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God had performed miracles for Scott and Donna Lehrer before they began looking for a farm to buy. When their marriage was in crisis, each one had decided, separately, to attend church. They became Christians the same Sunday morning at different congregations.

Over the next couple of years, as their marriage grew stronger, they decided to homeschool their children. Scott faced a difficult work environment as an executive, so they looked to move out of the suburbs. But Scott was skeptical when his wife said that she felt God wanted the family to raise sheep. "Excuse me," Scott replied. "I can't even stand to mow my own yard. What makes you think I'm going to start doing things like that?"

The family took a Sunday drive through Big Rock, Illinois, just a few miles west of their Aurora home in Chicago's sprawling suburbs. They began attending church in Big Rock and let it be known that they were looking to buy a farm.

Soon their pastor put the Lehrers in touch with a family that needed to sell a small plot of land. It was perfect for suburbanites who had never farmed before. It seemed like a miraculous start. Scott continued to commute to work in the suburbs, while the couple began experimenting on their ten acres.

Today, Lamb of God farm supplies about 40 families every week of the summer with fresh fruits and vegetables, and sells produce at farmers' markets around Chicago. Wool from their sheep is sold at a nearby knitting store, owned by their daughter.

During a CT editor's visit, Scott bends and grabs a handful of compost. "Smell that," he says, lifting to his nose a mixture of sheep manure and hay. "That'll make some good fertilizer."

It would take a miracle to get him to suit up again for a corporate boardroom, Scott says. "[Farming] is the most satisfying work I've ever done. It's because God's got his hand in it. There's something very elemental about tending this piece of his creation." Like the small but growing number of other Christian families across the U.S. who've left the suburbs to become farmers, the Lehrers now feel closer to God and closer to their family.

Called Christian agrarians, these families are tapping into broader cultural trends: interest in organic and locally produced food, back-to-the-land movements, and conservation and environmental concerns. They are resisting other trends: large-scale conventional agriculture, population flight from rural communities, and fragmented suburban life. Agrarians like the Lehrers also hold faith-fueled convictions that rural life is more wholesome, that families are healthier when they work alongside each other, and that being stewards of creation means both caring for the environment and cultivating it for human benefit.

Joel Salatin is a kind of elder statesman of this small movement. He's been working Polyface Farm in Virginia since he was a kid, and he has made a living at it since graduating from college. Though it would be fair to call him an evangelical and an environmentalist, Salatin fights labels. He calls himself a "Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist." He complains that evangelicals have been inconsistent. "We look at the liberal, who wants to abort babies and hug trees. We say, 'What is it with you?' " he says. "Well they look at you and me and say, 'What is this about you pro-lifers who want to genetically engineer food and eradicate everything?' "

Neither liberals nor traditional evangelicals are flocking to the countryside, but another group is, says Salatin. "Thirty years ago, 80 percent of all visitors to our farm were hippie, cosmic-worshipping, nirvana earth muffins," he says in his typical rambling manner. "Today, 80 percent are Christian homeschoolers."

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October 2007, Vol. 51, No. 10