Photo courtesy Flickr CC License

The evangelical creation care movement, though almost invisible to many, has been around for quite a few years.  One of its most visible historical markers is probably the founding of Au Sable Institute in 1979, thirty-three years ago now – but well before that date there were many individuals and a few small organizations seeking to promote what was then called ‘Christian environmental stewardship.’  There are many more of us now, and there is a lot of good work going on, but we still fly below the radar in most cases.

So it was enlightening and important that many of the current key players in this movement were on the phone together last week to share what we’re all doing, and perhaps more to the point, what God is doing to continue to foster and strengthen this movement.

Here’s a brief summary with bullet points of the highlights.  [If you’d like to hear a recording of the phone call yourself, just call  (507) 726-4220 and choose to listen to recording #1.] 

These notes are presented in the order on the phone call.  I am sure any of these folks would welcome a note from anyone interested in learning more; please write to them through the contact page on each organization’s website.  [Tell them Ed sent you!]

Scott Sabin is Director of  Plant With Purpose (formerly Floresta for those who are a bit out of date…)  This is one of our older organizations, having begun as a development organization in Latin America and now with projects and staff in Latin America, South America, Africa, and Asia.  PWP did some important work in Haiti following the recent earthquake.  Highlights recently

• They’ve planted 11 million trees.  Not sure over what time span, but that doesn’t really matter, does it?  It’s a big number.
• Opened a new regional office in Denver (main office is in San Diego).
• Currently involved in a new joint venture not yet public that has the potential link organizations and projects with new sources of funds (if I understood what Scott was describing).

Matthew Sleeth is Director of Blessed Earth, an educational nonprofit based in Asbury, Kentucky.   Upcoming highlights shared by Matthew

• A major seminary project is now in progress focused around a covenant seminaries are being asked to sign to commit to ‘live, preach, teach, hold each other accountable’ for creation care and sustainable activities and lifestyle on their campuses.  To date Denver, George Fox, Colombia and Asbury have signed on – a number of other major seminaries are in process.
• A year of teaching at and in cooperation with the National Cathedral in Washington DC kicks off on Earth Day (April 22) with a special service and recognition of Wendell Berry.

Joe Sheldon is a faculty member at Pacific Rim Institute for Environmental Studies.  Pacific Rim is one of the newest arrivals to the movement, but has a long shared history with Au Sable Institute , having been formed just a couple of years ago to take over Au Sable’s 175 acre Whidbey Island campus just north of Seattle.  The Institute is close to completing negotiations that will leave them with free and clear ownership of the property.  Highlights of the current and projected program…

• Pacfic Rim will continue to host Au Sable students and faculty during the summers;
• Ongoing research and restoration on the largest prairie remnant in Puget Sound, including the introduction of the Golden Paintbrush, a federally listed plant that is now growing 1500 plants strong;
• Partnerships with USFWS, National Park Service and others;
• and ongoing work with local schools and churches.

[Au Sable was to have been represented by new Director Fred Van Dyke, but winter weather in Chicago prevented Fred from joining us.  Undergrads in any field with an interest in creation care or environmental studies should be aware that the Au Sable program is available to supplement course offerings at their home campus. Check out their new website.]

Tyler Amy is the new Coordinator for Renewal, a relatively new student-run, student-led, student-focused organization with chapters on a number of Christian college campuses.  Think of it like a creation-care version of InterVarsity or Navigators(!).  Recent highlights:

• A fall summit (the second one) at Houghton College featured 70+ students from Houghton, Messiah, Eastern, Wheaton, Geneva, and (drum roll….) King’s University College of Alberta.
• Issuance of their second Green Awakenings report, this one focusing on assets and barriers to creation care on Christian college campuses.  [You really need to get this report – it is quite amazing what is taking place on Christian college campuses these days.]

