at this moment, experiencing the most rapid extinction events in recorded history. And it’s really interesting to consider that the earth is experiencing this extraordinary ecological disaster, if you will, and that it has been caused by human hands, which are to be stewards and ministers. And instead they are dominating and subjugating into extinction.
So when we look at it from that point of view, the situation can appear to be almost hopeless. But then when we consider our capacity as co-creators, and God beside us, with us, helping us to create the reality that we want to see in the future, then it actually appears extremely hopeful. It’s extremely hopeful, because for the first time these issues that have been compounding for generations are now entering the collective consciousness in a significant way. In a significant way that hopefully leads to action and changes the reality that we want to see in the world. So I’m actually very hopeful.
I’ve set as a mission for myself that regenerative agriculture becomes the global mainstream in the next 20 years, by 2040. My metric for that is that I want to see 80% adoption on all agricultural lands globally of these regenerative agriculture ecosystems. I believe that that’s a very reasonable and realistic and achievable goal, and that we’re well on the pathway to achieving that goal.
Now, along that pathway though, there’s a very real possibility, actually I would say that it’s a probability and that some of it is already coming to pass, that there will be a great deal of human suffering along that pathway. And we’re seeing this already in our modern civilized societies, where we have this epidemic of degenerative illnesses, diabetes, stroke, heart disease, cancer, et cetera.
Today, basically, one out of two people living in America today is going to have cancer sometime in their lifetime. Autoimmune diseases for people under the age of 18 has gone from 10% of the population in 2010 to 20% of the population in 2018. And perhaps one of the very significant trends worth mentioning is the rapid decline in fertility where we’re actually looking at tremendous losses in the human population’s ability to reproduce as a result of toxins in the environment and in our food supply.
Nathan: What can we do if we’re not farmers? Obviously, eating choices are obviously super important, but is there anything else we should be doing?
John: It’s not a question that I’ve prepared for, but remember that each one of us, as stewards and ministers and co-creators, is co-creating the reality that we want to see in the future. We need to fully invest ourselves in our own personal health and journey. And that’s not just food choices. It goes deeper than that. It means taking full responsibility for our health and our family’s health. That means you do not delegate responsibility to the doctor. You don’t delegate responsibility to other people. You take full responsibility yourself for learning and implementing.
There’s a great book that I’ve just read a little while ago that I would recommend people read, entitled Health for All of Life. It really encapsulates this whole personal responsibility and spiritual perspective on health and food, dietary choices, and lifestyle choices as well. Then, beyond that (and I’m realizing as you asked the question that I actually need to think about this more deeply and provide a more comprehensive answer) I would also suggest that obviously we have a lot of power in prayer and in action beyond just the food choices that we make and how we lead our daily lives.
So are we invested in the stock market? How are we managing our money? And if we’re invested in those places, why not invest in local farming? Why not invest in the solutions? It’s about managing all the different aspects of our life to create the change that we want to see in the world and living it. But then also doing more than just living it, also communicating it to others through our values and our actions and our business decisions.
By and large, the majority of farmers profess to be Christians. And yet we have adopted a model of agriculture that is directly the antithesis of these foundational Christian values.
And to a similar degree, we can say the same thing about businesses. Think about all the businesses that interact with agriculture and our food. If we picked some of the Christian nonprofits that feed lots of people, they buy a lot of food. If they were to change their food purchasing decisions, to bring about a different reality, they would have tremendous power and tremendous clout.
Nathan: That is an excellent point. I have pretty well given up on finding a church where I feel like I can be true to all of these things that we’re both sharing and discussing and I feel so strongly about. I read the Bible every day. I pray every day. I read a lot. But clearly in the Bible, it’s hard to get away from the fact that we need to have some sort of communal gathering of faith with other people. Do you have any advice for me, John?
John: Well, I have the same question. I have an incredible group of people that I commune with and that I fellowship with that are not in close geographical proximity to me. That’s been very valuable for me, but I would like to have geographical proximity and actually commune with people locally.
You know, Nathan, I think you are doing powerful work by sharing this on the blog, and you are attracting those people to you. So perhaps you should approach that question from the T. Harv Eker (author of Secrets of the Millionaire Mind) perspective and ask the question, “What can I do to become a like-minded believer magnet (instead of a money magnet)? What are the subconscious beliefs that I have that might push people away from me?”
Nathan: John, it has been such a pleasure and a blessing to have this conversation with you. Blessings on your family and on your new farm.
I want to share news of an unusual and free webinar by Allen Williams, Ph.D. on what the Bible presents on earth stewardship next Thursday (December 30) at 7 p.m. CST. I’ve registered, and I hope you will, too.
The webinar is entitled Biblical Stewardship: What the scriptures tell us about our role as Earth’s caretakers. Go to this page, and you’ll find the link to click on to actually register.
I felt compelled to share news of this because of who Allen Williams is. As this profile details, he is a sixth generation family farmer and, as he says it, a “recovering academic.” He is one of the tireless, dedicated regenerative farmer pioneers who has been teaching other farmers how to achieve the same success and satsifaction while rejuvenating God’s earth. I’ve read articles of his. I’ve attended presentations and field walks. I’ve heard him on podcats (this is a great one, by the way). His faith and his convictions come through in all he does.
In short, Allen is a gifted and passionate teacher whose energy and insights are inspiring. If he is going to do something, it will be good and thoughtful. I am very interested to hear what he has to say about the Bible. Are there things he’ll share that you and I have not heard before? There may well be.
Allen Williams, seen here educating attendees of a field walk about adaptive grazing, is a Christian and former academic who has dedicated his life to helping farmers adopt regenerative practices.
The webinar is being organized by Understanding Ag. Based in Alabama, Understanding Ag is a company that provides consulting and advising to farmers who want to move their operations in a regenerative direction. The company’s consultants include some of the most successful and pioneering regenerative farmers and experts in the country.
The vast majority of Understanding Ag’s webinar are on agricultural thinking and practices that, when used by farmers, can bring back life to their soils. So it’s intriguing that a company like that would offer a faith-focused webinar.
But it’s not completely surprising.
In fact, I think it’s brilliant.
Many of the best and most pioneering regenerative producers and experts are Christian. The way they farm is a reflection of their faith. And a large percentage of farmers around our country attend church and take the Bible seriously.
Changing how our country farms is more of a question of values than practices. Changing how our country farms will require that our country’s farmers rethink the values behind their farming.
They, like all of us, need to see that that we have a responsiblity and a creative calling to steward God’s earth in a way that honors God. And then we must all act.
When a fellow Christian farmer speaks that truth to them with conviction and knowledge, perhaps the hearts and minds of some will be turned.
And, of course, you and I are part of our country’s agriculture as well. What we buy tells farmers to produce more of. Our hearts and minds also need to be turned and kept turned in the right direction.
I urge you to join me.
P.S. Are you interested in an online discussion about the webinar right afterwards? if so, please email me at wholefaithlivingearth@gmail.com. If I have at least five people interested, I will send out a Zoom link to those who email me. We could have a great conversation.
Nathan believes that a whole Christian faith includes an imperative for us, individually and collectively, to actively show God’s earth mercy and compassion every day. For more than 15 years, he has worked for non-profit conservation groups that restore and protect natural habitats, change the relationship people have with nature, and promote sustainable farming. To learn more, click here.
