Celebrating the power of possibility. I'm Pastor Chris Badle and I believe anything is possible. Welcome to anything is possible. I'm Halloran Hilton Hill and these are great stories about great people who troll you through text messages in your life. Now these are great stories about great people and great friends like my friend Dr. Chris Badle. Thank you for being here today. Thanks for inviting me. You do know you troll me right? Every now and then. You know what? I love it.
I have loved our friendship all these years and it is great to have you back on anything as possible. Thanks for having us. We appreciate it. Oh man your life has changed. Considerably. Considerably. I wasn't expecting this. So when and by the way you can go back to our YouTube channel and you can probably go back and find the original interview that I did with Chris Badle. But at these long Samson-esque locks you were pastor of a growing and booming church. 19 children? Yes. 19 children.
Yes. Please explain. The long story or the short version. So we have 19, 15 of which we have adopted or have legal custody over. I had two from my first marriage and then with me and Toma got married. She wanted children and we had five miscarriages. And we said well we'll go the adoption route. And then I was actually doing a revival in Baltimore and she called me and said Chris there's a sibling group of five that are living in three different homes. Can we take them?
I'm like sure baby. If you want that's fine. You know. She said well I already told them yes. And so we got the sibling group of five. Then we had one. Then we had another. Biological after that. And then I went to the doctor. I think at that point there were eight and they kept coming. It's like if you know if an elephant steps on your toe and another elephant jumps on its back it's not going to make much difference. But we have a heart for children. Where did this heart though come from?
Wow. I would like to believe it's for a couple of things. It came from a couple of things. Number one my parents and definitely Toma's parents. Excellent parents. They were there. They showed us love. Showed us what semi-functional families look like. And then I think it's for our love for Jesus. You know that this love for humanity and when you see people who are hurting and in despair you just got a heart and want to do something.
And ours were toward children. And a home was just open. Toma's family they were she said she would come home sometime and that would be these children in the house like where these kids come from. But yeah that's I think it came from that. Just our upbringing in Cincinnati from our parents. Our love for God and just love for humanity. Well when first we met I met you as a minister. Yeah.
And you did something within your church that I thought was so forward thinking. You would have these dynamic church conversations. If it was a hot topic you would bring people in and have the full-throated conversation in the church. You remember this. I do. So when I was thinking about this interview this is the word that came up for me. When I think of Chris Battle I think of someone that has taken an asymmetrical approach to ministry.
Everybody else is kind of doing it this way or this way. It's like you're going to get there. You're going to get to the heart of people but you didn't seem to want to go the same way everybody went. And so you're pastoring. You're dealing with all of the stuff that goes along with that. What I remember though as a pastor is your church loved you. I mean they really loved you.
I would like to think they did. It seemed like it to me like they loved you. I just feel that we have all these issues in the world even in our community. It does us no good to just pray over them because we don't like it or we don't understand it. I said let's have the conversation. Let's talk about it.
Let's see the pros and cons. Let's understand why people are making these particular choices. And we may not agree with them. It may not be in our theological frame but we still need to understand it. And how can we truly show compassion and love for people if we don't understand what they're going through and why they made these particular decisions.
I always loved that about you. You wanted to have this full-throated conversation and look at it from all angles. But then I remember getting a call from you and you said hey just want to give your heads up. I think I want to make a big change. And I said you're going to do what? I'm going to do a farm. The title of this book by the way is Aim Coming to Your Church.
You missed the word there. I ain't coming to your church but I will come to your garden. The next thing I know you're off on a whole new journey. And what's interesting to me was the courage to take the leap because you correct me if I'm wrong here but I remember you saying to me I have no idea how I'm going to pay for this, how this is going to work. You sir have 19 kids.
So I'm going to take you back. When I came to Knoxville from Cincinnati I had been pastoring 30 years I guess at that point. And I'm like this is probably going to be my last congregation. So I kind of said let me have a little more philosophical approach to how I'm going to do this as I'm going out. I'm like how can our church affect community? How can we have significant impact in community?
And we were cleaning Odd Fellow Cemetery which is a cemetery right across the street from the church. Most of the people buried there were born in slavery and it was a mess howling. It was just overgrown. And I said we're going to clean this up. So I hadn't been here three months. We were out there about 30 of us out there cleaning. We're mowing, we're chain sawing, we're putting headstones back up and we have bags and bags of debris that we've collected.
