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Farmers and the Whole Faith Church

Nathan Aaberg —  October 29, 2016 — Leave a comment

So you’re a farm family with corn and soybean fields stretching in all directions to the horizon away from your house on a rural road.

You’re farming the way everyone else in your community has farmed for decades. You work hard at it every day. You believe you are helping to feed the world.

Suddenly, you hear of a group of people who have begun gathering together in a nearby town for worship and for the restoration of their hearts, minds, and lives to what God offers through Jesus. They call themselves a whole faith church. They seem unusually kind, sincere, thoughtful, and good-natured. You hear, too, that the people of this church teach, among many other things, that there are certain principles for how God’s land and water should be treated. You hear that this group of people is mindful of what kind of food they choose to eat together as a church.

And when you dig further, you realize your farming methods don’t seem to jibe with their principles.

How will you react?

Quite possibly with defensiveness and resentment.

Putting ourselves in the shoes of a farm family is a reminder that the way the whole faith church communicates about farming should be thoughtfully done. Farmers are in a tough spot as they have one of the most difficult callings there is. The practical challenges of raising food and making a living in a technologically-intense, market-driven world that is now experiencing intensifying climate change are immense.

It’s critical to remember, too, that farmers and rural communities have often had little voice in how agricultural economies are shaped. In Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, authors Evan Fraser and Andrew Rimas highlight how civilizations tend to create agricultural systems that work well for the interests of the civilization and its urban elites. There is a recurring pattern of civilizations creating large-scale, nature-depleting farming systems in the hinterlands that are dependent on advanced technology, complex logistics, sophisticated trading systems, and stable, pleasant climate conditions.

Sound familiar?

The United States has built exactly this kind of system. And we are now part of an increasingly global farm system that individual farmers and their communities did not choose at a time when the climate is becoming less friendly.

I talked to a diversified farmer recently in central Illinois who remembers when Earl Butz, Secretary of Agriculture under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, killed the supply management policies of the New Deal while promoting big new export deals for American commodity farm products (for a great overview, read this article from Grist). The New Deal policies, based on the lessons of the Depression and the Dust Bowl, had been designed to protect farmers from market swings in commodity prices while also protecting the land.

Under Butz, the new goal was for American farmers to produce as much as possible as cheaply as possible and to let the market sort out the winners and losers. Butz encouraged farmers to plant from fence row to fence row. He often said, “Get big or get out.”

That central Illinois farmer I talked to remembers how neighbors who used to be friends in his area began competing fiercely against each other to acquire the land they needed for their farms to survive. Fistfights broke out.

When this intense production fever led to lower prices even as interest rates on loans went up, there was an epidemic of farm failures in the 1980s. Fewer farmers remained. Natural areas were plowed up across the country. The social life that used to define small towns withered away. The interests of the local and small places in America’s countryside were sacrificed for the interests of the national economy and big companies.

It’s clear from the Bible that wealth and power are not what God called people to pursue.

In fact, it’s quite the opposite. People of the Christian faith should be instinctively allergic to any philosophy or policy that drives us to maximize wealth and power while simultaneously minimizing our commitment to other virtues and to the health of the commonwealth.

Proverbs 27: 23-27 provides some interesting food for thought:

Be sure you know the condition of your flocks,
give careful attention to your herds;
for riches do not endure forever,
and a crown is not secure for all generations.
When the hay is removed and new growth appears
and the grass from the hills is gathered in,
the lambs will provide you with clothing,
and the goats with the price of a field.
You will have plenty of goats’ milk to feed your family
and to nourish your female servants.

Riches and crowns, as I read it, are shorthand for economic wealth and political power. The writer is saying wealth and power can seem so important and pressing but are actually fleeting and can cause us to take our eyes away from what matters most. It also suggests that the foundation of stable family life, the basic building block of any community, is careful attention to the on-the-ground conditions of the land and animals we raise for food.

These ancient verses from Proverbs remind us that careful, attentive husbandry of land, water, and livestock is not some new fad. It is the old, old school of farming.

