Otis Moss III: Care for the land is intimately tied to Black liberation

Over the past decade, a cadre of African American pastors have stepped up their commitment to environmental stewardship. One of the leaders of this movement is the Rev. Otis Moss III, the pastor of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ.

After succeeding the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to become senior pastor of the 8,000-member South Side megachurch in 2008, Moss began to cast a vision for protecting the environment and retooling for resilience in the wake of climate change.

It wasn’t easy. Many church members grew up in an urban environment, far removed from that of their ancestors — many of whom were sharecroppers, and before that, worked the land as enslaved persons.

But over the past 12 years, Moss has led the church to plant the George Washington Carver community vegetable garden, which also teaches youth about gardening, and to start a Black farmers market.

He helped raise millions of dollars to build a green roof — covered in vegetation to absorb rainfall and regulate temperature — that also incorporates solar power. In 2017, he dedicated the site of a 27-acre “green” intergenerational community called Imani Village.

Faith & Leadership contributor Yonat Shimron talked to Moss about the challenges of reconnecting to the Earth and its habitat. The following is an edited transcript.

Faith & Leadership: When did you first make the connection between care for the environment and your calling as a minister?

Otis Moss III: It began in connection with my home church in Cleveland, Ohio. I was at Olivet Institutional Baptist Church, where my father pastored. My father was from Georgia, right outside LaGrange. As the son of a sharecropper, he was tied to the land and had a special affinity for the land and what we would call today holistic health.

That continued with my relationship with my wife, who is also from the South. Her family had a deep tie to the land and the lessons she learned from her grandmother. They lived on a peanut farm. Part of her ethic was, “You take care of the land; the land takes care of you.”

Coming to Chicago, we realized the great migration had created a break. People who had deep connection to the land were disoriented and living in spaces of rapid urbanization. When we took hold of a piece of property across the street from the church to create a garden, that was a catalyst for us moving in a green and sustainable direction.

F&L: What was that piece of property like?

OM: It wasn’t much of anything — just a little lot. We turned that into a community garden with a small grant from a group called Faith in Place. We received another grant to train young people to be gardeners and hired a master gardener to be their teacher.

From there, we expanded to a farmers market and built a relationship with a coalition of African American farmers in Pembroke, Illinois. Pembroke is primarily a rural African American community where the first people of African descent migrated from North Carolina, prior to emancipation, for a better life.

We built a relationship with this community where you had fourth- and fifth-generation farmers living in this area.

From there, we made a decision to be a sustainable church.

When we reached the point where we needed to do a church renovation, we made the decision it would be a green renovation. We would seek to hire returning citizens who were formerly incarcerated. The contractors would be from our community.

Those were the principles we used: green, dismantling mass incarceration and economic empowerment.

F&L: Was it a hard sell for the congregation? Did you have to convince the board of directors?

OM: There’s a funny story around that. I remember the first presentation I gave to the congregation. It was pretty quiet. Many times when people are quiet, people are thinking to themselves, “I’m not going to support this, because I don’t understand what the minister is talking about.” They have to take it home and sit with it.

I went to go get my hair cut later that week, and my barber told me that one of the elders came into the barbershop and was fussing about the new minister and his church.

We had been talking about doing a green roof. The person in the barbershop was quite upset with me for wanting to put a putting green on top of the church.

When he heard “a green roof,” he only associated it with a putting green on top of the church. He didn’t have any concept of what a green roof was.

Because of that encounter, I went back to the board of directors and said, “We made a huge mistake. We have not educated the congregation appropriately. They have no idea what we’re talking about.”

From there, we instituted an education program with small groups, sharing, “What does green mean?

“Your grandmother was green because she had a quilt that recycled pieces of cloth. Your grandmother made gumbo, which is essentially a culinary form of recycling. Your grandmother grew food behind the house and you never went without.”

Once we did that and the elders had the language and vocabulary, it was easy to make the next step. They became the ambassadors for it: “We must go green. This is our responsibility and our heritage.”

F&L: Do you now encourage other churches?

OM: We do. I’ve been asked multiple times to give presentations about our work. Our community development corporation became evangelistic for green design, sustainable design and partnering with organizations that put to work people who are returning from prison.

We were part of the renovation for our local library, several blocks down the street, the Carter G. Woodson Regional Library. It’s a repository for African American literature in the Midwest.

The building was falling apart. We wanted a green renovation using people from the mass incarceration system and contractors from our community.

