By Reverend Heber Brown

Reverend Heber Brown is a community organizer, third-generation Baptist preacher and currently Pastor of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church in Baltimore. In the midst of the Baltimore uprising of 2015, while protests engulfed parts of the city after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, Rev. Brown launched the Black Church Food Security Network, which has grown into a multi-state alliance of congregations dedicated to creating a grassroots community-led food system. Today, the Network has member congregations throughout the East Coast and the southeastern United States and as far west as Omaha, Nebraska.

The Black Church Food Security Network works with, pastors, farmers and community members to create a food supply chain that transports, processes, and distributes produce to neighborhoods that are impacted by social upheaval and generations of political neglect. The following is an edited excerpt of a talk Reverend Brown gave at a Bioneers Conference.

The Black Church Food Security Network is working within the Black Church space to remember our long agrarian history and to revitalize our land-based legacies. We are organizing Black Churches around Black food and land sovereignty. I’m excited about the ways that our team can steward that history and, in an Afro-futurist kind of way, to build on that legacy.

I founded the Black Church Food Security Network in 2015 out of frustration with the inequities and lack of access to healthy food in my community. When I think about what’s wrong with the food system, I think about the exploitation; I think about excessive profit over people; I think about control over others instead of relationship and solidarity; I think about its impact on the Earth; I think about the ways in which the health of people and local communities are suffering; I think about the ways that the system has been used as a tool of racism and white supremacy both here and around the world, and how it continues to wield tremendous violence upon our various siblings around the world. As I have studied the current food system more and more, I’ve learned that gradualist approaches to tweaking and reforming that system only lead to a dead-end.

We’re in a position with the Black Church Food Security Network to remember, reintroduce and reconnect our folks with our sacred agrarian history. There is a 300-year tradition that began in the late 1700s with the founding of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and other independent black Baptist churches. We’ve had these autonomous spaces of economic strength, culture and advocacy. In many respects, they are places where we have achieved some distance from the domination of local white power politics and racist white supremacy.

Colonial Christianity has done such damage to the globe and to African people. In many ways, Christianity has been a handmaiden to white supremacy. I’m not alone, there are many religious leaders who recognize and acknowledge the harm done by Christianity and the Church by promoting a perverted colonial version of the way of Yeshua [Jesus]. This is a time for that acknowledgement, and it’s the time for reconnecting with our great ancestor Yeshua in a way that does not partner with domination and legacies of exploitation. We have an opportunity to be transformed, and one way we can do that, at the community level, is to build a food system that serves the needs of local people.

We just need to see what we can do with the kitchens, the land, the church vans, the classrooms that Pleasant Hope Black Church is currently stewarding, and what it looks like when we are pollinators and connecting all of it together.

In doing this work, I think about one of the ancestors of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church, Maxine Nicholas. Before she transitioned, she was a dynamic member of our congregation. I’m grateful to her for helping me see that the divine spark that was before me was bigger than I ever imagined. I had an idea to establish a garden on the 1500-square-foot front yard at Pleasant Hope Baptist Church. I didn’t know the first thing about growing anything, but I was upset because I saw members of our church, folks I share a life with, going in and out of the hospital for diet-related reasons. I went down the street to a nutrient-rich food store and saw that we were priced out of buying anything there. That made me mad. I still get frustrated thinking about it, because it was right at our fingertips and we still could not get what we needed.

So, I came back to the church with that divine discontent. In that moment, I looked at our front yard and said: “If we can’t afford what they’ve got, we’re going to grow what we need ourselves.”

That’s how it started. I didn’t know the first thing about how to begin a project like that. It was, as we say in church, the beautiful, senior, seasoned saint, Maxine Nicholas, who said, “Let me help this boy out; he got heart, but he don’t know what to do.”

Maxine grew up in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina with a bunch of brothers and sisters on a farm. She was the one who transformed that 15,000 square foot space and helped me to see that it was much bigger than I thought. She led the effort to grow tomatoes, a variety of herbs, okra and so many other things. She showed me that the people we needed were right around us; so, instead of reaching beyond ourselves for the solutions, we turned to the people that I’m in community with. I had to clean my lenses and see that from an asset-based community development and relational approach, we have what we need. We’re here and we’re together.

But, out of recognition of how gargantuan the challenges are in overcoming an exploitive and racist food system that puts profits over people’s health and well-being, there are times when I and those who I share community with have to resist the impulse to constantly do, to constantly be on the go every day. I recognize that as one of the characteristics of white supremacy culture—this never-ending urgency.

In this society our value is connected to our productivity. What did you produce? What did you do? So, to help balance that never-ending urgency, I want to elevate reflection, particularly reflection upon the ancestors, because I believe the ancestors know the way. The more we sit with them, the more we glean from the dynamic wisdom that they have to share, but we’ve got to be still enough to listen and to hear their voices at a deeper level.

I’m inspired by the lessons that I’m learning from Black farmers and Black pastors all over the country who are pointing to another way that we can pursue and follow, and we’ll see where the path leads, but I’m excited to be on it step-by-step.