Really knowing the condition of your herds and paying careful attention to your flocks takes time and patience. It means creating the conditions for your animals to thrive in ways that are natural for them. When Proverbs was written, the audience would also have understood that you can’t have healthy flocks and herds without healthy pastures. Pastures also need attention and careful observation.

Insightful people like Wes Jackson say that for that kind of attention to be given to the land you need a high enough ratio of eyes per acre. In other words, you have to have enough people looking at any property’s acreage to know how the land is really responding to how it is being used.

Wendell Berry writes of this concept:

We can suppose that the eyes-to-acres ratio is approximately correct when a place is thriving in human use and care. The sign of its thriving would be the evident good health and diversity, not just of its crops and livestock but also of its population of native and noncommercial creatures, including the community of creatures living in the soil. Equally indicative and necessary would be the signs of a thriving local and locally adapted human economy.

On the other hand, the more land that is being farmed by the same number of people (the lower the ratio of eyes-to-acres) the less attention can be given to the health of the land and water of a particular farm field. The bottom line is that farming, like any enterprise, can grow beyond the limits of the natural capacities of people, nature, and community life. In many places, as a result of policies and national and industrial imperatives, our farms are too big for the kind of care that Proverbs speaks of. But farmers have felt pressured to move to that scale and to rely heavily on technology to do so.

We should empathize with farmers who have to live and work here at the tension point between a civilization’s riches and a farmer’s calling to treat God’s earth well and to produce good, healthy food. They are caught in a system. Doctors who cannot give their patients the time and care they need because of our current health care system are also stuck in a similar situation. That is a difficult, stressful place to be.

The whole faith church will recognize the challenging position farmers are in and show great love to them.

Conversely, farmers of all kinds will, I hope, eventually recognize why whole faith churches will choose food that has been raised in keeping with the fruits of the spirit. The why is that eating compassionately and with God’s love for people and all Creation is a natural expression of hearts that have been transformed by God.

Hopefully, farmers will see, too, that this counter-cultural approach to food is actually profoundly supportive of the long-term interests of farmers and their rural communities.

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Food and the Whole Faith Church: Thinking Through the Practicalities (Part 1)

Nathan Aaberg —  September 28, 2016 — Leave a comment

It’s relatively easy to create a vision for something new at the 30,000-foot level. Working out some of the practical details is a whole different matter.

For that reason, I want to follow up on my piece in mid-August – Food and the Whole Faith Church – with some thoughts about how a whole faith church would actually implement one of the essential characteristics of a whole faith church presented in that post:

A defining feature of a whole faith church will be that this community of believers will be fully committed to demonstrating the proper and attentive relationship between humanity and Creation in its common meals, including communion.

This means that the food of the whole faith church will come as much as is practically possible from farms where the land, water, and animals of God’s earth are stewarded in ways that God would find fitting of a good, loving shepherd and from farm enterprises which support a good quality of life for the farmers and their communities.

Here are 10 principles I would offer as a starting point.

1. Form a Food and Faith Committee: Because of the complexity of the world of food and farming, the church will need dedicated and concentrated attention to continually learn about the topic, tackle difficult dimensions of application, and help the church’s approach to food evolve and mature over time. The committee should, ideally, be made up of 10 people or less for effectiveness and cohesiveness. These people should be widely recognized as thoughtful, compassionate, and yet practical people. Ideally, there would be at least one person on the committee who had farming experience or who has easy access to farmers of all kinds. The committee should visit farms on a regular basis. It should also regularly share what it has learned with the congregation.

2. The holier and more communally important the meal, the more attention should be given to how the food was farmed and made: The first order of priority would be to delve deep into the sourcing of wine (or grape juice) as well as the bread for holy communion. Following shortly after would be attention to other church-wide communal meals that the church enjoys together and that the church is the lead organizer and purchaser of. Eventually, attention would move down to smaller group meals the church organized.

3. Guidelines and plans for the food the whole faith church will choose and provide will be made a year at a time (at least): Based on a recommendation from the Food and Faith Committee, the whole church should agree to the practical details to be implemented for a particular year period (or more) before that period begins. In other words, the guidelines and plans for how food matters will be managed will be set for decently long period of time. Stability and predictability help people adjust to new habits.