Renewal shares organizational ties with two other organizations that are old and well-know partners in the movement.  He also reported on

Creation Care Study Program (CCSP), Chris Elisara, Director. Similar to Au Sable and Pacific Rim, but offering semester-length study-abroad programs…

• Have moved into new facilities at their campus in Belize;
• Will be opening a new semester program on Camino Island (also in Puget Sound) focusing on sustainability.
• They also have an established and popular program in New Zealand.

Restoring Eden – Peter Illyn, Director, is known for getting students (and others) involved in visible direct-action efforts.  Current plans include

• Spring Break health surveys in coal mining areas of Appalachia – (last yr’s were published in the Journal of Community Health).
• Chapel lectures on campuses, recent trip in Indiana.

Alexei Laushkin is on staff with the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN) .  Based in Washington, publisher of Creation Care Magazine, EEN has a number of things going on:

• Last year partnered w/Blessed Earth, Eden Vigil,
• Involved in a highly visible ‘Mercury and the Unborn’ campaign with radio ads, television ads and testimony at some high profile Washington hearings, thus adding a strong evangelical voice to the national discussion.
• Held their 2^nd Day of Prayer for Creation Care in Wash DC, and…
• Their big upcoming event is the 3^rd annual Day of Prayer for Creation Care to be held in Washington on April 26^th.  Featured speakers will include Dr. Chris Wright (primary author of the Cape Town Commitment), Leith Anderson (NAE), Lon Allison (Billy Graham Center), etc.  [Tickets are available for members of the movement – contact Alexei soon!]

Lowell Bliss is founding director of Eden Vigil , an environmental missions initiative operating under the umbrella of Christar, an established and well respected pioneering and church planting mission agency.  Eden Vigil’s recent and upcoming highlights include…

• Monthly publication (via email) of the Environmental Missions Prayer Digest.  This is a prayer publication unlike any other, and deserves a wider following than it now has (sign up here).
• Lowell has an important book in progress:  Environmental Missions: Planting Churches and Trees.  Now in the negotiate-with-the-editors-and-rewrite stage.
• A new podcast will be launched any day now.  The Agabus Project .  Interviews will feature people like Peter Harris, founder of A Rocha, and Joel Salatin, well-known proponent of sustainable farming and eating.
• “Sending Services” – similar to ‘tent-making missions’; Eden Vigil provides supporting services for Christians going to other countries in secular (environmental) jobs who want to go with a “missionary mindset”.

Tom Rowley is director of A Rocha USA, the US chapter of A Rocha (ask Tom how to pronounce it!), the largest and probably oldest international Christian conservation organization, with a presence in about 25 countries now.  In the US A Rocha is involved in…

• 3 projects – Linden WA, Santa Barbara, and ‘the Texas hill country’, and several others under development.
• The Texas project is a  7,000 acre ranch, and is working with some new grant money on habitat protection, riparian work, and ultimately the development of a Field Study Center.
• The Rowley family recently relocated from Texas to Bend OR and Tom is developing new opportunities in the Pacific Northwest.
• Grass roots orgs can now join A Rocha as independent affiliates.  If you know of a local group that could benefit from a connection with (and the encouragement of) a national organization, contact Tom for more information.

And finally, Ed Brown (myself), Director of  Care of Creation… Our emphasis is on the mobilization of the church toward a God-centered response to the environmental crisis.  This has us going in a number of different directions:

• A long-established work in Kenya (Care of Creation Kenya) working in tree planting, agriculture (“Farming God’s Way”), and training and discipling church leaders, teachers, pastors and development workers about environmental issues and creation care principles.
• A similar new project will be launched in southern Tanzania this year.
• The Our Father’s World seminar is a weekend seminar for churches, presented around the country and in a number of overseas venues.
• Ed is the point person for a Global Consultation on the Gospel and Creation Care to be held in Jamaica October 29 – November 3 of this year, hosted by Lausanne and the World Evangelical Alliance.  Names are now being collected for this invitation only meeting – contact him now if you have people you would like to nominate for participation.

