PAICINES, Calif. (RNS) — Sometimes a tomato isn’t just a salad ingredient. Sometimes it’s a call to action.
That’s the revolutionary idea of about 40 farmers who gathered for a first-of-its-kind interfaith weekend at a working ranch in the rolling green hills 60 miles southeast of San Jose. Christians, Jews, Muslims and the spiritual-but-not-religious united to seek nothing less than a complete disruption of how food is grown, distributed and even served.
“We never ask questions when it comes to a handout model of food ministry,” said Venice Williams, a Lutheran lay minister who came to the conference from Milwaukee, where she is executive director of Alice’s Garden, an urban farm. “But when we begin to move into a self-sufficiency model, a model that acknowledges the talents and gifts of the communities we are called to journey with — not ‘serve,’ but ‘journey with’ — it gets more complicated, because that is more work.”
Jesus, she said, does not call his followers to what is easy.