Getting down and dirty in the soil: Rural congregation discovers ‘life has the last word’

The Rev. Julia L. Brown has a love/hate relationship with this time of year.

“I dislike the rain and the allergies, but I love the new growth we see all around. What’s brown is turning green,” she said. “We are blessed to see resurrection every spring.”

Springtime is a time of witnessing resurrection, one in which the congregation of Solomon’s United Church of Christ has a front row seat.

Two and a half years ago, the rural church located in New Franklin, Pennsylvania, stepped boldly toward eradicating food insecurity for its neighbors, turning its unused lawn into gardens.

“We are blessed with a few acres, a lot of which was just lawn. There weren’t any youth using it anymore,” Brown said.

Bringing the church property from death to life was an idea that was on the heart of Solomon’s retired pastor’s wife, says Brown.

“She wanted Solomon’s lawn to become a community space,” said Brown.

Solomon’s UCC started with ten garden beds that were opened to the public. A banner advertised the prospective plots, free of charge, to the community. Garden applications were posted on the church’s website in English as well as in Spanish and Haitian.

Creating an inclusive garden

The church lawn now boasts 20 raised beds and inground plots. To make the church garden truly welcoming for all, a grant was received to add handicap accessible elevated gardening beds.

In 2024, grant money helped in the creation of the Katie’s Krops children’s garden. Katie’s Krops is a national gardening movement that started with a young girl in South Carolina who wanted to raise the next generation of earth stewards and hunger advocates. Today, the organization has more than a hundred children gardens in 30 states, including the one at Solomon’s UCC.

Brown says watching the children get their hands into the dirt and seeing their awe of seeds turning into seedlings and then fully producing plants is a reminder of how powerful a teaching tool a garden is, providing lessons on how deeply connected all are to the ground and to one another.

Last year, Solomon’s gardens — including the Katie’s Krops — produced 300 pounds of fresh vegetable that were disbursed to help feed neighbors. According to studies, about 17,000 Franklin County residents are food insecure and 90% of adults in Franklin County eat less than the recommended five servings of fruits and vegetables a day.

Beyond gardens

Solomon’s UCC, though, still has plenty of lawn to use in creative ways. One such idea is to create a haven for Pennsylvania’s flora and fauna by planting more native trees on the property.

“We have all this space to fill in native trees that would glorify God and support the ecosystem,” said Brown. Among the trees now currently stretching their branches toward heaven are dogwoods and red maples.

“We also have a pollinator garden that we created last year with native geraniums, milkweed, phlox, and coneflowers that are attracting butterflies, bees and wasps,” said Brown.

A decision to live boldly

Solomon’s thriving vegetable, children and pollinator gardens, mingling with native trees, are just a few chapters in the congregation’s story of how the decision to live boldly as Easter people is bringing them from death back into life.

It was almost three years ago, after the retirement of their pastor of 40 years, that Solomon’s search and call team decided to do something radical.

“They took a gamble with the church endowment, hiring a full-time minister rather than part-time,” said Brown. The congregation, she adds, was ready to let go of running the church like a business and be more creative.

The search and call captured that desire in what Brown says was a “bold” profile letting perspective pastors know that their hearts were committed to leaning into a new way of being and doing. The profile also told of their passion for wanting to address food insecurity and environmental stewardship, the latter being a personal passion of Brown’s.

“I originally thought I wanted to become a veterinarian,” said Brown, crediting her parents who bought alpacas into the family when she was just 15 years old. Brown soon found herself studying animal agriculture. But it wasn’t until her stint at a horse rescue farm that her focus shifted from the physical care to the spiritual care of God’s creation.

During the Covid years, she attended Fuller Theological Seminary online. With the ink still fresh on her Master of Divinity degree, Brown read Solomon’s UCC’s profile with excited curiosity, as did the search and call team read her’s. Both knew it was a good fit.

“The decision was made to run with it,” said Brown.

Life has the last word

Solomon’s UCC has been running ever since and shows no signs of slowing down — except for much-needed seasons of reflection.

This past Lent, Brown found herself reflecting on the words of Jeff Chu, author of the bestseller book, “Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand.”

In the book, Chu, a Manhattan journalist who spent time at Princeton Theological Seminary’s Farminary, a 21-acre working farm where students learn about food justice and creation care, writes “life ultimately gets the last word.”

Brown looks forward to speaking with Chu more about this statement as the author will be at Solomon’s UCC on June 18 as part of his national “Good Soil” book tour. For now, she carries his simple yet profound words into Eastertide, remembering each day how her congregation embraced death to old ways to get to life once again.

“Life does have the last word. We can trust that — even now in a society where everything feels scary. Life having the last word is our Easter story,” she said.

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