We were able to negotiate with the city — it was about 10 different organizations that got together — and we were able to receive $10 million from the state for a full-service renovation that was green.

It’s the crown jewel of our community. It’s a beautiful structure now that was built and organized by community partnership.

Then we purchased 27 acres down the street and we built a medical facility. We’re planning housing, along with an urban farm and workforce development with people coming out of mass incarceration, and a fitness facility. And the entire design, from the ground up, is a green design.

It’s in partnership with the Nature Conservancy, and we’re putting together what’s called a healing garden, which will be a beta test for prescribing nature over traditional chemical medication.

It’s a new way of looking at revitalizing and building communities in areas that have traditionally had no investment or have been divested over the years.

F&L: African American churches are dealing with so much right now — police brutality, health disparities, unemployment. Have you seen this issue gain much traction?

OM: The challenge in America and in the West in general is that we compartmentalize issues. Environment is over here; mass incarceration is over there.

But we approach it all as intertwined.

If you live in [some sections of] Chicago, you live in a food desert. You have corner stores. The reason you have corner stores is because no one has invested there or these areas have been redlined due to government policies.

These corner stores do not serve healthy food. They serve highly processed food. That then becomes the diet for children in that area.

Then they’re diagnosed by a public school system with attention deficit disorder or some other type of challenge that needs to be fixed by medication. It’s directly connected to how children are perceived in our community.

We do a lot of work helping people see the connections between a food desert and mass incarceration and economic disparity and the way police are deployed to occupy rather than being community partners.

All of it is interconnected with systematic racism. And helping people see the connection, they then understand, “Oh, creation and the land is also connected to my transformation and liberation.”

F&L: Have you seen congregants make changes in their lives?

OM: We use our farmers for the food that’s prepared at the church so you know where it’s coming from. We push this idea that you should know your farmer. When you invest with a farmer, you know his or her entire family.

You have this community that’s created where people are witnessing children learning about farming and building a relationship with a person who’s raising the food.

A change in eating can also change a community, economically and socially. There is now data that shows that community gardens reduce violence in impoverished neighborhoods. It’s a pretty simple reason: community gardens create community.

They have people working in the gardens who get to know each other. They become quasi block clubs and watch clubs. People become interested in each other and their challenges and celebrate their victories together, all because we put our hands in the same soil.

F&L: How do you tie it in to the Christian message?

OM: The exodus story is near and dear to people of African descent. We see ourselves in the exodus story. Moses tells Pharaoh to “let my people go” — not “that we may build an ark,” but “so we may go to a land where we may worship God,” where we may have this relationship we used to have prior to the enslavement moment.

We share that narrative that we are displaced, that we have been disoriented from the land. Exodus is about reorientation and the Jewish people becoming landed people from a landless people. We share that same narrative.

When we move to the New Testament, Jesus is a country preacher, a rural preacher. Paul’s urban; Jesus is a landed preacher.

The parables are told from the perspective of someone who knows about the land. That’s why you have a parable of seed falling upon the land or the parable of the prodigal son, of someone who has been hired out to care for pigs.

They are rural stories, stories that connect people to the land.

The Bible is rich in imagery that connects us to the land. There’s a list of 100 scriptures beloved by people of African descent. Many of the most beloved are those that are landed.

For example, the Twenty-Third Psalm speaks in rural language. The Isaiah text of “they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles” (Isaiah 40:31 KJV) speaks, again, out of this landedness. The Amos text of justice rolling down like waters (Amos 5:24).

The creation metaphors, the rural metaphors speak to a community that still has a deep memory of being in the South migrating to the North, but it still rings so true to us.

On a hot, humid summer afternoon in Atlanta, children at Camp Beech Grove are enjoying their daily hike down to the creek. Here, in the nature preserve of Central Congregational United Church of Christ (CUCC), they find relief from the sizzling sun, surrounded by a canopy of trees — many of them beech, the camp’s namesake. In these woods, a butterfly goes by, a frog makes a splash, and children learn about the native plants that surround them.

Today, the children can enjoy all that nature has to offer here. But that hasn’t always been the case.

For five years, the 450-member congregation at CUCC has been working to restore the 8 acres of woods surrounding the church. A certified wildlife habitat by the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), the woods offer a magnificent view through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the church’s sanctuary. It was there that Ron Smith, gazing out those windows, had a vision.

“These woods were a mess,” said Smith, who initiated the project. “Nobody went out there. They were overgrown, and they weren’t inviting. And I thought to myself, ‘I want to change that.’”

