Food Production as a Ministry

If the Christian community will take this incredible opportunity that God has given us to extend redemptive power and to wrestle with righteous landscape, righteous visceral physical living; what does righteous physical living look like? If we will wrestle with that it will create inroads of opportunity for testifying of His grace and His existence, and His mandates on humanity, and on His creation, that we can’t even conceive of…

The power of appreciating God’s mandate to nurture and massage His creation as caretakers of this wonderfully and fearfully made community of beings from the visible to the invisible, the physical streams to ruins, O Lord our God How Great Thou Art, when I walk through the trees and I hear the birds and the bees;  this is not weirdo environmental creation worship, this is appreciating God has laid out here an object lesson of His grace, and abundance, and provision that we as stewards should be presenting to the people around us as a magnificent testimony of beneficence, and His grace, and His interest in every affair if our life.  – Joel Salatin

Oh how this topic has been weighing heavily on my heart this year! I’m so inadequate at expressing ideas…

But why is it that liberals are the ones taking over this area of life?

Why is it that herbal healing has been associated with pagans for centuries?

Why is the environmentalists are more concerned with animal welfare than Christians are?

I don’t know how it is elsewhere, but in our community it is the Christians running the big-ag farms. They’re shipping in tomatoes in June and putting up “local” banners. Moral unbelievers can see the compromise, they see the lie, and they can’t figure out what sets us apart, so why bother with “religion.”

Why aren’t we using food production as a ministry? It is the most obvious and necessary aspect of all of our lives (how many times have you eaten or drank today), believers and non-believers, why aren’t we using that to our advantage? Church lawns are quickly becoming a pet peeve of mine. Why aren’t they bursting with the Lord’s abundance, feeding the poor of the community, and drawing them in to us that we may introduce them to Jehovah-jireh, provider for our bodies & souls?

Why aren’t we learning about the creation around us, how God put all these systems into place and how we should be nurturing them? Why did I learn about mycorrizal fungi from a secular source? This is our God’s creation and system for feeding the earth and all that is therein! We ought to be fervent and jealous in becoming intimately acquainted with it in order to better understand Him!

May God be pleased to give His faithful farms, educate us as to how He wants us to steward them, and open doors for us to testify of His wondrous works in a culture steeped in evolutionary Darwinism and Mother Earth worship.