Humans with mustard plants in Baltimore. The Strength to Love 2 Farm began as an initiative of Newborn Community of Faith Church
Land is the source of life
Anyone who eats, anyone who prays, anyone who lives from the earth should be thinking about land.
Land has a history
For every tale of settlement, there is a tale of dispossession; for every tale of wealth, there is a tale of labor. The land carries these stories.
Land has a future
Reconnecting with land and agriculture, and enabling others to reconnect with and access land for farming and ceremony, is crucial to protecting the future of the land and all who live from it.
God has entrusted to us sacred land to tend and cultivate. We are of the land and it is the foundation of our lives. The FaithLands Toolkit helps us connect our core values and beliefs about land to how we faithfully use it. This toolkit provides strategies, best practices, case studies, and spiritual teachings that support partnerships between farmers, congregations, and the food that sustains us.
PHP helped initiate FaithLands three years ago and contributed to the writing of this toolkit. Download the toolkit to learn more about the transformative potential of land.
Inspiring Case Studies
Case studies are featured throughout the FaithLands Toolkit and these are two from the FaithLands website:
“Our neighborhood has many assets: impassioned people, historical legacies, and a number of caring churches. However, we are a historically redlined community that still suffers from neglect, which has contributed to our having some of the largest arrest and recidivism rates in the state of Maryland,” said Darriel Harris, senior pastor of Newborn Community of Faith Church in Baltimore
“Our faith says that we have to meet the needs of the least of these, meet the needs of the marginalized, and our neighbors needed employment,” Harris asserted. “So we created a farm to give employment to people returning from incarceration.”
Sisters of St. Joseph and Brentwood Farms
“We knew we didn’t want to be the farmers, but we knew we wanted farming on the land.” —Sister Karen Burke
In 2015, the Sisters affirmed a land ethic statement laying out the principles that would guide all future decisions regarding the land they hold in sacred trust for the next generation. Now they are leasing to seven farmers who are growing food organically on the land.
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