Reimagining Ministry Under the Magnolia
by Katie Mills (she/her) - Pastoral Intern Summer 2024
When I arrived at Farm Church in June, I was on the comedown from a spring semester that had left me worn to the bone, unsure if or how I would return to my theological study in the fall. My first year of divinity school, though growth-filled and often joyful, had utterly exhausted me. The exhaustion was as spiritual as it was physical – my imagination had atrophied. I had been introduced to an abundance of good and liberative theology, but I had put very little of it into practice, to the point that I had begun to lose sight of what this could even look like. I hoped that Farm Church might remind me.
From the outset, Farm Church exceeded this hope. It was clear to me from the beginning that this community was doing something new and beautiful. On my first Sunday, I bunched rainbow chard and onions while meeting members of the community – who, I could already tell, had the same sense that I did that there is something deeply spiritual about orienting ourselves down toward the dirt. We tallied our harvest totals and then gathered on benches under a magnolia tree to discuss what it might mean to be co-creators with God. The band played Kacey Musgraves’s The Architect, and I sat on the ground and ran my fingers through pieces of mulch while singing along. I was amazed – never had church felt like this.
Throughout my first weeks, I started to feel pieces of myself returning. I remembered: it was the hope that a place like this – a world full of places like this – could exist that had brought me to divinity school in the first place. I sensed that my time here would speed by, so I prayed that I would attune myself moment by moment to what this place (both its people and land) had to teach me. I began a practice I kept throughout the summer: arriving at the garden a few minutes early to walk the rows, listen to the birds and my own breath, and notice what had changed from the day before. The garden was full of surprises – it often felt as if new life sprang up out of nowhere. One day, a trellis was a wall of green, and the next, it was dotted with red and orange with ripe cherry tomatoes. After a few weeks of heavy rain, clusters of frisbee-sized mushrooms started appearing along the ends of the rows. The practice of looking for such surprises was deeply grounding, and it began to extend into other areas of my life and work, as well.
One of my primary goals for the internship was discerning what my next steps after divinity school might look like. I had entered divinity school with hopes of pursuing a Ph.D. in theology afterward, but I knew by the year’s end that the expectation of constant production in academia would not be sustainable for me in the long term, and moreover, that orienting my daily life toward trying to secure a future in the academy was affecting my spirit in ways I did not like. I had long wondered if I might be called to church ministry – but having grown up in a denomination in which this was not an option for women, I had never had much of a framework for how one might discern such a calling, or what a “calling” even meant. On an early summer afternoon, in the car on the way back from having gone to the Scrap Exchange to procure containers for a seed-saving workshop, Kristen wholly reoriented my understanding of pastoral calling. A calling, she said, did not require an intense, lifelong sense of God’s leading toward a particular vocation. Instead, it was simply born of paying attention to what felt joyful and fulfilling in the everyday. She encouraged me to notice this intentionally. And so I did – I journaled constantly, making a point to document moments of delight and connection. Joyful moments were so abundant that listing them here would take far more pages than anyone would be willing to read, but I will share a few:
One day, a group of young children from a neighboring church’s creation care camp came to visit the garden. I guided them through the rows, showing them how different vegetables grow (they were particularly enthralled by tomatillos in their tiny lanterns) and sharing with them
tidbits like “Green bean plants like being harvested! Picking the beans tells them to grow even more.” I will never forget the looks of utter amazement on their faces as they picked cucumbers off the vine for the first time and stooped to sniff wildflowers. They quite literally leapt for joy when I told them they could taste the cherry tomatoes, and when the time came for them to leave, multiple children gave me slivers of paper and asked me to write down the address of the garden so their parents could bring them back. I remembered feeling just like this about my dad’s strawberry patch and my grandmother’s tomato plants at their age. I could hardly contain my own joy at the idea that this day might create such a memory for them in the future.
In mid-July, Kristen and I spent an entire day in the industrial kitchen at Trinity Avenue Presbyterian Church making bread and lasagna out of the abundance of zucchini that had gotten too large to be otherwise edible. We talked about God and the garden and music and life while cutting zucchini into pieces small enough to fit into the food processor and pouring pounds of flour into the stand mixer. About six hours into this endeavor, one of our weekly visitors from nearby Reality Ministries stopped in – he sat down and enjoyed the first of the lasagna with us, and then offered to stay as we finished cooking. Kristen asked what kind of music he liked, and he delighted us with his no-beats-missed response of “Dancing Queen!” which we, of course, queued immediately. The three of us danced around the kitchen and sang along to Abba songs while we sprinkled extra cheese onto lasagnas and divided bread into individual portions to take to the Durham Community Fridges. When I left, I stocked the fridges and then headed to the garden for the first of a series of conversations focused on how grappling with the reality of death impacts the way we move through our daily lives. The sunset was breathtaking as I drove home from the garden that evening, and I made a mental note: this was the most fulfilled that a day of work had ever made me feel.
Over the course of the summer, serving communion grew to be one of my favorite parts of the week. Prior to my time at Farm Church, I had never thought much about Eucharistic theology and practice. In my childhood church context, communion was infrequent, and it was stressed that it was purely symbolic – the only thing that was happening, it was emphasized, was a practice of remembering Christ’s death. Farm Church’s creative ways of celebrating communion – always with words of institution emphasizing wholeness and liberation, sometimes with green beans picked straight from the rows – caused me to see it with fresh eyes, week after week. And as I got to know each utterly delightful member of the Farm Church community more deeply, sharing the sacrament that I came to believe binds people together as the family of Christ became more joyful. One midsummer Sunday, my younger sister came to visit. I was unable to hold back tears as I looked at her and said, “The cup of grace for you, Kelly,” while she dipped a piece of a bagel into the cup. In that moment, I felt at peace that this was what I wanted to do with my life. This feeling intensified on my final Sunday at Farm Church, looking each member of the community in the eye, thinking about the kindness they had shown me and the ways their unique insights had shaped me throughout the summer, I felt the way Christ draws us toward each other in the sharing of the bread and cup on a deeper level than ever before.
My time at Farm Church restored my hope that a new way of being in the world together is possible. It is a community marked by attunement to the wild, surprising movement of the Spirit and to the particularities of the place where it is rooted. It is a community marked by a dual commitment to imagination and action. In coming together every week to cultivate new life, Farm Church affirms that a world beyond extractive, death-dealing systems is possible, and is already bursting forth. My life and ministry will be forever shaped by my time learning from this place and its people, and I am immensely grateful.
