Biggest Little Church

The documentary Biggest Little Farm (2018) tells the story of the regeneration of Apricot Lane Farms in Moorpark, California. When John and Molly Chester bought the land, it had been conventionally and extractively farmed for citrus fruit for decades. The soil was dead, killed off by repeated dosing of pesticides and other chemicals. Erosion scarred the landscape. There was little wildlife — or any life — to speak of.

Over many years, the Chesters worked to renew the land and make it capable of sustaining life. They planted a variety of fruit trees, not just one kind. They contoured the land to preserve the rainwater. They let ground cover grow in their orchards to protect and nurture the soil. They planted flowers and other plants to attract pollinators, which ensures the tree blossoms turn into fruit. They brought in animals — chickens, sheep, and a notably charismatic pig — and allowed them to help renew the earth through their manure and rooting. All this change brought back wildlife, though the animals were not always welcome. Snails and starlings attacked the fruit. Coyotes ate the chickens. Voles tunnelled under the trees. The solution was more diversity and more life. Ducks ate the snails. Owls saw off the starling. The owls and coyotes feasted on voles.

What the Chesters did was not radical. It was what advocates of organic agriculture have urged for generations. Biggest Little Farm just happens to depict this transformation in a particularly winsome (and, yes, somewhat self-congratulatory) fashion. Where there was once a dying, conventional monoculture farm that was no longer economically viable, Apricot Lanes Farms is now a flourishing ecosystem and economically sustainable farm that contributes to the health of the soil and the natural world.

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You don’t have to go far in the church these days to hear one question again and again: How are we to adapt the model of church that has developed in recent generations to the new reality we face today? In Canada, a new commission is studying how the national church should be organized in the face of diminishing resources. Dioceses are considering — or already have — merged. Theological colleges (including the one I serve) are embarking on new forms of partnership and integration. The Presiding Bishop-elect, Sean Rowe, has wrestled with these questions throughout his episcopate in northwestern Pennsylvania and western New York and made clear that they will be at the forefront of his primacy. Transformative structural change is inescapable.

I welcome these conversations and this holy time of change. But I have also struggled to find a good metaphor to describe what we are aiming for in this time of transformation. It’s clear why we need to change — to make the best possible use of our resources to proclaim the gospel and be God’s people — but it’s not always clear where that transformation is heading. This is a challenge familiar from Scripture: when you’re setting out on the journey God has set before you, you can’t always see the destination. Still, it helps to have some sense of what we might be looking for as we change. As I have thought about where the church is heading, and in conversation with friends and colleagues, I find myself thinking about Biggest Little Farm.

Let’s imagine this: the church is (like) a farm, or, if you prefer a biblical metaphor, a garden. The model of church we’ve inherited was like the conventional monoculture that the Chesters took over. There was a single model of doing things: a paid, professional cleric looked after a congregation that occupied a building it owned, often close to the center of town. The congregants came to church on Sunday to consume religious services, paying for this consumption in the form of the annual stewardship campaign and their volunteer service. When time and money permitted, they engaged in outreach and service to those around them, though when they couldn’t do that, writing a check was fine too. This is the model of church in which I was raised, and there are many parts of this model I cherish.

While this model was never as universal as we sometimes think, it exercised a grip on our collective ecclesial imagination. But it is also inescapable that in many parts of North America this model of church is playing itself out, like a worn-out monoculture farm. There are fewer people willing to be professional clergy and fewer congregations capable of paying them or sustaining their buildings. We’re also coming to realize that the kind of congregations this model attracted weren’t always so welcoming to people who weren’t heterosexual, white, in families, or otherwise outside what was considered the “norm.” There could be, at times, too much emphasis on making other people more like us rather than traveling together toward new maturity in the body of Christ.

This model may be reaching the end of its life. But the world still needs to hear the good news of Jesus Christ, in just the same way that people in Moorpark still need food produced by that land the Chesters own. It’s the model of producing that food — of sharing that good news — that needs to change.

