9: Why Tallgrass Church?

**Ben Deaver** (0:46)
So, why Tallgrass Community Church? Lots of people ask that question, why are we called Tallgrass Church? Ready for the short answer? Well, we wanted to name our church something that kind of captured our geography, and honestly, you know, Little Apple, Kansa, Flint Hills, they've already been taken by so many organizations, so we landed on Tallgrass. Now you're ready for the longer answer? Welcome to episode nine of The Chopping Block, where we take juicy morsels from our Sunday sermon off our chopping block and bring them to you. All right, so we're here at the Bill Snyder Highway Scenic Overlook on K-177. It's cold, it's windy, it's dreary, it's overcast, not quite as beautiful as it is sometime. There's sound of cars on the highways behind us. The car that was here just, you know, took off. And we're here to capture and talk about why Tallgrass Church.
Walt Whitman, American poet, SAS and journalist in his Writing Specimen Days from 1879 says this, As to scenery, giving my own thought and feeling, while I know the standard claim is that Yosemite, Niagara Falls, the Upper Yellowstone, and the like afford the greatest natural shows, I am not so sure but the prairies and plains, while less stunning at first sight last longer, fill the aesthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest, and make North America's characteristic landscape. So those are Walt Whitman's words from 1879 And since then, the Tallgrass Prairie has really been dwindled and obliterated. Here's a quote from, even I think up here, if you read the different descriptions of the Tallgrass Prairie up here at the overlook, you'll hear about this, but here's one description of the Tallgrass Prairie. The Tallgrass Prairie once stretched over most of what is now Iowa, Illinois, southern Minnesota, northern Missouri, eastern portions of the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Most of this region was converted to farmland during the westward expansion in the 1800s, and as a result, only a fraction of the original prairie remains. The exception is the Kansas Flint Hills, where steep slopes and rocky soils defied the plows. Within the Flint Hills region, approximately five million acres remain as the largest contiguous area of Tallgrass Prairie in North America. Today, the key ecological processes of fire and grazing are important management practices in the Flint Hills Prairie. So the question is, where is the Tallgrass? Tallgrass Prairie once covered 170 million acres in North America, but within a generation, the vast majority was developed and plowed under. So today, less than 4% remains, mostly here in the Kansas Flint Hills.
The National Park Service Preserve protects a nationally significant remnant of the once vast Tallgrass Prairie and its cultural resources. Here, Manhattan, Kansas, the surrounding area, the Tallgrass Prairie takes its last stand.
Now, what once was available and open to all is actually sectioned off by barbed wire to protect what remains of the Tallgrass from the propensity of humans to destroy it.
And so now there's great conservation efforts underway just to preserve what remains, this remnant of the Tallgrass Prairie.
So this analogy, it plays out for us in many different ways, and really the scriptures kind of capture this analogy of preservation of a field as well. So here we are, a scene full of beauty and yet tragedy as the Tallgrass Prairie, for the most part, has been destroyed and now is needing to be reclaimed. So we need to reclaim the Tallgrass Prairie. So let's talk a little more about this analogy.

**SPEAKER_3** (4:56)
I don't know how to do this, Dave.

**Ben Deaver** (5:06)
So in Luke, we hear from Jesus where he goes to, in his hometown, and he opens up the scroll of Isaiah, and he flips to Isaiah 61 And then he reads this, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. And if we look at that reference in Isaiah 61, it goes on to say, To grant to those who mourn in Zion, to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit, that they may be called oaks of righteousness. And here's the phrase, the planting of the Lord that he may be glorified. The planting of the Lord that he may be glorified. Little later in that chapter, it says, I'll greatly rejoice in the Lord, for as the earth brings forth its sprouts, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to sprout up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to sprout up before all nations. So in Jesus' own teaching, and in the Old Testament we learn that God is all about planting fields and conserving and reclaiming what was lost in human history through the fall. In fact, that's really the story of the Bible. Jesus committed to reclaiming what was lost. So Jesus, he himself is the good gardener, the cultivator of the field, the prairie conservationist, to put it into our modern terms.