4. The reasons why the church is being careful and deliberate in its food choices should be frequently explained and remembered: This could come in the form of sermons, special events, and sometimes simply a few words spoken during a service.

5. Whether meat is served and from what kind of farm-to-slaughter-to-market supply chain any meat that is served came from should receive particularly close attention: The raising of animals is an area where the worship of mammon and efficiency have overwhelmed kind and thoughtful shepherding ethics in particularly awful ways. Meat that has come from animals that have been systematically treated in ways that are cruel and don’t allow the animals to exhibit their natural behaviors should simply not be served. But there are varying degrees of humane and Creation-friendly livestock raising practices to be looked into. Tasty vegetarian options should always be provided to accommodate people whose compassion for animals is so great that any taking of animal life is an ethical problem for them.

6. On a regular basis, the church should share information about the farmers and their practices of farming for foods the church has committed to using: It would be ideal to bring farmers, especially Christian farmers, to the church (or the church to the farmers) as part of this effort.

7. The primary filter for choosing food sources for food the church will eat together will be the fruits of the spirit listed in Galatians 5:22-23: A whole faith church will ask of food it is considering eating to what degree the farming methods reflect love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control applied to God’s soil, water, animals, wildlife, and local, rural communities. Yet, the whole faith church will also recognize the practicalities and struggles of applying God’s values in any sphere of life in this fallen world.

8. The whole faith church will make a special effort to treat all farmers with respect in words and deeds and to offer tangible help to local farmers who want to farm with the fruits of the spirit: How would you feel if your local church scrutinized the ethics and morality of every decision you made in your job as a teacher or accountant or salesperson or IT consultant? Not very comfortable. Probably defensive. That’s how many farmers feel who have been working within the conventional food system for decades and whose family’s livelihood and culture are based on that system. The whole faith church needs to be loving and respectful to all farmers even as the whole faith church seeks to live out Christian values as they relate to farming and food in truth and love. The whole faith church should also seek out ways to help any farmer who desires to move in a significant way toward farming with stewardship and affection for God’s earth as a prominent goal.

9. Within the general principles laid about above, each local whole faith church will naturally have some latitude and freedom: Perfection will not be possible, and the intention is not to create food Puritans.

10. The whole faith church will frequently celebrate food as a provision of God, God’s beautiful earth, and God’s creative, gifted people: The efforts the whole faith church invests in making the common food of the church more in keeping with the values of God should be complemented by warm and lively celebration of the blessing of food in prayer, music, storytelling, and other creative ways.

If I’ve learned anything in my life it’s that planning is important but being able to adjust one’s plans and ideas when they make contact with reality is just as critical. I hope you find these ten points thought-provoking and helpful. I’d welcome your comments and feedback. 

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Food and the Whole Faith Church

Nathan Aaberg —  August 20, 2016 — Leave a comment

As I wrote earlier, Christians will not consistently care and act as if God’s Creation mattered, unless churches weave a whole faith into their worship, theology, and culture. I’ve set myself a goal of figuring out what that weaving would look like in what I call the “whole faith church.” This is another post in that series.

The first feature of a whole faith church that I highlighted was, perhaps surprisingly, a church in which membership would mean something. Membership would be the binding together of believers around a central faith in what God offers us and calls us to through Jesus. That faith would be inextricably bound up with a commitment, growing out of transformed hearts, to living out that faith together in concrete, tangible, accountable ways.

In this post I highlight another feature of the whole faith church. It is this:

A defining feature of a whole faith church will be that this community of believers will be fully committed to demonstrating the proper and attentive relationship between humanity and Creation in its common meals, including communion.

This means that the food of the whole faith church will come as much as is practically possible from farms where the land, water, and animals of God’s earth are stewarded in ways that God would find fitting of a good, loving shepherd and from farm enterprises which support a good quality of life for the farmers and their communities.