Smith set out to reverse decades of neglect and to rehabilitate the surrounding woods, where he says he can be closer to the Creator.

“God is speaking in nature, and we’re losing something when we don’t make nature a part of the community or when we don’t show respect for it. He created all of this. All life is sacred, and all of nature is sacred,” Smith said.

Active with the church since 2010, the year he retired from his 60-hour-a-week corporate job as a CPA, Smith knew that creating a sustainable wildlife habitat would also provide ecological benefits, including the preservation of native species and better air and water quality. What he didn’t know is that his vision would ultimately bring an awareness of and connection with the surrounding community, providing an urban oasis and a place for the church’s neighbors to be closer to God.

It started with a trail

Smith had learned to love the outdoors at a young age. He grew up in a farming area of Pennsylvania, and his mother had vegetable gardens and an infectious love of nature. From these influences, Smith said, he knew he would be a gardener when he retired. He first tackled the overgrown yard of a home he and his wife purchased in nearby Decatur before setting his sights on the distressed woods at CUCC.

“The times I accompanied my wife, Martha, to church, I would notice the magnificent trees that were dying from the oppression of invasive species,” said Smith, who is a member of the Georgia Native Plant Society. “The woods needed care, and I knew they offered a place of sanctuary for me.”

In spring 2011, Smith told his wife he wanted to work in the CUCC woods. He joined the congregation’s Garden Team, which meets once a month to work on the church grounds. As Smith worked, he realized that a path through the woods would not only invite people in but also provide the access needed to remove and replace unwanted plants.

With no church budget, Smith personally purchased the first equipment and plants and began clearing a path to the creek, thinking, “If I build a trail, people will come.” And he was right.

Since then, much has happened to the neglected wooded area. Nature trails have been created. Trash and debris have been removed from the creek. Invasive plants — aggressive species that grow outside their natural range and crowd out the native plants — have been removed and replaced with species indigenous to the area. Meadows and gardens have been established.

Over time, more people from the congregation have showed up to help: working, bringing plants or donating money. Local businesses and nonprofits have joined the effort, too. In 2012, Trees Atlanta donated 40 trees, while Hands On Atlanta sent 30 volunteers to help plant, clear ivy and mulch trails. Members of the Native Plant Society have also donated trees and shrubs, helped Smith identify appropriate grasses for the creek area and assisted with transporting the plants. The Garden Team and its supporters continue to invest their time and money to support the forest restoration and gardens as well.

And this past spring, reinforcements were brought in — 12 sheep stayed for two months, eating the English ivy that overran the grounds. This literal flock was a big hit with the metaphorical one.

“The congregation fell in love with the sheep,” said the Rev. Ginnie Ferrell, the associate minister for children and youth at CUCC. “We can be so separated from creation that sheep … give us warm fuzzies.”

It’s bridging this separation from nature that inspires Smith and Ferrell to continue their efforts and watch the project evolve.

“Love is the greatest gift any of us can give,” Smith said. “It is an act of love to care for God’s creation. Humans do not and cannot exist in isolation from plants, animals, water, air or soil. Our earth is in peril. What greater mission could there be than to take care of all creation?”

Drawing from the congregation’s beginnings

At this liberal, progressive, mission-oriented church, Ferrell says, there’s a history of people wanting to worship in a natural setting.

When the CUCC congregation moved from downtown Atlanta in the late 1960s to what was then considered the suburbs, it chose to build the church in the middle of an 8-acre forest. Today, that property is surrounded by an urban landscape. It’s just minutes from downtown, located on a major four-lane road.

The congregation continued to enjoy the leafy view from the sanctuary, but over time, the land — like many urban forests — became overgrown. Every urban woods, forest and preserve fights invasive plants, Smith said; the deterioration is slow and organic.

The church started to take notice and reverse this decline shortly after Ferrell joined CUCC in 2008.

Wanting to create manageable volunteer opportunities to help with care for the church’s gardens, Ferrell established the Garden Team.

The team divided the land into 35 sections. Members were asked to adopt a section, which they tended on their own time. This worked well, and the team took steps to have the forest designated as an NWF wildlife preserve. This is significant, Smith said, because the certification is a badge telling people the land has intentionally been set aside to be cared for in order to provide refuge for wildlife.

