Farm Church Ceasefire Statement

December 17, 2023

A Call to Christians, from Farm Church:

As Christians in North Carolina celebrate the Advent season, stringing lights, decorating trees, and exchanging gifts, our Christian siblings in Bethlehem have canceled their public festivities. They’ve said that they are unable and unwilling to celebrate amidst Israel’s relentless bombardment in Gaza.

Knowing this, we at Farm Church feel compelled to interrogate our role and responsibility in this moment. This statement is an outward demonstration of our internal, ongoing commitment to such interrogation.

We are heartbroken. Since October 7th (and as of this writing), nearly 19,000 Palestinians (many of them children) and 1,200 Israelis have been killed. Nearly 2,000,000 Palestinians have been displaced by carpet bombing and vital resources being cut off. We know that there is no justification for genocide —ever. In the land where Jesus was born, we are seeing horrific violence enacted against communities as bombs level whole city blocks and people are killed, injured, trapped, and traumatized. Settler colonialism, Christian Zionism, and U.S. imperial aims are driving forces in this conflict. As a church located on the occupied lands of the Occaneechi, Cheraw, Shakori, Catawba, and Lumbee peoples; as a congregation largely made up of people who are descendants of white settler colonizers; and as inheritors of a faith tradition that has often fueled both antisemitic and anti-Muslim violence, we recognize our culpability in what’s . We also recognize our obligation to do something.

Farm Church is a community informed by Jesus’s example, centered in the sacred work of growing and sharing food, and committed to honoring God’s image in all people. We meet on a farm and leverage our resources to address food insecurity in Durham. In short: we grow food and give it away.

The work we do in the garden necessitates that we pay attention to the world around us: the micro life and death inherent to a garden’s ecosystem, the threats of the climate crisis, the realities of systemic hunger and poverty, as well as the potential for abundance and the power of transformation. As a community, we are convinced that all things are interconnected in nature and in our communities; as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Our church’s primary spiritual practice is tending to a little patch of dirt in the center of Durham, North Carolina. As such, we relate to land — all land — as sacred, and we honor the holiness of all beings, past and present and future, who traverse the land that we call home.

We understand, as Palestinian human rights attorney Noura Erakat said, that “land doesn’t belong to us but we belong to the land.” We dream of a future — here in Durham, in Palestine, and everywhere — where the bounty of a well-cared for earth is sufficient to the health and wellbeing of all its inhabitants — Christians, Jews, Muslims, Atheists, everyone — and that they would know a deep sense of safety, freedom, and belonging to the soil upon which they reside. We invite you into that vision.

We call upon our Christian siblings — and all people who understand land as sacred — to take action with us.

• We invite you to follow the leadership and strategy of those at the forefront of the movement for a free Palestine. Locally, Farm Church is following the leadership of the Triangle Chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, Muslim Women For, and the UNC and Duke chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine — among others — as they call on our elected officials to demand a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, an end to all US military aid to Israel, and an end to the Israeli occupation.
  
  
• For people living, working, and worshiping on the occupied lands of Turtle Island, we invite you to give directly to the Indigenous peoples upon whose land you reside. The Farm Church Council is committed to giving to the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation in our next budget. May this be part of a deeper practice of land-back and decolonization.
  
  
• We recognize the harm that Christianity causes when it is used in pursuit of domination, rather than liberation. One way this shows up is in the form of Christian Zionism, an antisemitic ideology that ultimately uses Jews as formulaic pawns in an apocalyptic end times theology. As Farm Church, we are learning together about Christian Zionism and how we can work to dismantle it, and we invite you to join us.
  
  May we lament, protest, grieve, and relentlessly work for justice until all people everywhere are free.