CONETOE, N.C. – Congregants at Conetoe Chapel Missionary Baptist Church thought their pastor was crazy when he suggested that his rural community take up farming as a way to improve their health and become more self-sufficient.

The small, predominantly Black community about 80 miles east of Raleigh is surrounded by vast, fertile farmland but without a grocery store for miles. According to Census Bureau figures, 67% of Conetoe residents (pronounced Kuh-NEE-tuh) live below the poverty line.

It turns out that Minister Richard Joyner made prophecies. The venture, which was transferred to the nonprofit Conetoe Family Life Center in 2007, now produces 1,500 cans of vegetables a week on land it purchases or leases. It partners with numerous organizations, including public schools, hospitals, the North Carolina Food Bank and local churches, to grow, grow, harvest and package produce, some of which is sold but most of which is donated.

Joyner’s formerly frequent funerals are less common, and the health and well-being of his congregation, who eat vegetables grown without any synthetic chemicals, have improved, he said.

But now Joyner has another problem. In September, Hurricane Helene flooded some of his fields, destroying late August plantings of greens, radishes, and beets. The ground was already wet from weeks of rain when the hurricane hit and dropped 17 inches of rain over a two-week period. In 2016, Hurricane Matthew also flooded the nonprofit’s fields.

About 100 members of Joyner’s congregation claimed that God was trying to tell him something.

“We’re in the Bible Belt,” Joyner said. “When my farm floods, people say, ‘God doesn’t want you to do this. That’s why he floods the farm and you should stop being so hard-headed.'”

Joyner’s new response: “God is not flooding the land. Our behavior is destroying the environment. That’s what flooded the land.”

Over the past few years, the 71-year-old preacher has become not only a farmer but also a climate change activist. In September, he lent his name to a new group called Extreme Weather Survivors, which provides trauma-informed support to people harmed by natural disasters. Some of the group’s members, including Joyner, attended a Climate Week forum in New York a few weeks ago, aiming to convey the message that extreme weather should be labeled as an “act of Man,” not an “act of God.”

Speakers such as Delta Merner, a scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, noted that studies in North Carolina show that climate change is significantly increasing heavy rainfall. He said in other regions, such as Arizona, science can now show a link between climate change and record-breaking heat waves that are becoming more frequent and intense.

Merner, who studies “connectivity science,” a field that aims to determine how much human-caused climate change directly affects extreme weather, said researchers can now trace climate change to major fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers.

Explaining this to church members hasn’t always been easy, but Joyner now sees it as his duty.

Joyner himself was a late convert to farming and environmentalism. He grew up on the outskirts of Greenville, NC, one of 13 children of parents who worked as sharecroppers. His father, who always had a garden and some animals, loved farming and was particularly good at it. But landowners were always cheating him out of his earnings, which soured Joyner’s interest in farming.

When he finished high school, Joyner joined the U.S. Army and later the National Guard. He studied chaplaincy at Shaw University and began working as a chaplain at WakeMed in Raleigh and Nash General Hospital in Rocky Mount, NC.

In 2004, with the encouragement of his mentor, he became pastor of Conetoe Chapel Missionary Baptist Church, and his mentor handed over leadership of the church to Joyner on his dying days. Many of the church’s members suffered from preventable diseases such as diabetes and high blood pressure.

Joyner was working in hospice care at the time and watched them slowly die and later presided over their funerals.

Convincing members to change their diets and exercise was not easy. He said he reluctantly came to this point after learning that a major grocery chain had no chance of opening a store in such a small town, population 671, a classic example of a food desert.

In 2005, Joyner found three property owners who would let him use their land as a community garden. The first garden was a two-acre plot of land located a quarter mile from the church.

Church members initially opposed the idea.

But he managed to win over children and eventually adults as well.

Joyner has won many awards for his thriving community farm, including the 2014 Purpose Award, which recognizes social innovators over the age of 60. The farm has partnered with several universities to study whether food-as-medicine interventions work on people with chronic diseases. A health kiosk has also been set up on the farm where people can communicate with their health providers online. CNN reported on the entrepreneurial pastor and his community farm. Recently, Conetoe Family Life Center built a kitchen on the farm where people can learn to prepare nutritious plant-based meals.

Church members noticed this.

“I was very fond of the meat in the vegetables you cook, and I’ve pretty much gotten rid of that completely,” said Betty Jones, a retired high school cafeteria manager who is a church member and takes advantage of farm-fresh vegetables. .

She admitted: “There’s one last food item that I haven’t moved away from meat yet — and those are my collard greens — but I make everything else without meat in it and it tastes good.”

Joyner is now researching how farming practices can be changed in a time of climate change.

As he walks through his fields, a vast gray expanse of brittle soil and dead weeds that crunch underfoot, he points to the road that divided the field in two decades ago.

“We can say that the altitude of that road is higher than this land,” he said. “This field became a basin. It took me a while to see it until one of the men came and said ‘your farm is standing in a mud pit’.”

He is now considering different ways to farm. He recently learned that tractors can compact soil and make it less porous, increasing the risk of flooding. He also knows that high tunnels (unheated, plastic-lined hoop house structures) can provide some protection from rain and include some flood-preventing drainage systems. Such a high tunnel on the farm prevented rows of peppers (banana peppers and habaneros) from being ruined.

But finally, there is the work of advocacy; To help people understand that they live in a relationship with creation and that there will be consequences if they abuse and manipulate that relationship.

Living in relationship with the world and other people and sharing this blessing is now the essence of his spiritual journey.

“I’ve been a Christian all my life,” Joyner said. “But these spaces became the most powerful place of worship I have ever been.”

It’s a lesson their parents and grandparents knew, and it’s a lesson they hope more people can learn.

“My grandmother always said, ‘This is God’s beautiful world, and you have only one responsibility: to leave it better than when you came here,'” Joyner said. “I take this seriously.”

Pastor Richard Joyner walks through a field flooded by Hurricane Helene on October 14, 2024 in Conetoe, North Carolina. (Religion News Service via Yonat Shimron/AP)