Disciple: A Sweet Partnership

By Summerlee Walter

During the Rev. Richard Joyner’s first year serving Conetoe Chapel Missionary Baptist Church, he buried more than 30 people under the age of 45. The bodies he laid to rest belonged mostly to poor African-American young people from his rural community. While some died as a result of community violence, Joyner was struck by the number who died from diet-related diseases like diabetes and heart disease.

To begin addressing the epidemic of preventable deaths, Joyner planted a small garden next to his church, which he taught the congregation’s children how to plant and maintain. As the vegetables ripened in the sun, Joyner invited community members to harvest what they needed in order to prepare healthier fare for themselves and their families.

What started as a modest patch of dirt and a few plants has grown into the Conetoe Family Life Center, an organization dedicated, as the Center’s website explains, “to bring[ing] programs and resources into the community that will educate and empower the local citizens of Conetoe in areas of health and wellness such as diabetes, nutrition and physical education.”

What began in 2011 as a health ministry composed of 11 dedicated volunteers who met the first Wednesday of every month, the Conetoe Family Life Center now runs a full-fledged farm sitting on 25 acres. Several years ago, an apiary, or bee yard, was added to help pollinate the plants, and through the Center children and teenagers can now learn the arts of gardening and beekeeping. In fact, with the help of master beekeeper Barry Heinz, the Center has produced more than a dozen certified beekeepers aged 12-16.

Good Shepherd, Rocky Mount, became involved with the Center’s beekeeping project through a relationship between Joyner and Good Shepherd parishioner Ted Sherburne. Sherburne, who moved with his wife to Rocky Mount to be nearer to his son-in-law, former Good Shepherd rector the Rev. Scott White, met Joyner seven years ago through his work with Gatekeepers, a collaboration among several area churches that each summer sends volunteers to make repairs to the homes of older adults. The two men began talking about Joyner’s work with the community garden. Sherburne was impressed.

Two years ago, Joyner asked Sherburne, who is a master woodworker, if he would be able to assist the Center by building beehives to replace those that had worn out or been damaged by weather and hungry bears.
Sherburne was eager to help but soon realized purchasing lumber and building hives from scratch was not cost effective. Instead, last fall Sherburne set the goal of raising enough funds to purchase 175 beehives at $110 each and 175 units of bees at approximately $100 each. (According to Sherburne, a unit of bees weighs three pounds and includes one queen and 50,000-60,000 worker bees.) The 175 hives will allow the ministry to replace those that have been damaged or destroyed while also expanding honey production. In a few years, Sherburne would like to help the ministry expand its apiary further, to 200 or 250 active hives.

Sherburne doesn’t plan to assemble and paint the hives himself, though. He’s enlisted help from youth who attend Good Shepherd, Conetoe Family Life Center and St. Andrew’s Episcopal, Lakeside Baptist, First Presbyterian, Westhaven Presbyterian, First Methodist and Inglewood Methodist churches in Rocky Mount. Throughout May and June, approximately 75 youth and adults have gathered to hammer together frames and paint the finished hives white to provide protection from the elements. Some participating churches have incorporated the events into church picnics and other fellowship events. This collaboration is important to Sherburne, who hopes to build relationships between the racially and socioeconomically diverse youth from the two communities.

“This for me was the most satisfying part of it,” Sherburne says. “We need to grow from that because a group of churches working together can accomplish a lot more than one church.”

So far, the collaboration has purchased and assembled 75 hives and procured 50 units of bees, but the fundraising efforts continue. The completed beehives and their related colonies will continue to pollinate Conetoe Family Life Center’s gardens and produce the honey that forms a major revenue stream for the Center.

The hives will also travel in the Center’s repurposed school bus to a local farm, where the bees perform their magic on a wide variety of crops. Sometimes pallets full of hives are lowered to the ground, while other times the bees buzz in and out of the bus’s open windows, flying up to three miles to find food before returning to their hives and, ultimately, to the Center where they will continue to teach young people about beekeeping.

“We’re teaching kids there’s something more available to them,” Sherburne says. “They can take control of their lives.”

Profits from the Center’s honey, which is sold at the Lowe’s in Cary and at the Raleigh Farmer’s Market, go into a scholarship fund, but maintenance and repair costs continue to increase.

Sherburne, however, feels confident the coalition of churches dedicated to fundraising for and assembling the beehives will succeed. As for Richard Joyner, the man whose vision started it all, Sherburne feels confident in his skills, too.

“We were recently talking about [Joyner] taking swimming lessons, and I joked with him that he doesn’t need to take swimming lessons because he already walks on water.”

Summerlee Walter is the communications coordinator for the Diocese of North Carolina.