A congregation that owns land in a neighborhood where fresh food is hard to buy already holds part of the answer to that neighborhood’s problem. The church should see food access as part of its calling for three reasons. Feeding hungry people has always been part of Christian love. Food access is shaped by human decisions, and decisions can be answered. And Black congregations, taken together, hold land, kitchens, vehicles and long-standing community trust that few other institutions can match.
That last claim belongs to Dr. Heber Brown, pastor of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church in Baltimore and founder of the Black Church Food Security Network. His argument is less about charity than about assets. He is asking churches to look at what they already own and ask what it is for.
A church lawn and a hospital bed
Brown’s case starts in a hospital, not a policy meeting. Early in his pastorate, he says, he kept visiting members of his church who were hospitalized for diet-related illness. He wanted to respond as a pastor: “in addition to prayer and scripture, I wanted to do more to minister to them.”
The answer was right outside the front door. Pleasant Hope owned a small plot of land, which Brown puts at 1,500 square feet. “And we hadn’t been doing anything productive with that land, but cutting the grass and shoveling the snow and raking the leaves.” He describes the moment as something the Lord showed him: that the plot could serve “a purpose greater than maintenance.” The church began growing fresh, chemical-free food for its members. That work later grew into a network that helps other churches do the same and connects them with Black farmers.
The order matters. Brown did not begin with an abstract theory of justice and then look for a project. He began with sick church members and found that his congregation was sitting on an unused resource that could help them. The garden is small, but it shows that church property can be a pastoral tool. Many churches treat their buildings and grounds as overhead, something to insure, mow and repair. Brown treats them as inventory.
Why the name of the problem matters
The common term for a neighborhood without easy access to fresh groceries is a food desert. Brown thinks the term hides the cause. “There is nothing unnatural about a desert,” he says. No one is to blame for a desert. It is just how the land is.
The neighborhoods he has in mind did not form that way, in his account. “We don’t call it a food desert anymore. We call it food apartheid, because there were political factors.” He gives the reasoning behind the new name: “somebody made the decision not to have grocery stores in certain communities. That didn’t just happen by coincidence or happenstance.” Public policy, local planning and corporate development choices, he argues, decided which communities received grocery stores and which did not.
His sharpest point is about interpretation. When a block has many liquor stores, check-cashing places and corner stores but few banks, credit unions or grocery stores, residents can absorb a quiet lie: that their neighborhood looks this way because something is wrong with the people in it. Brown rejects that reading directly. The pattern, he says, has more to do with unjust policy than with any curse on Black people or any deficiency in their ability to govern themselves. Renaming the problem is his way of refusing that lie.
A fair reader should notice what the source does and does not establish. Brown asserts that decisions shaped food access and that bias ran through those decisions. He does not walk through specific laws, maps or corporate records in this conversation. His conclusion that nothing in a neighborhood is coincidence is also a strong generalization. A careful reader can accept his basic point, that grocery access is the product of human choices rather than weather, while still wanting the local history of a particular neighborhood before deciding how much of its condition came from deliberate bias. That caution does not weaken the case for church involvement. A problem made by human choices can be addressed by other human choices, including those of a congregation that owns property.
What the Black church brings
When Lisa Fields asked why his organization focuses on the Black church, Brown began with gratitude. He credits Easter Sunday recitations with teaching him to speak in public and church mothers and deacons with raising his confidence. He is also candid that those churches were not perfect. “There’s some things about church I hate with a passion,” he tells young activists who distrust the church. He does not ask them to pretend otherwise.
The weight of his answer, though, is institutional. For more than 300 years, he says, Black churches have provided mutual aid, legislative advocacy and training, and helped give birth to colleges, credit unions, banks, clinics, hospitals, community development corporations and schools. His shorthand for this record is that “the black church has receipts.” The claim is about track record: this is an institution that has organized resources for its community before, not a hypothetical one that might someday try.
Then he turns to what churches hold right now. “The black church collectively is the largest land owner in black America.” He adds commercial kitchens, classrooms, fifteen-passenger vans, and sanctuaries already equipped with cameras and sound. The landholding ranking is his assertion and would need independent figures before anyone builds a plan on it. The underlying observation stands on its own. Many congregations own buildings and ground that sit mostly idle between services, often in exactly the neighborhoods Brown describes. Lisa Fields named the blind spot plainly: “people discount the power that we have.”
Notice the word “collectively.” Brown is not saying every Black congregation is wealthy, or that the Black church is one organization with one budget. It is many congregations across denominations, sizes and cities. His point is that when those separate assets are counted together and organized, they function like a public resource. A single church lawn feeds a few families. A network of church lawns, kitchens and vans connected to farmers becomes part of a regional food system.