The Creation Care movement is most definitely alive and well.  None of these organizations has the resources they need to do the tasks that need to be done – we encourage you to find your favorite one(s) – send them a note thanking them for their work, and perhaps send a donation from time to time!

[Perhaps you can help us spread the word by reposting this in full on any blog you might have or sharing via Twitter or Facebook.]

Report compiled by Ed Brown, Care of Creation.

[Apologies if any important bullet points were left out…]

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!

————————————————————————-

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.

On the other hand, Christmas can be a special time for thinking about God’s relationship to his earthly creation.  I touched on this several years ago in a chapter of my book, Our Father’s World, comparing Jesus’ incarnation with a hypothetical visit of a rock star to my own home:

This is how we need to think of Jesus, the Son of God, coming to earth.  We often think of his humiliation.  It is not a small thing for the all-powerful creator of the universe to adopt the form of a creature, but that is exactly what happened:

[Jesus,] being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death – even death on a cross.  [Philippians 2:6-8]

Something else is just as important, though.  When he came down, he raised us up, and all of creation as well.  He lived here, in our house.  When he walked down the street and sat in the shade of a tree, his presence was honoring and exalting the dirt, the grass, the tree, the sky. If my daughter’s idol, the singer, had actually come to our house, the effect would have been purely imaginary.  Whatever fame and reputation this man has is purely ephemeral and is already fading.  He is no more worthy of praise and honor than I am – or than my daughter herself.  Not so with Jesus.  He made the dirt, the grass, the trees and the sky.  When he arrived, everything changed.

In the last chapter we saw creation as a temple – a cosmic worship space where a divine-human relationship can be pursued.  In Jesus we see God himself walking the aisles of that temple, not just standing behind the altar.  This is God as one of us: eating and drinking, laughing and playing, walking and talking, sleeping and working.  Before we heard God say that “it was good”; now we can see God himself enjoying creation.  It must be good, and it must be worth taking care of. [Our Father's World, chapter 3, IVP 2008]

There are a number of reasons we could list for why we do what we do, and you have probably heard many of them:  Tending the Garden was the first task God gave us to do; caring for creation means caring for people – it’s a true ‘pro-life issue’;  God’s redemptive plan culminates in the ‘reconciliation of all things to himself’ (Col 1:15-20).

But I like the Christmas reason as much as any:  Jesus, the Son of God, became part of Creation, and showed by his example and presence here that this is a special place and one to be valued and cared for.

And so, on this occasion when we pause to remember Jesus’ coming to earth as one of us, we thank you for your part in making our mission possible.  And we ask that you join us in recommitting to the great task of caring for this creation until the very day when Jesus returns to ‘make all things new!’

Blessings from our Care of Creation family to yours –

Ed and Susanna Brown;
Craig and Tracy Sorley with our Kenyan staff;
And Erik and Rachel Ness, bound for Tanzania.

Order Our Father’s World from our office or Amazon by clicking here;
send a donation to any of our staff or projects – or ‘buy trees for Kenya’ – by clicking here.

Guest post: Lowell Bliss of Eden Vigil

“Wangari Maathai–Nobel laureate, founder of the Green Belt Movement, and sister-in-Christ Jesus–passed away on Sunday, Sept. 25, at the age of 71.  We at Eden Vigil wish her the joy of her resurrection.”

Ed has asked that I post this latest issue of the Environmental Missions Prayer Digest, something I’m happy to do.  But first let me forward a story from Ed himself.  On Sept. 28, Ed wrote:

Wangari was a good friend of Care of Creation Kenya. . . . She did attend a 2006 God and Creation conference – funny story there:  She had been invited and finally showed up on the last day of the conference.  They had to give her platform time which turned out to be right before my presentation, which was to be the closing talk of the conference.  Well, she took the entire slot (45 minutes) which meant that by the time I got up to talk, it was already past lunchtime…  wouldn’t have worked in the US, but these were Africans – so I just pretended there was no clock in the room and took my entire time as well (and then some, as I recall!).  I had the honor of a future-Nobelist telling me after that she ‘enjoyed my talk very much.’ Of course, at that time we had no idea that she would be winning the Nobel.

