Thanks to Holly Rossi for this guest post, which talks about the trend of American churches growing food on their property. (Maybe Hazon should hook these churches up with our Tuv Ha’Aretz CSA program?) Holly is a freelance writer and the Health editor at Beliefnet.

A nice Jewish girl walks into a sprawling evangelical mega church in the heart of Idaho and asks, “Where do you grow your organic vegetables?” Within minutes, she’s being whisked away on a golf cart to a patch behind the massive church: “Welcome to the Garden o’ Feedin’!”

No, this isn’t a pitch for a Twilight Zone remake on the Planet Green TV network. It’s a scene I actually experienced at the Vineyard Church of Boise, a church that grew over 20,000 pounds of organic produce on a 1/3-acre plot last year. On assignment for Search magazine, I was looking to explore the newly fertile connection between evangelical Christians and the environmental movement. What I found inspired me to imagine the world we could live in if every house of worship in America took a stab at growing food on its little piece of God’s green earth.

Read an excerpt from the article below.

God in the Garden

When one thinks of a conservative evangelical megachurch, one generally does not picture a teeming organic garden. But the more than two thousand worshippers who attend typical Sunday services at Vineyard Christian Fellowship of Boise, Idaho, know differently. The church’s multi-structure campus stands just off the main drag of Boise’s neighbor Garden City, within a dizzying queue of RV dealers, tattoo parlors, and bars touting “beer pong” night. There, nestled onto a mere third of an acre behind the main church building, is the “Garden o’ Feedin’,” a vibrant rectangle of land that yielded more than twenty thousand pounds of fresh, organic produce last year to be shared with church members and donated to local families through the church’s own food pantry.

If contemporary faith and science clash on issues from evolution to abortion, environmental science and climate change seem to be escaping the maelstrom. “Green” is getting religion, with environmental consciousness taking root even within evangelical Christian circles, where it once was dismissed as left-wing radicalism. And in addition to recycling and installing low-energy light bulbs, churches are improving their little pieces of the planet by growing gardens on their property, creating food, community, and good green fun all in one.

Evangelical environmentalism—often referred to with the less politically charged term “creation care”—at churches like Vineyard Boise is becoming more mainstream. A recent advertisement for Al Gore’s environmental activism Web site wecansolveit.org featured 700 Club host and conservative political mainstay Reverend Pat Robertson and liberal African American preacher Reverend Al Sharpton seated next to each other, united in their support for environmental protection despite their myriad political and theological differences. In March 2008, the Southern Baptist Convention, a bulwark of conservative Christianity, released a Climate Change Initiative that accused evangelicals of being “too timid” on environmental concerns. The National Association of Evangelicals’ Richard Cizik has been an outspoken proponent of creation care since 2003, and in April, he declared in the pages of this magazine, “Evangelicals are becoming the go-to religious community on the environment.” A proliferation of books and publications, including Creation Care: A Christian Environmental Quarterly, are gaining wider circulation among evangelicals. A blog called “The Evangelical Ecologist” boasts more than three hundred thousand visitors. The word on the environment has reached the people of the Word.

Tending the Garden

The heart and soul of the Vineyard church’s operation is Bill Meeker, a seventy-two-year-old garden maven, a retired construction company owner with a short white beard and an encyclopedia of wisecracks—almost all of which end up praising God—always at the ready. Meeker’s hand tremor caused by his early stage Parkinson’s Disease does not stop him from tirelessly overseeing the daily operations of a garden that produces steadily throughout a 150-day growing season.

Though conventional wisdom around here states that if there’s still snow on the nearby mountain peaks, it’s too early to plant a garden, Meeker turns over the church’s soil on Valentine’s Day every year. By May, it’s time to harvest radishes and lettuce, and the bounty continues all the way through to November’s pumpkins and kale.

The garden also yields strawberries, raspberries, cabbages, cantaloupes, eggplant, turnips, cucumbers, and virtually every other kind of produce imaginable (none of Idaho’s famous potatoes, though—they are so inexpensive and prolific that Meeker doesn’t think they warrant precious garden space). “We use compost and God’s help,” Meeker says to sum up his gardening methods.

Other than in Meeker’s pocket of town, Garden City seems oddly named, given its concrete-heavy boulevard. But in the 1860s, when Boise was settled by gold prospectors and Chinese mine workers, the area’s soil, which Meeker describes as “river bottom,” became home to a number of Chinese gardens. The city also housed saloons and other unsavory establishments, and later it became something of an industrial dumpsite for Boise.

Environmental degradation almost stopped the Vineyard church from getting “planted”—a classic evangelical term for new churches—in the first place. In 1994, the nascent congregation was outgrowing the section of an old grocery store it was meeting in and was ready to purchase its own land. The twenty-two acres they were interested in was seriously contaminated with toxic waste after years of chemical dumping by a dry cleaning company, and an airfield on the property had leaked fuel into the soil. The Environmental Protection Agency declared the water table tainted, the land un-buildable.

As evangelicals do, the congregation turned to their Bibles for inspiration. One morning, a church member read in his daily devotions 2 Kings 2:19-22, in which the men of Jericho tell the prophet Elisha, “Look, the town is a pleasant place to live in, as my lord can see; but the water is bad and the land causes bereavement.” Elisha responds by asking the men to bring him a new bowl filled with salt, which he casts down into the town’s spring, miraculously purifying it.

Though the idea “at first seemed a bit out there” for the church’s senior pastor, Reverend Tri Robinson, he soon agreed that the few dollars it would cost to buy some salt could be more than worth it. So a dozen members gathered on a cold spring morning to pray and pour boxes full of Morton’s salt into the three holes the EPA had dug to test the property. When the agency returned to retest the water, it was declared safe for use. Construction began, and today the main building is a sprawling, 95,000 square foot structure that houses a 1,200-seat sanctuary, bookstore, coffee bar, baptismal pool, and youth chapel.

Read the remainder of the article at Search magazine.
Image from Transitions Abroad.