Heirloom Seeds and Hard Ground: Planting in Utah

Growing up in South Carolina, our relatively short winters usually subsided quickly and gave way to the first signs of spring. Farmers eagerly awaited the first peach blossoms, praying that late frosts would not tarry, but instead give way to cool damp evenings accompanied by sunny morning dew that blanketed orchards in life giving moisture. And for many, Spring is also the planting season. A time when soil that has been turned and tilled and is ready to receive heirloom seeds that would eventually grow into bountiful gardens that produced an abundance of vegetables, many of which often found their way not only to our table, but were an offering of friendship to our neighbors.

I often shadowed my now ninety-seven year old grandpa through rows of Silver Queen sweet corn and Better Boy tomatoes. Each step felt like an outdoor classroom where instead of books, I held what felt like ancient implements, the handles worn as smooth as glass from decades of cultivation. In the humid embrace of the Southern spring and into summer, gardening felt less like a battle and more like a gentle coaxing. The soil in the foothills is acidic, forgiving, and rich. One old saying goes “You could stick a broom handle in the ground in May and harvest a rocking chair by August.”

But in 2023 God called my family out of the comfort of my upbringing, and into the shadows of the Wasatch Front. We moved to Utah to join a church plant, and I quickly realized that in the arid Utah climate, we were tasked with sowing Gospel seeds into unfamiliar and difficult soil.

Tending New Soil

Our initial move to Utah saw us land in a city of about 80,000. A far cry from the town of roughly 7,000 we had grown up in, and after serving in the Redemption Family of Churches (redemptionutah.com) for a couple of years, I had an opportunity to fill a pulpit for a small languishing church in Tremonton. My wife and I fell in love with the rural aesthetic and small  town feel, while recognizing the apparent need for healthy Gospel preaching churches. So after much prayer we transitioned again, this time to the Bear River Valley, situated in northern Utah not far from the Idaho border. Our new mission, to plant Redemption Church Bear River.

Upon moving to our new home in December, I was immediately left speechless at the view. Our home overlooks the entire Bear River Valley and the sunrises and sunsets can only be truly appreciated in person. When I walked into our back yard, (yes we actually had a back yard that wasn’t measured in square feet) I noticed two large areas that looked like they had been used as a garden. And in a true moment of Holy Spirit illumination, it was not lost on me the lesson God wanted to teach. Not only had God given us the opportunity to plant a church, but a garden as well. And somewhere in that dichotomy there was something to be learned about sowing seeds. You see, the soil in Utah is aggressively different. It is highly alkaline, packed with clay, peppered with rock from the ancient lake that once covered the area, and starved for moisture in the high-desert air. As I sat one afternoon, my bare feet in the dirt, I realized that in a spiritual sense, the soil in which we were praying to God to bring a harvest of healthy churches was equally as dry and rocky.

In Utah, planting an evangelical church is the spiritual equivalent of farming in the desert. In fact, this region is ominously known as the Church Planters Graveyard. The statistics are staggering: only about 1.6% of the population here in Box Elder County identifies as evangelical Christian. This isn’t post-Christian secularism or cultural-Christianity found in other cities across North America; this is a generationally devout, highly insulated culture dominated by the LDS church. The spiritual and social fabric is tightly woven, and as an outsider planting an SBC church, you are not merely offering an alternative—you are asking people to risk their entire social, familial, and cultural ecosystems.

The “Southern Baptist playbook” that we employed back home—mass mailers, big event evangelism, and opening the doors to see who walks in—simply doesn’t take root here. The seed bounces off the soil.

Watering at the Root

And as I contemplated how to make the best out of my garden, I also wondered how we were going to make headway in gathering people to a church that seemed unwanted by so many in this context. But I was reminded of one of those lessons I had learned from my grandpa “You gotta change the way you feed it. You don’t grow the seed anyway. You just tend the dirt.”

He was right. To grow anything in Utah, you have to amend the soil. You have to haul in compost, mix in peat moss to balance the pH, and break up the clay by hand. And you have to change how you water. You abandon the heavy, overhead soaking of the South and install drip lines—slow, steady, unglamorous drops of water delivered consistently right to the root over hours and days.

It was an evangelistic epiphany. We had to stop looking for the sudden, massive harvest and instead started laying down spiritual drip lines. In a culture where trust in outsiders is exceptionally low, evangelism can’t be a one-time presentation. It has to be built on relational equity, drop by drop. It’s sharing meals, helping neighbors shovel snow or care for their livestock, coaching Rec League sports, and often being a consistent, loving presence before a single theological conversation happens.

We have to do the grueling work of amending the soil. We have to learn to celebrate the incredibly slow growth. When you are planting in 1.6% soil, you don’t measure success by a packed sanctuary; you measure it by a neighbor finally feeling safe enough to ask a tough theological question they have been wrestling with over a meal or a front yard conversation.

A Bountiful Harvest Takes Time

While we have seen some very encouraging signs in our church plant of not only numerical growth, but spiritual growth, we understand that it may take longer to see this church produce indigenous leaders who are called and equipped to plant another church. We might have to spend more time individually discipling people who are deconstructing faith in a way we never encountered in the heavily Christian south. And like the seeds in my garden, our church planting team is just getting those seeds in the ground.

My garden may take several seasons of hauling compost and adjusting drip lines before producing a yield that mirrors my grandfather’s, so too we might labor for years before we see Redemption Bear River establish deep roots in the community.  But just as I hope in the moment when I can pick a mess of okra from my Utah garden and fry it up, even more do I hope in the promise that the Lord of the harvest will send laborers to join us in the great work He is accomplishing here, and to bring sinful men from death to life through the preaching of the Gospel, albeit one heart at a time.

Planting a church in Utah is the hardest thing our family has ever done. The air is dry, the sun is hot, and the gospel work sometimes feels agonizingly slow. We are not seeing  hundreds saved in a weekend. But occasionally, the hard ground breaks. A heart is changed. And a new life, born from the free gift of God’s grace in Christ begins to grow.

When it does, I think of the seeds sown from my grandfather’s worn hands. I think about how the Gospel—the true, heirloom seed of the Word—contains exactly the same power here in the shadows of the Wasatch mountains as it does in the place we used to call home.

The seed hasn’t lost its power.

We just have to learn how to tend the Utah dirt.