Farm Church in Durham Credit: Photo by Angelica Edwards
Farm Church operates on a precious plot of land around the corner from my house. I always pass it on walks. Their front lawn is where I got my “We Support Fair Wages for City Workers’’ sign, and their Instagram advertises mutual aid opportunities before pleading congregation numbers. All an indication that something radical might be happening, I follow my curiosity.
Sunday service resembles a discussion group at a liberal arts college more than a pulpit-led sermon. Handouts circulate from a book on food inequity, and we dismantle the welfare queen myth together. Read next to a passage from the Bible, the idea arises that scripture is not always a “moral” but can often be a “mirror.” We remember Matthew as an anti-imperialist author to inform our view of the Parable of the Talents. The slaves in the story parallel those submissive under capitalism; the master would reap where he did not sow, punitive and ever-demanding. The slave who could not earn more than he was given was thrown to a place with “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
That transitions seamlessly into a question for the group. We are asked where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth” today and to utter aloud suffering in the world that needs to be held. We would carry it together.
A core belief Farm Church operates around is that calling for justice and liberation within one’s community is a holy act.
The gathered community for each Wednesday and Sunday is nontraditional. It carves out an alternative space to the classic steepled chapels, the places that ask themselves, “Where are the young people?” The assumption is that the youth are not spiritually concerned. Farm Church disagrees, simply positing that young people don’t like to conform—tradition for tradition’s sake is always asking for some degree of conformity.
Kim Brummel waters plants at Farm Church in Durham Credit: Photo by Angelica Edwards
I grew up Southern Baptist in the Bible Belt of deep South Georgia. We sat obediently in the congregation and learned that there was something inherently wrong with us for being gay, that women should submit to the male leaders of the household, and that CNN was the Communist News Network.
Imagine my surprise sitting at Farm Church, reflecting on Matthew 25:14-30, and hearing people call it a denunciation of capitalism. The Parable of the Talents was taught to me as a warning to heed, that God had entrusted me with a life and it was a privilege and my duty to drive it into the ground and make it worth it. Or else there would be hell to pay, literally.
All my hometown friends left the church as soon as they could. But I held on, imagining something like Farm Church was possible. My renouncing of the organized religion I grew up with was held sacred by my own view of Jesus: full of radical care, righteous anger, and deeply anticapitalist. But the question in today’s world remains, Can a church be anticapitalist?
Every Sunday morning at Farm Church is divided between farming and gathering. Kristen Sommerfield acts as lead gardener first and pastoral leader second. She tells us what the garden needs today, how to prevent the microbes in the dirt from getting bleached by the sun, and how to encourage sustainable long-term farming by continually topping off the rows, and she shows us a fancy stake-filled device called a broadfork. We go row by row, weeding and thinning turnips, beets, carrots, and lettuce. All of this food will go to the community.
We are shown how to thin the sproutlings, a rather callous-seeming measure of ripping up swaths of potential plants. This way each vegetable will have space to grow. Kristen acknowledges the emotional distress that can come with having to pick what to leave and what to take, and this comforts me. As does the little bucket that appears where we can save all the sprouts for a tasty microgreen snack.
Kneeling in the dirt, I strike up a conversation with a guy in his thirties who started his career in bioethics and has come around to a passion for food security. I make a new friend in an older man who grew up in the 1950s and drove from Alaska to the tip of Chile when Pinochet was in power. A man stands to the side and plays a fiddle as we garden.
As it turns 11:00, folks hit a natural stopping point and complete the tasks for the day. We gather around the benches, and a little girl in overalls plays in a pile of dirt, shovel and bucket in hand as if she’s making sandcastles at the beach.
The congregants sing a chorus from a song in a bonfire style. One man plays a guitar and sings the loudest. The Batya Levine lyrics are written in Sharpie on a piece of cardboard:
“May I be empty and open to receive the light
May I be empty and open to receive
May I be full and open to receive the light
May I be full and open to receive.”