Because our food system is complicated, the practical application of this principle will be complicated and not always black and white. This will be a long-term odyssey that a whole faith church will need to address with loving kindness. Education and research will be needed. Farms visited. Thoughtful meetings held to discern how to make this work on a day-to-day basis in the local place in which a whole faith church is nested. In upcoming posts, I’ll dive into specific questions about how this feature of a whole faith church would be lived out.

A good starting point, however, for examining any food choice for the whole faith church would be to keep Galatians 5:22-23 in mind. In other words, whole faith churches would ask this fundamental question – does the food we are thinking of purchasing come from a farm which has been operated with as much love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control as is possible?

If you look into it, you’ll probably find that much of the food served in the common meals of a church, especially any meat products being served, does not measure up very well to that criteria.

You do not have to work very hard, for example, to learn that most pigs are raised in ways that are cruel and completely counter to the fruits of the spirit. Reading Pig Tales: An Omnivore’s Quest for Sustainable Meat is a good way to learn more about the natural capacities and intelligence of these animals and how much has been sacrificed to provide cheap pork. The Chicago Tribune ran a series recently on the cruel excesses of the increasing number of pig factory farms in Illinois. What’s more, there are clear links between the indiscriminate use of antibiotics (which promote growth) in pig factory farms here and in China and the rise of strains of bacteria that are resistant to every antibiotic doctors have in their arsenal. This resistance is leading to the misery-filled deaths of adults and children

If you do this research with an open mind and transformed heart, it becomes clear that the factory farming of pigs and their inhumane slaughtering in high-speed facilities is a cruel and unloving thing to do to the animals, workers, neighbors, communities, and waterways of any place. It is clear, too, that a Christian, and especially a church, could not in good faith knowingly choose to purchase and consume the meat of pigs produced from such a system.

That a church would do so is another example of human culture, economy, and convenience overwhelming a church’s commitment to not just believing but actually living as if God existed and that this is His world.

In a church’s life, more than in any other setting, the values of God should prevail.

For a whole faith church, that desire to have God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven will naturally prompt the church to think about food carefully. The idea is not to create a wide array of new rules and regulations. But the whole faith church will make it a habit to treat all of life as if it issued from God and as if it matters to God and as if our hearts should be engaged in all the ways we interact with life around us.

Creating and consuming common meals that are, at their source, in synch with the fruits of the spirit will ultimately be a life-giving habit and discipline for the whole faith church.

One literally life-givinging impact will be that the common meals will be better for the health of those who eat them.

The thoughtfulness that will go into the common meals will also make members of the whole faith church mindful of the value of God’s Creation to God.

The effort to create these meals will connect the church with farmers, like Steve and Marie Deibele of Golden Bear Farm, who are raising cows and pigs in ways consistent with the fruits of the spirit. This will be rewarding for everyone involved.

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Steve Deibele of Golden Bear Farm with his pigs that are raised with great care on pasture.

In following this discipline, members will be reminded, too, of their common hope for a new heaven and new earth where God’s shalom will prevail.

Creating and consuming these common meals will also, and perhaps most importantly, further inspire members to pursue their common mission of reconciling this challenging, complex world to God in every corner of their lives,

To paraphrase an insight from Stephen Webb in his book Good Eating, it will feel right in every way for a church to say grace over food that has some grace in it.

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In the Kingdom Flow

Nathan Aaberg —  July 31, 2016 — Leave a comment

It’s a simple but counterintuitive finding.

As Cal Newport tells it in Deep Work, when University of Chicago colleagues Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Reed Larson invented a psychological testing technique called the experience sampling method, they were eager to find out what kinds of activities truly gave people joy and fulfillment.

The experience sampling method involved giving test subjects a pager and then randomly paging the subjects during a day. When they were paged, the subjects were to immediately record what they were doing and what their feelings were. This method, as opposed to relying on test subjects to keep a diary on their own throughout a day, was found to be far more effective in prompting people to accurately document the connection between different kinds of activities and their state of mind.

