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The Land That Calls Me Home - Connecting God's People to God's Land through God's Church (Paperback)
Loot Price: R332
Discovery Miles 3 320
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The Land That Calls Me Home - Connecting God's People to God's Land through God's Church (Paperback)
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Loot Price R332
Discovery Miles 3 320
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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The Land That Calls Me Home investigates the disappearance of
small-scale farms from rural America and casts a vision for the
church to lead in their recovery. The book goes beyond naming the
usual suspects of industrialization, agricultural policies, and
corporations most often blamed or credited with orchestrating the
mass exodus of farmers from rural America and brings to light two
overlooked contributors to driving farmers away from the land:
Theology and the Church. The author shows how a misinterpretation
of scripture erroneously equates farming with God's curse on Adam
for eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. That fallacy
lies at the root of the uncontested takeover of agriculture by
corporate powers. The takeover centralized farming so that today a
few giant corporations monopolize global farm markets and only
one-percent of all Americans farm full time. Globalizing farming
promised to free the masses from the curse of having to work the
land to survive. The author debunks the portrayal of tilling the
soil as a curse and interprets the curse rather as the separation
of human beings from the soil. The more distance we create between
ourselves and the soil, the less healthy the earth and our human
bodies become. Therefore, restoring the viability of small-scale
farming is a means of counteracting the curse on Adam and the soil.
The church has been an accomplice to the theft of agriculture from
the people and forcing their mass migration from rural farmsteads
to suburbs and cities. The church saw the increase in productivity
of those who were left to farm on a large scale as a positive
development to be celebrated. The negative impact of farming with
pesticides, herbicides, genetically modified organisms (altered
seed), and chemical fertilizers, along with the effect of
agricultural runoff on the soil, rivers, oceans, and on human
health were seen as negligible compared to the promise of increased
yield that could be used to eradicate global hunger. Corporate
greed, however, has stockpiled food while millions die of
malnutrition annually. Furthermore, the church has too often
separated the care of souls from the care of the earth and ceded
earth and health care to government and free enterprise. In
shrinking rural communities, decimated by the migration of farmers
to the city, a few dwindling churches have remained open long
enough to care for the lingering souls and to bury the dead. By
confessing our complicity in causing the current farm crisis in
America, church leaders can with renewed vision help restore the
viability of small-scale farming in rural communities on the
fringes of larger population centers. Churches can serve as network
hubs for farmers, whose crops are too small to win contracts with
large grocery chains, to sell their produce in local Farmers
Markets and community supported agriculture (CSA) networks.
Churches that catch the vision to support local agriculture have
the volunteer base, the parking lots, and the presence in their
communities to organize and run an effective Farmers Markets. They
provide a service to the farmers and to their community while
reconnecting people to the soil. The author researches the loss and
revival of small-scale farming from the standpoint of a pastor and
a farmer. He lived on and moved from a small-scale farm as a youth
and has served in full-time pastoral ministry forty years,
including the last twenty years when he has worked to revive and
grow his family farm. His greatest discovery in seeking to make
farming viable has been that the small-scale farm's best chance of
financial solvency is having adequate local markets to sell farm
products, markets which churches in population centers are ideally
suited to provide. He has worked with lay leaders to establish a
successful Farmers Market in his present pastoral appointment and
serves as consultant to other congregations seeking ways to support
local agriculture.
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