Kristen emphasizes that what makes Farm Church successful in its mission is hyperlocality. They are not seeking to be a megachurch, and their organizational structure is horizontal: Kristen’s “boss” is a council of church and community members.
The church’s original founders chose Durham for its unique community with an already active scene addressing food insecurity. Farm Church has simply plugged itself in with partners already working toward the same goal. As it grows, Farm Church is constantly asking, “What are the needs of the gathered community? What are the needs of the community we serve?”
That means a Wednesday night pesto-making party spent in a kitchen, creating something out of all the basil the church rescued before the frost. We measure oil by the cup and fill many containers of pesto to donate to Feed Durham for the nonprofit’s Thanksgiving meal initiative.
Bonny Moellenbrock works at Farm Church in Durham Credit: Photo by Angelica Edwards
Nohemi, a member of Farm Church, says a big draw of the community was the “space for 20-to-30-year-olds to gather.” That and helping families who are food insecure, a hands-on alternative to the usual act of simply donating money to removed organizations. As a member of the Latino community, she says it has been illuminating to realize how much of Durham’s food insecure population looks and speaks like her. Farm Church, while mainly white, presents an interesting path of advocacy; Nohemi calls them “real allies.”
When I sit down and talk with Kristen on Monday, we are on similar pages of having arrived in the real world ready to build the reality we wished for—only to be pleasantly surprised by the fulfillment already waiting. Farm Church is her first job out of seminary, and seminary itself was a path change from the corporate food production world she was slated for. During a “breath of hesitation,” she calls it, she took a year after college to do service with the Presbyterian Church and fell in love with the spirituality of organic produce farming. I find myself relating to her imaginative questioning of the status quo.
“You’re a manic pixie dream church,” I say.
Kristen laughs.
“Honestly—there could be no better compliment.”
Elim Lee is a Georgia peach who took a detour in New England and came back to her roots in the South this past year. Her least-in-progress, most-finished project is her children’s book Needle and the Too Big World. Follow her on Twitter at @wellwhatgives and Instagram at @elimscribbles.Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.
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Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
Voices: I Met Jesus on a Farm
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Farm Church operates on a precious plot of land around the corner from my house. I always pass it on walks. Their front lawn is where I got my “We Support Fair Wages for City Workers’’ sign, and their Instagram advertises mutual aid opportunities before pleading congregation numbers. All an indication that something radical might be happening, I follow my curiosity.
Sunday service resembles a discussion group at a liberal arts college more than a pulpit-led sermon. Handouts circulate from a book on food inequity, and we dismantle the welfare queen myth together. Read next to a passage from the Bible, the idea arises that scripture is not always a “moral” but can often be a “mirror.” We remember Matthew as an anti-imperialist author to inform our view of the Parable of the Talents. The slaves in the story parallel those submissive under capitalism; the master would reap where he did not sow, punitive and ever-demanding. The slave who could not earn more than he was given was thrown to a place with “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
That transitions seamlessly into a question for the group. We are asked where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth” today and to utter aloud suffering in the world that needs to be held. We would carry it together.
A core belief Farm Church operates around is that calling for justice and liberation within one’s community is a holy act.
The gathered community for each Wednesday and Sunday is nontraditional. It carves out an alternative space to the classic steepled chapels, the places that ask themselves, “Where are the young people?” The assumption is that the youth are not spiritually concerned. Farm Church disagrees, simply positing that young people don’t like to conform—tradition for tradition’s sake is always asking for some degree of conformity.
I grew up Southern Baptist in the Bible Belt of deep South Georgia. We sat obediently in the congregation and learned that there was something inherently wrong with us for being gay, that women should submit to the male leaders of the household, and that CNN was the Communist News Network.
Imagine my surprise sitting at Farm Church, reflecting on Matthew 25:14-30, and hearing people call it a denunciation of capitalism. The Parable of the Talents was taught to me as a warning to heed, that God had entrusted me with a life and it was a privilege and my duty to drive it into the ground and make it worth it. Or else there would be hell to pay, literally.