Here is what Csikzentmihalyi wrote of their fundamental finding:

“The best moments usually occur when a person’s mind or body is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

This prompted him to write the book Flow about that particular state of being. Flow I

Our instincts, of course, are to seek happiness and contentment in relaxation, fun, and doing as little as possible. There is, of course, nothing wrong with relaxing. We need downtime. Even the occasional binge watching of a TV series. Yet, being fully engaged in something – physical training, carrying out a challenging work project, figuring out a complex jigsaw puzzle – that pushes us and stretches us is actually an essential ingredient of a full life.

This, interestingly enough, is what the whole Christian life offers.

When, with God’s help, we commit ourselves to living out God’s love and purposes in all phases of our lives and the life of the world, we are immersed in something both challenging and worthwhile. This will translate into new consciousness of our choices and our habits every day of our life. It may mean taking on projects and challenges at a larger scale. These projects or challenges may well be way beyond what we believe we can handle with the skills and experience we’ve developed on our own.

This is what I believe the Jesus was talking about when he talked about the kingdom of God and the kingdom of heaven. He modeled it for us. Committing ourselves to it, paradoxically, can give us our best moments in life. Not necessarily easy. Or relaxing. But it can make us fully alive to who we should be.

This is what I would call the “kingdom flow.”

A great example is Bob Muzikowski. As he describes it, he was saved and made sober on the same day. When he subsequently moved to Chicago from New York to get away from reminders of his former drinking life, he started a little league on the city’s troubled Near West Side that attracted, to his amazement, 300 youth the very first time he put out notices about it.

His dive into a larger purpose did not end there. His professional life continued in the financial world until he began to talk deeply with Bob Buford and then joined the Halftime Institute when Buford launched it. In this process, Muzikowski found that he continued to be drawn to the needs of the communities he had experienced through the Near West Little League he had helped establish. So he gave up his comfortable financial career to convert an abandoned Catholic elementary school on the Near West side into the Chicago Hope Academy, a college and life preparatory high school with a strong Christian faith element. Muzikowski purposefully developed it to be more affordable for poor and minority youth than typical private high schools. He also recruits the best teachers he can find from around the country.

This has not been easy work.

“If I hadn’t had a Halftime journey, my life would have been easier and less stressful today,” Muzikowski says, “but it would definitely be a lot more shallow.”

Not everyone may feel the calling to do something that meaningful on that scale. But in every life I am convinced there are needs and purposes that God is offering us to be engaged with and choices to make every day. Responding will move us beyond our own interests and needs while tapping the talents and skills we have and even those we don’t know we have.

When we move from faith in God and what God offers to us through Jesus to a deep commitment to living with God’s purposes firmly in mind every moment, we go from getting to the starting line to actually running the race of which the Apostle Paul speaks in 1 Corinthians 9:23-25.

This is an essential point of what I mean by the phrase “whole faith.” When Jesus said he was the way, the truth, and the life, he was not pointing only to life after death. He was, as I understand it, pointing to a true life that begins when we synch our lives with God’s purposes. That true life begins in the here and now, and that God-filled life will never end. After death, it will be even more glorious and complete. This is the new and abundant life that Jesus promised. Being in this kingdom flow give us the sense of flow and challenging, immersive purpose that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described.

Our churches should help us understand this and develp the kingdom flow in our lives.

I know I need that help at times. The brokeness of the world, incuding the dysfunction of how we treat God’s earth, is at times overwhelming. When I don’t hear churches calling us to bring God’s kingdom into this world to the best degree possible, I am dismayed. I even find myself questioning my faith.

But when I come across Christians like Bob Muzikowski, my spirits rebounds, and my faith grows. I am encouraged, too, that there are growing numbers of Christians in the kingdom flow who are working in their own ways to change how we treat God’s earth in the process of growing food from it. Like Bob Muzikowski, they have taken on missions that are challenging and require of them tremendous sacrifice. Gabe Brown, Joel Salatin, and Ray Archuleta are just some of them.

The testimonies of their lives and the impacts of their lives say a great deal about what the whole Gospel offers to you and the world and about its truth beyond its words.

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As Water Reflects the Face

Nathan Aaberg —  July 9, 2016 — Leave a comment

Have you found yourself coming to walk in the same paths as your parents without consciously choosing to do so?