For the Chesters, the answer began in the health of their soil. They needed to renew its life so it could sustain all other life. In my garden, I tend to the health of the soil through compost, taking the refuse and detritus of life and letting it slowly decompose to release its valuable nutrients. If we look at the church in this way, we might be prompted to ask ourselves what it is in the dying models we now inhabit that needs to be allowed to lie still and decompose so something new can emerge. Compost material often needs to be brought in from elsewhere, like leaves from nearby trees or grass clippings from the lawn. What resources — however insignificant and worthless they may seem to the world around us — need to be brought into our churches to enrich and renew our soil?

Gardens and farms depend on pollination. That’s why gardeners plant flowers and why agribusiness trucks bees around the country to pollinate their blossoms. The Chesters paid careful attention to pollination as well, and it paid off in the vitality of their farm. What would it mean for churches to think of themselves as in need of pollination? Mainline Protestants tend to be pretty good about sharing ideas among ourselves. The Liturgical Movement, which resulted in a profound reshaping of Anglican worship in the mid-20th century, was not a top-down movement. Instead, it was a kind of pollination, of spreading ideas around and seeing what blossomed. More recently, the rapid and hopeful emergence of church garden ministries are examples of how we can spread ideas and see them take root in different contexts.

But the best kind of pollination comes when you have not just one kind of pollinator, but many, not just honeybees but bumblebees, squash bees, mason bees, hover flies, bee flies, and a few butterflies and moths thrown in for good measure. But what gardeners also know is that we have no control over pollination. All we can do is create the right conditions and see who might stop by to brush through our flowers and leave a little pollen behind. For the church to be open to pollination means to be looking for what is flying around us, what external actors might have a crucial bit of nutrient for us. We need a spirituality that helps us create the conditions necessary to be pollinated, and often by unexpected actors.

The Chesters constantly talk about diversity. There’s a reason for this: monocropping just doesn’t work. It robs from the health of the earth for short-term gain and has no sustainable future. Diversity answers a lot of problems (the owls see off the starlings, the ducks see off the snails) but it also leads to unexpected consequences — did I mention the charismatic pig? Diversity is not something that can be managed or controlled. All the Chesters can hope to do is create the conditions for as much diversity as possible and trust that the results will enrich life.

In my context, the great transition that is taking place is the welcome of new immigrants. Canada’s population is now growing by an astonishing three percent per year, as compared to about one percent for most recent decades, fueled almost entirely by immigration. Many of these newcomers are Christian and many are joining our churches. The Diocese of Montreal once imported clergy from England and Ireland, but we now have clergy from Costa Rica, Haiti, Congo, and elsewhere. This diversity is a great blessing to our churches, not only in numbers but also in the gifts these newcomers bring with them for Christian witness. But we will miss the opportunity of this moment if we simply think that these newcomers are here to buttress our existing models of church.

Instead, the opportunity of this moment is to see what new and unexpected things will result from bringing together the diversity of the body of Christ in one place. Many of my students come from places where paid, professional clergy are not the norm or where it is unusual for a congregation to own — or even worship in — a church building. The challenge of this diversity is the new questions and new relationships it offers us to help us evolve into the body of Christ that God calls us to be in this moment. I cannot foresee what the outcome of that will be. But I do know a diverse church is much more likely to thrive and give life than a monocropping church.

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The garden/farm is just one model, and perhaps the questions it raises are not helpful in all contexts. Nonetheless, I am convinced that as we discern our future, we need to move beyond questions of resources (and resource constraint) and instead ask questions of what could be and what might be. To do so, we need a model or metaphor. I offer the garden — messy, diverse, flourishing — as one point of departure for that conversation.

It is encouraging that as we seek new models for church, many congregations have engaged in gardening, farming, and other food ministries. The true value of these ministries may lie less in their produce — however bountiful that may be — but in the way that linking garden and church, the natural world and the body of Christ, helps move us toward a deeper understanding of how God is calling the church to be in this time. A flourishing garden is not just a model of the destination toward which we are called, but — in its commitment to healthy soil, pollination, and diverse forms of life — also a guide for the journey we are on.