All my hometown friends left the church as soon as they could. But I held on, imagining something like Farm Church was possible. My renouncing of the organized religion I grew up with was held sacred by my own view of Jesus: full of radical care, righteous anger, and deeply anticapitalist. But the question in today’s world remains, Can a church be anticapitalist?
Every Sunday morning at Farm Church is divided between farming and gathering. Kristen Sommerfield acts as lead gardener first and pastoral leader second. She tells us what the garden needs today, how to prevent the microbes in the dirt from getting bleached by the sun, and how to encourage sustainable long-term farming by continually topping off the rows, and she shows us a fancy stake-filled device called a broadfork. We go row by row, weeding and thinning turnips, beets, carrots, and lettuce. All of this food will go to the community.
We are shown how to thin the sproutlings, a rather callous-seeming measure of ripping up swaths of potential plants. This way each vegetable will have space to grow. Kristen acknowledges the emotional distress that can come with having to pick what to leave and what to take, and this comforts me. As does the little bucket that appears where we can save all the sprouts for a tasty microgreen snack.
Kneeling in the dirt, I strike up a conversation with a guy in his thirties who started his career in bioethics and has come around to a passion for food security. I make a new friend in an older man who grew up in the 1950s and drove from Alaska to the tip of Chile when Pinochet was in power. A man stands to the side and plays a fiddle as we garden.
As it turns 11:00, folks hit a natural stopping point and complete the tasks for the day. We gather around the benches, and a little girl in overalls plays in a pile of dirt, shovel and bucket in hand as if she’s making sandcastles at the beach.
The congregants sing a chorus from a song in a bonfire style. One man plays a guitar and sings the loudest. The Batya Levine lyrics are written in Sharpie on a piece of cardboard:
“May I be empty and open to receive the light
May I be empty and open to receive
May I be full and open to receive the light
May I be full and open to receive.”
Kristen emphasizes that what makes Farm Church successful in its mission is hyperlocality. They are not seeking to be a megachurch, and their organizational structure is horizontal: Kristen’s “boss” is a council of church and community members.
The church’s original founders chose Durham for its unique community with an already active scene addressing food insecurity. Farm Church has simply plugged itself in with partners already working toward the same goal. As it grows, Farm Church is constantly asking, “What are the needs of the gathered community? What are the needs of the community we serve?”
That means a Wednesday night pesto-making party spent in a kitchen, creating something out of all the basil the church rescued before the frost. We measure oil by the cup and fill many containers of pesto to donate to Feed Durham for the nonprofit’s Thanksgiving meal initiative.
Nohemi, a member of Farm Church, says a big draw of the community was the “space for 20-to-30-year-olds to gather.” That and helping families who are food insecure, a hands-on alternative to the usual act of simply donating money to removed organizations. As a member of the Latino community, she says it has been illuminating to realize how much of Durham’s food insecure population looks and speaks like her. Farm Church, while mainly white, presents an interesting path of advocacy; Nohemi calls them “real allies.”
When I sit down and talk with Kristen on Monday, we are on similar pages of having arrived in the real world ready to build the reality we wished for—only to be pleasantly surprised by the fulfillment already waiting. Farm Church is her first job out of seminary, and seminary itself was a path change from the corporate food production world she was slated for. During a “breath of hesitation,” she calls it, she took a year after college to do service with the Presbyterian Church and fell in love with the spirituality of organic produce farming. I find myself relating to her imaginative questioning of the status quo.
“You’re a manic pixie dream church,” I say.
Kristen laughs.
“Honestly—there could be no better compliment.”
Elim Lee is a Georgia peach who took a detour in New England and came back to her roots in the South this past year. Her least-in-progress, most-finished project is her children’s book Needle and the Too Big World. Follow her on Twitter at
@wellwhatgives and Instagram at @elimscribbles. Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.
Support independent local journalism.
Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.