And this brother pulls up in a pickup truck. He stops me and starts thanking us for what we're doing. Appreciate y'all investing in the community so on and so forth. Now in my Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Training I done caught me a fish. Brother, won't you come join us at the church? And that's when he said to me I'm not coming to New York.
Church. This is G-rated TV. And it still plagues me and he pulls off and I'm like that's something's wrong. Fast forward to 2016. First Baptist Concord does a study on church attendance in Knoxville. 20% of Knoxvillians in the buckle of the Bible Belt go to church on a regular basis. Just 20%. 20% and regular is once a month. Right. Roughly 40% are done with it. Love Jesus can't stand the institution or consider themselves spiritual. Other roughly 40% have no religious affiliation.
I'm like, well, something's not right. You know, and I'm talking to my pastor friends across racial lines, across denominational lines, across the country. I'm like, they're telling me the same thing. Church attendance is going down. Money is declining. You know, I'm like, well, maybe we need to do church differently. But I don't know what that looks like. You know, they say I'm a baby boomer and I'm kind of stuck in my ways. And I don't know what that.
But the things that we were doing were for those who are already coming, you know, come as you are Sunday, you know, wear a hat to the side. I don't know anything. And so it was then was 2018 when I started doing the garden. I've always done a little gardening and we had a plot of land there at the church. And it's been a nice place for a garden. That way I can say I'm at the church and at the garden at the same time, you know.
And so I called a friend of mine who was working at the Botanical Garden, Robert Hodge, and he came over. I said, man, can you help me with the latest thing out? What did she look like? I've never done a community garden before. And we learned about food disparity. And we had a conversation about food disparity and food desert. And I'm like, ooh.
So the USDA says that if one third of your community is living at poverty level and more than a mile away from nearest grocery store, food desert, your food desert, we were two miles away from the nearest grocery store. And the median income of the one five zip code is like $17,000. And I'm like, we can fix this. And two things happen. One, we started fighting food disparity, started getting other pastors to do gardens as well.
We started a farmer's market. But the other thing about the garden was that people started coming to the garden who would never come to my black Baptist brick and mortar church. I'm like, huh, they're coming to my garden, but they won't come to the church, which is less than two doors. I mean, literally two doors down. And I'm like, well, maybe this is how we ought to do church. So I ended up leaving. And we did the garden.
But you're on the way out. You're right at that point in your career where if you just put it on cruise control, you're going to go out nice. You're going to get invited to all the stuff. You're going to be able to give the good elder chuckle. I remember them days. Yeah. And you decided to go in a whole new direction. Like this is like the biggest chance of your life. Because you didn't know how you were going to fund it or let no idea.
Plus we were living in a parsonage. And I think we had eight kids at that time. And me and Tom were, we kind of delayed for like a year. You know, like, where are we going to live? Where's our income? You know, and I said, baby, we just got to do this. I just feel us being pushed. And the craziest thing happened. So Toma had a nonprofit for single moms. And there was only one young lady there at the time. So her and all the girls moved in there.
All right. And there was one of the elderly lady at the church had a house, a little two bedroom house. She said, you and the boys can stay over there, rent free. So for about a month or two, we were living in separate houses. What wasn't too bad actually for, you know, but too bad. But it was very interesting, man. I had been at a book club and they had asked me to lead this book club on racial reconciliation.
And I had said some things and I think it kind of sparked something in one of the fellas. And we met, he wanted to have a breakfast and chat. So we went to Pete's. It was the day before I left my final Sunday at the church. And I'll never forget it. We had our conversation. I told him, you know, that I was leaving and we were living in separate homes. You know, so we had our conversation. We had our breakfast. We said our goodbyes Sunday. I went to church.
I said, my goodbyes, Monday morning I'm at the farm and I'm out there just working. It's hot. He texts me, he said, Hey, Chris, can I come talk with you? Sure. You know, so he comes over and he says this to me. He goes, man, we've been praying. Me and my wife have been praying for you. Like, yeah, thank you. He said, and we got this big old house and it's just the two of us. If we moved out, would you and your family want to move in?
So now I'm balling. You know, man, I ain't got no money. I couldn't do, you know, how much can you afford? And I told him, and he says that's as lowest as we said we could go. Come by the house tomorrow. Look at it. If you don't want to do it, fine. We just feel led by it to make this offer to you. Tuesday morning I'm at the farm. One of the volunteers comes up to me. She says, Chris, me and my husband been praying for y'all.
