Subtitle: The Mission Field as field. . . and forest and river and mountain and topsoil

by Lowell Bliss, guest contributor

Ed has asked me to re-post this article from a recent issue of our Environmental Missions Prayer Digest, in particular as a means to discuss one way in which

Pray to Jesus for Tiger Protection: The people of the Sunderbans Mangroves (#139), from the Environmental Missions Prayer Digest

creation care can affect how the Church goes about doing missions: evangelism, discipleship, and church-planting.  “Go and make disciples of ta ethne, all nations,” the Great Commission says.   Even the Greek renderings of the words indicate that making disciples occurs among ethnic groups, or people groups.  Political nations may grant missionaries their passports and entry visas, but ministry occurs among smaller cultural and linguistic communities.  But what about ministry in something we would define as ecoregions?  To what extent should the local biosphere inform how we preach the Gospel to a particular people group?

A 1982 Lausanne Committee meeting in Chicago offered the following definition of a people group:  “A significantly large ethnic or sociological grouping of individuals who perceive themselves to have a common affinity for one another. For evangelistic purposes, it is the largest group within which the Gospel can spread as a church planting movement without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance.”  A creation care perspective looks at this definition from a number of assumptions.  One is that these “individuals” are homo sapiens, and thus not disembodied souls floating in a simple construct of culture and language.  People live, and they live somewhere.  That physical “somewhere” means something; it creates a valid “common affinity for one another.”  It also greatly affects how one hears and interacts with the Gospel.

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Here’s the Christmas letter we sent from Care of Creation to our mailing list recently.  If you would like to be on this list, click here to sign up, and check off any of the different newsletter’s you’d like to  receive (we mail about every six weeks or so).

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

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On this week of Christmas, I am very pleased to bring you greetings from all of us here at Care of Creation – from me and Susanna, from our staff and volunteers in Madison, from the Sorley family and our project staff in Kenya, and from the Ness family, preparing to launch our Tanzania project early in the new year.

Often at this time of year people ask me if I will be doing any traveling or speaking in December. Invariably my answer is, “No – people don’t want environmental talks during Christmas.”  Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m not complaining!  It’s nice to spend time closer to home.

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For many years, it has been our practice (my wife and I) to write a Christmas letter that includes one page of devotional thoughts about Christmas, and a second page of family news.  This post is taken from this year’s letter -I hope you enjoy it, or at least find it helpful.  Please note that you are more than welcome to sign up for our occasional newsletter - and then you can get the family news, too!   When you get to the sign up form, click on News from Ed and Susanna, and any of the other newsletters you would like to subscribe to.  

Here are my thoughts on Christmas, 2011:

Christmas.  It is a great story that we never tire of: The manger scene, stars, angels, shepherds, wise men. Underneath the story is the best news any of us will ever hear:  Immanuel – “God is with us”. In the words of John’s gospel, “the Word became flesh and lived among us…”

What we kind of lose track of, I think, is what it took to make this miracle happen.  Bringing a baby into the world is not easy…
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Last Friday was  “Black Friday”, when the world goes crazy over shopping.  There was a lot of controversy in the days leading up to the event concerning stores opening not at 5 am, not ta 4 am, not even at midnight, but as early as 10 pm the evening of Thanksgiving.  This controversy was misguided.  The issue should not have been Black Friday “invading” Thanksgiving’s time slot, but Black Friday happening at all… As for me, my experience of Black Friday was different and unexpectedly blessed. What did I do on Black Friday?  I went to a funeral.  Read on…

I am an incurable news-addict, so I suppose it’s my own fault that I had heartburn before breakfast on Black Friday.  I woke up to a story from the Los Angeles Times that many of you probably saw in some form sometime during the weekend:

Matthew Lopez went to the Wal-Mart in Porter Ranch on Thursday night for the Black Friday sale but instead was caught in a pepper-spray attack by a woman who authorities said was “competitive shopping.” Read more »

by Lowell Bliss, guest contributor

Dancing at a Pakistani wedding is a safer celebration than gunfire. It's an analogy we can stand to learn in God's "what goes up, must come down" creation.

“What goes up, must come down,” is one of those multi-purpose aphorisms, functional on the natural level as well as the moral.   A physicist might use it to describe the Law of Gravity.  A preacher might recite it in a sermon on Galatians 6:7: “for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

Last week, the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Lab reported that global carbon-dioxide emissions saw their biggest one-year rise, a 6 percent jump in 2010.  (The report is linked here.)  Tom Boden, director of the lab, calls it a “big jump.”  His colleague, Gregg Marland, a professor of geology at Appalachian State University, was a bit more descriptive: it’s a “monster” increase, Marland said.  Part of the monstrosity no doubt is how the study indicates that emissions are now growing faster than what the IPCC projected as a worst-case scenario in its 2007 report.  A worsened pace of carbon emissions will result in higher projected temperature averages (up now to 5.2° C by 2100, according to MIT models.)

What goes up—including CO₂ molecules—must come down, but in the case of carbon dioxide, it may take 100 years or so.  It is true that our planet’s oceans and vegetation act as carbon sinks, that is, they absorb CO₂ from the atmosphere, albeit at a rate slower than what industrial society and natural processes are emitting it.   A single molecule of CO₂ will float unmolested in the atmosphere for one hundred years.  Read more »

Our friends at the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN) have developed a new program to train “Creation Care Champions” – people who will be equipped to give presentations in their own churches and communities.

Here’s the blurb from Alexei Laushkin, host of the program:

The Creation Care Teaching (CCT) Institute is a series of teaching modules for those interested in learning more about creation care, developing their creation care expertise, and/or for those who might want to speak about creation care to their church, school, and or local community. CCT offers monthly teleconference trainings on a wide range of creation care topics including: the biblical basis for creation care, global Christianity and creation care, climate change, mercury & the unborn, deforestation, relief and development work, protecting wild places, sustainable agriculture, evangelism, creation care as discipleship, green buildings, and much more.

For more information email support@creationcare.org

And actually, you need to do it right away – the next session will be held at 3 pm this Thursday, October 20. The topic is Creation Care and the Lausanne Cape Town Commitment with guest presenter Lowell Bliss (one of the occasional authors on this blog).

It’s free, and well worth your time – but you’ll need to contact Alexei via the email address above to get the call-in instructions and to have the material emailed to you.

Tell him Ed sent you…