This is also why his network names Black churches specifically. Brown says many organizations working on food equity do not understand how Black congregations function, from the role of church mothers to the rhythms of revival. Resources, he says, need to be “customized to fit our feet.” He is making a practical point about how organizing succeeds in a particular setting, and he makes no claim that Black churches are more righteous than others.
The objection from history
The most serious objection is rooted in history, and Brown raises it himself. He acknowledges that Black people were driven off land by racist terror, that many left the South for work, and that “there’s a lot of trauma” connected to agriculture and land. For some, asking a Black church to farm sounds like asking it to return to the fields.
His answer distinguishes the tool from the people who abused it. “The land never enslaved us. Cotton never enslaved us. Corn never enslaved us.” He presses the point: “Let’s not put on cotton and land that which the white power structure did to our people.” The injustice lay in who controlled the land and labor, not in the soil.
That distinction has biblical roots. Before the fall, Genesis presents tending ground as part of humanity’s original vocation: “And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it” (Genesis 2:15). The passage is narrative, and it does not command any church to plant a garden. It does show that cultivating land is not inherently degrading. Work on the land became a site of oppression through human sin, which means the work itself can be reclaimed rather than abandoned.
Brown also sees an economic fit. Farmers, he says, are about one percent of the national population with an average age in the early sixties, and Black farmers are a fraction of that. He describes meeting farmers in eastern North Carolina whose healthy food spoils in the field for lack of a market, while Black communities in northern cities rely on corner store and dollar store food. His summary is plain: “We need food, they need markets.” Churches sit between the two, with buildings, buses and relationships that can carry food from one to the other.
Neither charity alone nor politics alone
Brown separates his work from two familiar responses. The first is food charity: pantries and emergency meals. He calls that important work, but his own calling is food sovereignty, helping people gain agency over their food so they are not wholly dependent on others’ goodwill for basic needs.
The second is electoral politics. Brown applauds people working to change laws, but he thinks it is a mistake to treat voting and legislation as the only way to change a community’s material conditions. “That’s not the only way.” A local food system tied to Black farmers, he argues, can improve life on the ground whether a Democrat or a Republican holds the White House. That keeps his strategy local and practical, and it keeps the church’s allegiance from being tied to a party.
Lisa Fields sharpened the contrast when she pointed out that communities often lobby healthier grocery chains to open nearby, “but if they come in our neighborhood, that money still goes to them. But if we partner with farmers, as you said, that keeps the money in our hands.” Brown agreed and named the principle as control rather than mere access. “For far too long, we have been satisfied with access.” His alternative: “Why not build your own table?”
Some readers will hear separatism in Brown’s insistence that his movement not depend on white-led organizations. In context, he frames it as dignity and self-provision rather than hostility, and he does not condemn others for receiving help. A reader can still weigh where partnership across communities makes sense. What Brown is guarding against is dependence that leaves a community’s basic needs at the mercy of someone else’s priorities.
Where Scripture places the church
Jesus describes the final judgment in terms of concrete care: “For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in” (Matthew 25:35). Feeding people is not a side project in that passage. It is how faithfulness becomes visible.
The early church also faced a food distribution problem. In Acts 6:1, “there arose a murmuring of the Grecians against the Hebrews, because their widows were neglected in the daily ministration.” The apostles did not answer with a sermon about generosity. They had the community choose trusted people and placed them in charge of the distribution (Acts 6:3). The widows’ need was not a shortage of compassion. It was a breakdown in how food reached people, so the remedy was structure: named people, clear responsibility, a fair system.
That is close to Brown’s instinct at the hospital bedside. He kept praying and reading Scripture with sick members, and he also changed what the church did with its ground. Lisa Fields made a similar connection from her own family’s history with diabetes, noting that some health problems people try to pray away might be eased by better food. None of this promises that a garden will cure diabetes or end poverty. It does mean prayer and an organized food supply belong to the same ministry.
Where a congregation starts
Brown’s advice is to begin with inventory, not need. Communities are often trained, he says, to open with deficits, partly because grant applications reward a list of problems. “We flipped the script on that.” His instruction to pastors is to “start with asset mapping.” Walk the neighborhood. Put a map of it on a screen. Locate unused land, nearby churches that share the same needs, other anchor institutions, and local champions who are already doing the work but lack a place to meet, a commercial kitchen or a bus.
He also releases busy pastors from a false burden. “Oftentimes you don’t have to be the person,” he says. A church can place its property and vans behind someone already working on the problem. For a small congregation that cannot launch a farm network, the first contribution may be a fellowship hall on a weekday, a refrigerator, or a parking lot where a farmer from two states away can sell sweet potatoes and greens on Saturday morning.