My father has long treasured the book of Proverbs and has quoted his favorite verses as long as I can remember. As I recently made my way through Proverbs as part of my morning meditation and prayer routine, I found rich wisdom in it. It’s becoming one of my favorite books of the Bible.

The twenty-seventh chapter’s nineteenth verse has begun to put down particularly deep roots in me:

“As water reflects the face, so one’s life reflects the heart.”

What kind of heart are our lives reflecting?

The Bible refers to the heart a great deal. The word “heart” is referred to in the Bible, depending on the translation, easily over 500 times, according to Christian Bible Reference.

There are also many definitions of the heart as it is used in the Bible. I would suggest that it is a combination of one’s character, will, and emotions. It is the center of who we are.

Read the Bible carefully and you’ll see that the nature of people’s hearts is at the center of many stories.

When David reacts in anger to Nathan’s story of the rich man who has stolen and then cooked a poor family’s beloved lamb, it is David’s heart that is on display. When the story leads David to then confess his own sin of adultery with Bathsheba, it is David’s heart that has been moved. And the fact that his heart would respond to the crushing realization of what he had done in the context of God’s moral framework is one of the reasons we sympathize with David. Our hearts resonate with his heart.

As you read the Gospels, I believe you’ll find that Jesus is sympathetic or antagonistic to people depending on the orientation of their hearts.

People who are humble and who recognize their own failings or whose hearts are full of adoration for God receive his kind attention.  On the other hand, Jesus jolted people who had allowed their hearts to become cold and selfish. People who had become bound up in preserving institutional power or in pursuing purity without being balanced by mercy find themselves exposed to Jesus’ anger and criticism.

Jesus models for us the hearts we should have – full of love but also tenacious and passionately committed to God’s will and kingdom and intentions for this world.

In his book Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ, Dallas Willard wrote a profound statement about Jesus:

“The revolution of Jesus is in the first place and continuously a revolution of the human heart or spirit. It did not and does not proceed by means of the formation of social institutions and laws, the outer forms of our existence, intending that these would then impose a good order of life upon people who come under their power. Rather, his is a revolution of character, which proceeds by changing people from the inside through ongoing personal relationship to God in Christ and to one another. It is one that changes their ideas, beliefs, feelings, and habits of choice, as well as their bodily tendencies and social relations. It penetrates to the deepest layers of their soul.”

Much of my life I have heard little of this from churches I have attended as there is a focuse on holding true to correct doctrines on grace, sin, the Trinity, and other topics. But there is little or no attention given to encouraging members to honestly and carefully examine the state of their hearts and to helping them deliberately open their hearts to transformation by God.

I am 100% convinced that a whole Christian faith must also be rooted in what Dallas Willard calls the revolution of the heart. A whole faith church would be intentional about this in its worship, instruction, and culture.

If Jesus is renovating, remaking, and revolutionizing our hearts, then our lives could not help but reflect that. And not just the lives we live in public, but all the spheres of our lives. At home. With our families. With our friends. On business trips. In our politics. On the Internet.

And, without doubt, in our relationship with the life of God’s earth.

How could it be otherwise?

How can one be loving, compassionate, patient, and possessing of self-control and yet deliberately and unnecessarily maim the land, water, and living things around us? How can one be fiercely, self-sacrificingly loyal to God’s desire for how all of life should be in this world and go along with systems and culture that methodically destroy what God has given us to carefully shepherd?

More than in any other area of our lives, we have put blinders on our hearts when it comes to our relationship with non-human life around us.

Our human tendency, of course, is to resort to rationalization when there is an aspect of our life in which we do not live by the values to which we say we are committed with our hearts and minds. This is easier to do when the mainstream culture and even the mainstream church culture around us accept and even promote those rationalizations.

But God wants our whole life, our whole heart.

And when you open yourself to God’s love and God’s spirit, your heart will begin to be remade and your life cannot help but show it.

Every corner of your life.

What kind of heart is your life reflecting?

What kind of heart is the corner of God’s living earth that you are impacting with your life reflecting?

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