Now, on any given day, members of the church and surrounding community can be found walking the nature trail, which starts at a memorial garden just outside the sanctuary. At the creek, 700 feet down the path, they’ve built a fort for children out of the remnants of Chinese privet, an invasive plant that was removed from the forest.

Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts spend time in the woods, now referred to as the nature preserve, to plant, work on trails and visit the award-winning pollinator garden, which is designed to attract insects that feed on and pollinate surrounding plants. Children, from the on-site preschool and the summer camp, are out in the woods almost every day of the year.

This, according to Ferrell, is how it should be. Worship and outreach are amplified to include the earth, she said.

“When we walk out into a forest or step into a creek, we are reminded that we are a part of the natural world,” Ferrell said. “Our time watching a bee sleep on a flower or a goldfinch sitting on the tiniest stem brings us in touch with the gifts of our Creator. The forest helps us to remember the incredible gift of life, all life, on this planet.

“If people realize from an early age that they are a part of nature, will they grow up to live more sustainably and to invent things that are more compatible with the natural world?”

According to Richard Louv, the author of “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder” and co-founder of the Children & Nature Network, the answer is yes.

“Smart religious leaders of all faiths, and many nonbelievers as well, intuitively understand that all spiritual life begins with a sense of wonder, and that sense is usually formed early in childhood, often in natural settings. Most religious traditions and, especially, indigenous cultures offer ways to discover the divine in the natural world. In these cultures and faith-based communities, individuals, families and religious organizations can play an important role in helping children and adults know the world and beyond through nature,” Louv said.

There is also an expanding body of scientific evidence linking experience in the natural world to better physical and mental health and enhanced cognitive abilities, Louv said. How can we tap into this for ourselves and our children? The answer, according to Louv, is to rethink nature within cities. And CUCC is doing just that.

Authentic mission

When Smith looked out the sanctuary windows that Sunday in 2011, his desire was to heal the earth. But this mission has also helped the congregation cultivate relationships in the community, largely through the preschool and the summer camp.

“Camp Beech Grove and the preschool would not be here today without the trail,” Ferrell said. “They are both nature-oriented, and without this land, we couldn’t have done it.”

Since 2012, the church has hosted Turning Sun School, a place-based preschool that emphasizes the local community and natural environment as an extension of the classroom. The children have fun with activities such as the fall lantern walk, a nighttime family hike along the trail, illuminated by lanterns they have made, and the spring fairy breakfast, for which they create their own fairy houses.

“Having the nature preserve outside our windows and within our reach has been such a great resource to our school,” said Alicia Karpick, the school director. “Children need to be able to play and experience nature with all their senses. If we want children to be environmental stewards, we need to give [them] the freedom and space to love and understand nature.”

Ferrell echoes this sentiment, which is why she, along with the CUCC Board of Christian Education, created Camp Beech Grove, a summer camp offering six one-week sessions focused on learning about the outdoor world and the sacredness of creation. For years, Ferrell and the board discussed this idea, hoping to create a way for children and families of the community to be connected to the church, and after five years of rehabilitating the nature preserve, Ferrell knew they could offer something great.

“Stepping into a cool and shaded forest, we feel like we are walking into a mysterious and healing space where we are cradled by the trees and the land,” Ferrell said. “That is what we hope children will feel as they walk through the forest at church, or anywhere in nature — that they are held by God’s gift of the whole earth.”

The camp, held in June and July, had 61 campers this first year. The church offered 45 scholarships to children in a nearby neighborhood. Campers began each morning with a sacred story before a daily hands-on nature lesson. This type of learning was especially beneficial to 6-year-old Gabe Narducci, who attended all six weeks of Camp Beech Grove.

“He is an outdoors kid, so we knew this camp would be perfect for him,” said Donna Narducci, Gabe’s grandmother, who found out about the camp from a community email list. “The things he learned on the nature walks were really interesting, and he would come home and tell us about a bird or bug or something growing there. It really allowed us to engage with him and find out more about how much he learned and retained.”

And Camp Beech Grove is just a first step. As the project continues to evolve, Smith has plans for more trails and gardens, including a community vegetable garden, where neighbors can participate in growing their own produce.

“The preserve keeps us alert to the hope of nature’s ability to heal and to our need as humans to heal and restore the earth in all the ways we can,” Ferrell said. “As humans, it is more clear every day how much we have impacted all life and the very ground on which we live. The whole church is called to remember this sacred planet, our home. If we want to have a healthy planet for future generations, then the whole human community needs to learn to live sustainably.”