And we got this big old house and we were wondering if we moved out, would you all want to move in? And so now I got to make a choice howling between two big houses. I'm like, okay, God, I'm really starting to believe in you now. What we were struggling with, what we were holding back from, God had already provided. We just didn't know. And we end up going with the first house. So that meant they had to go buy a house and they can.
I'll never forget, he texted me, he goes, hey, we found a house. They accepted our bid. If everything goes smooth, we'll close May 30th if you guys can move in June 1st. Got one problem. What's that problem? The house we're buying is bigger than the one we live in. So why don't y'all just move into the big house and the rent will stay the same. Yeah. And God has been doing stuff like that over and over and over again. It's just taking care. I don't worry.
What is Battlefield Farm for people who don't know? So Battlefield Farm is a, we fight food disparity. We named it Battlefield as a play on my name, Battle. But also because we're in this war against food insecurity in East Knoxville. We want to turn food desert into a food oasis. And so our goal is to make sure people have access to fresh fruits and vegetables. Your zip code shouldn't determine your accessibility to nutritious food.
And many of the people in our community are literally dying slow deaths because there's no grocery store. We don't have access to it. There's a lot of liquor stores. There's a lot of corner stores that are selling processed food. There's dollar stores. There's fast food restaurants. Because the crazy thing is we're not only considered a food desert. We're also considered a food swamp. And a food swamp is when there's four unhealthy choices to every healthy choice.
I think we're like nine to one in our community. And I'm like, we can fight this. We can win this. Because I truly believe that we are the solution to most of our problems if we just work together. So you make this leap. You take a bold step and then God starts opening doors. And what was a community guard now understand is you're on a couple of acres. Well, so we moved to a couple of acres. There was a farm called Abbey Field. I was owned by the old standard knitting mill, which was two acres.
The young lady that was running it left and they needed somebody to run it. And some reason I raised it again. And so we took that over. But that property sold to a developer and it still hasn't been developed. And it angers me every time I walk by it. So we ended up with the property on Boyd's Bridge Pike, which was listed for $50,000. I don't have $50,000. And I'm talking with the guy. I'm like, I really want this piece of property.
Maybe I'll offer him 20 and lay down and sack cloth and ashes and, you know, and he calls me goes, Chris, you still interested in the property? Like, yeah, I just don't know how I'm going to raise the money. So you know, we never settled on a price with 5,000 work. I'll have the check for you Friday. I got plenty of stories. Just how things like this work is like boom, boom, boom. It fits into place. So then People Magazine gets ahold of the story. Yeah. Isn't that crazy?
So we, and I don't know how people heard about me. I know they did do an NPR, all things considered. And I don't know if it's a result of that. But yeah, People Magazine, January 20th issue, just in case you wanted to know, did an interview with us and put us in there and things just start taking off again. You know, I get interviews with you and been on more podcasts and news shows and papers that I've never, just never believed the publicity that this has got. And I didn't ask for it.
I didn't ask for it. It just, like, it just came and I'm just grateful for that because we need funding. And with that publicity is a corresponding funding and it's been very helpful to us, you know. My goal, my goal is to go out of business. I want to not to be needed. I want our community to be able to have access to fresh fruits and vegetables. I've seen more missing tolls than I ever want to see in my life. We have a veggie van that goes out.
And there's a guy from Concord United Methodist Church. He calls me, he goes, Brother Chris, would you like some sweet potatoes? Sure. How much would you like? How much you got? I came home with 210 pound bags of sweet potatoes. Good Lord. I laid them out on the farm stand. I get on Facebook live. Y'all come get these taters. Within two hours they were gone. People were coming from everywhere. This happened a couple of times.
And then a don to me, I say the demographic, the community I'm specifically trying to reach, may not have transportation, may not have Wi-Fi. How do I get this to them? I get a veggie van. Veggie vans cost, those mini buses cost $72,000. I don't mind having $72,000. Hang on right there. I want to hear the rest of the story. Why don't we take a break? Coming up on part two, you're going to hear the rest of the story about the veggie van.
But then I want to talk to you about what God has been teaching you in the story. My guess is Chris Battle, this is anything as possible.