Mentors are prized commodities in our culture. Whether in the business or church world, a lot of time and money is spent on training and securing mentors. They promise us everything from monetary success, business planning expertise, and spiritual enrichment. Typically, mentors are people that we meet with face-to-face. One of my mentors doesn’t fit that profile.
I’ve never met this mentor, seen his face, or heard his voice. I do have a small handwritten note from him declining my request for an interview. My mentoring relationship has been at a distance through his books. Who is this shadowy figure in my life? Who is this long-distance mentor? His name is Wendell Berry.
Wendell Berry died on August 31. You can read more about his life through this excellent article in the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/04/books/review/wendell-berry-appreciation.html.
Berry was an acclaimed and nationally awarded author, poet, essayist, a Kentucky farmer, and a Christ follower. I discovered him in a book’s footnotes as a quoted author. This “chance” finding in a quotation led to a decades long immersion in Berry’s life and thought. Reading drew me into his orbit, and my life has not been the same. Wendell Berry has been my long-distance mentor.
Berry is a classic contrarian. Maybe that’s why I like him. Here’s a line from a Mad Farmer poem that sets the tone for his writing.
I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my
inheritance and destiny, so be it. If it is my mission
to go in at exits and come out at entrances, so be it.
He’s not afraid to shove a stick into the spinning wheel of modernity. Berry’s critique of our culture’s diminishment of the family farm and its corresponding lifestyle points to a broader cultural analysis. He took me on a journey bigger than any farm; painting a vision of a simple, sustainable lifestyle, one rooted in community and in faith.
Even though he writes about farming and food, his insights and contrarian nature was a breath of fresh air to the predictable books on church growth, disciplemaking, and spiritual life. Berry’s diverse writings yanked back the curtain of my intellectual and faith horizons. Here are my top six insights from his works captured in the form of a principle.
#1 The Principle of Place. Berry frequently refers to the wisdom of “farming the farm that’s given to you.” He writes, “Healthy farmers must consult the genius of the place . . . to fit the farming to the land . . . which is say the nature of the place.” You don’t grow pineapples in Alaska or rice in Arizona. Like a wise farmer, I must first understand and then adapt my life and ministry to a people and a place.
#2. The Principle of Care. This one should be so obvious, but it sometimes gets overlooked in our rush to produce, grow, and multiply. “Farmers must tend farms that they know and love, farms small enough to know and love, using tools and methods that they know and love, in the company of neighbors that they know and love.” Ministry is a commitment to love a place and a people so that they flourish.
#3. The Principle of Slow. Blogs train us to scan quickly, structured around key points. That’s why my principles are bulleted so you can read faster. Berry challenges the role of speed in our lives when he writes: “Sort-term economics is the practice of making as much money as you can as fast as you can by any means possible while ignoring the long-term effects.” Slowness exemplifies the effective farmer: “The gait most congenial to agrarian thought and sensibility is walking. It is the gait most suited to paying attention and most permissive to stop and look . . . Machines, companies and politicians run!” Did you catch the twist about speed?!
#4. The Principle of Limits. We live in a BHAG age — we must write Big Hairy Audacious Goals for our life and ministry. We think big, plan big, spend big, seldom considering the reality of limits. Wendell challenges this thinking by writing: The making of a farm begins in the recognition and acceptance of limits . . . The true [farmer] shapes the farm with an assured sense of what it cannot be and should not be . . . Limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.”
#5. The Principle of Community. We live in distance and solitude; longing for community but seldom realizing it. Perhaps we’re looking for the wrong things. Here is Berry’s insight: “And we hear again the voices of our cultural tradition telling us to have community, people don’t need a community center or recreation facilities or any of the rest of the paraphernalia of community improvement that is always for sale. Instead, they need to love each other, trust each other, and help each other.”
#6. The Principle of the Given Life. I’m saving the best principle for last. “We must learn to live a given life in a given world,” Berry writes. To accept this givenness of a generous God, he encourages us “to live in gratitude, and in responsibility of care that is fearful, difficult, and yet pleasing.” “Fear” in his writing is not a malicious statement about God but a proper sense of the holy. “We live a given life, and not the planned.”
If I wrote a book about Wendell Berry, I would call it “From the Farm to the Church.” Berry taught me the value of place, how to choose care over productivity, to value slow over speed, live within limits, cultivate community, and live a given life of grace. I’m thankful that in the providence of God I checked out the reference that led me to Wendell Berry’s works. He has been a true mentor to me.
Let me finish with two quotes from his poetry. The first reflects his life as a contrarian, the Mad Farmer poems.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
Here is a selection from The Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems. This selection of poems was inspired by his early morning walks through the forest on Sunday mornings.
When field and woods agree, they make a rhyme
That stores in distant memory the whole
First Sabbath’s song that no largess of time
Or hope or sorrow wholly can recall.But harmony of earth is Heaven-made,
Heaven-making, is promise and is prayer,
A little song to keep us unafraid,
An earthly music magnified in air.
For some fun, check out his magazine article Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer. His arguments may win you over! Even though it was written in the late 1980s, there are some transferable lessons to how we use AI and chatGPT. Here’s the source: http://tipiglen.co.uk/berrynot.html. The best part is how he replies to the letters of criticism.
The quotes in this blog were drawn from the following books and are a good starting point for reading. A summary of his philosophy and writings is found in Wendell Berry and the Given Life by Eagan Sutterfield.
The Art of the Common Place
The Unsettling of America
Bringing It To the Table: On Farming and Food
Our Only World: Ten Essays
Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth
Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition
Jayber Crow (novel)
Hannah Coulter (novel)
The Mad Farmer Poems
A Timbered Choir
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