 Environmental Missions Prayer Digest, October 2011

Often in this opening paragraph, we offer a Scripture passage or a quotation.  This month, in tribute to Professor Maathai, we refer you to a song, Peter Mayer’s “Holy Now.”  (You can find a nice version of it at YouTube here.)  The songwriter arrives at the conclusion:

So, the challenging thing becomes

Not to look for miracles

But finding where there isn’t one.

Often what we come away with from a song, like how we interpret Wangari Maathai’s Catholic faith or her activist life, is determined by what we listeners and observers bring to it in the first place.  For what do we have eyes to see, or ears to hear?

Wangari Maathai proposes an Easter Monday celebration

Professor Wangari Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977.  Its mission, as described, was “to plant trees across Kenya to fight erosion and to create firewood for fuel and jobs for women.”  In 2004, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the first African woman and the first environmentalist to win the prize.

While Green Belt’s “Billion Trees Campaign” may be calculated in the number of seedlings planted, Professor Maathai’s legacy may be best understood in her statement: “The planting of trees is the planting of ideas.  By starting with the simple act of planting a tree, we give hope to ourselves and to future generations.”

In 2005, Professor Maathai gave an interview to Mia MacDonald of Beliefnet which was entitled “Heaven Is Green.”  When asked how she had sought to engage religious leaders in environmental activism, she replied:

For the last few years, I have been trying to communicate with leaders of various Christian churches to urge them to bring protection and conservation of the environment into the mainstream of their faith and their teachings. I have been suggesting that Easter Monday could be a very good day for the entire Christendom to plant trees. If we could make that Monday a day of regeneration, … it would be a great celebration of Christ’s resurrection. After all, Christ was crucified on the cross. In a light touch, I always say, somebody had to go into the forest, cut a tree, and chop it up for Jesus to be crucified. What a great celebration of his conquering [death] it would be if we were to plant trees on Easter Monday in thanksgiving. 

Please join us in prayer:

•  For comfort to the family and friends of Professor Maathai who are mourning her death.
•  For the continued success of the Green Belt Movement, now that its founder has passed away.
• For the re-forestation of Kenya.   The country’s forests have dropped below 2% of total area, and as such are exacerbating drought, erosion, and climate change.
• For the Ogiek, the ancestral forest dwellers of the decimated Mau Forest. They live in constant tension
  

  Ogiek men examine a 3D map that they helped create from tribal memories, detailing the landscape of the Mau Forest prior to its decimation.

  with the government and have often been displaced.  Less than 5% of the Ogiek are Christian.  Literacy rates are low, so the Gospel must come in oral forms.

Link: Heaven is Green: An Interview with Wangari Mathaai

Photo of Maathai: Martin Rowe

Photo of Ogiek: Giacomo Rimbald

Guest blog: by Lowell Bliss

As part of our summer vacation this year, we found ourselves at Canada’s Wonderland, a colossal amusement park near Toronto.  My teenage son has discovered roller coasters as a passion, and so we strapped ourselves into the Behemoth, riding up to a height of 230 feet and then plunging down at 77 mph.  The Behemoth cost $26 million to build.  But all day it was like that: we were surrounded by acres of ingenious and costly technologies engineered with the sole purpose to amuse and thrill.

As my old body began to wane in the late afternoon, I plopped down on a park bench and waited out my kids who were on another ride.   A young teenage girl was standing nearby.  Suddenly, I heard her utter a short squeak and I felt something rustling on the ground between my ankles.  I looked down.  A chubby woodchuck wandered out from under my bench.  Behind us was a small wooded lot between paths in the amusement park.  A little stream flowed into a pool there and it was hard to tell whether this patch of nature among the tarmac was original or manufactured.  Nonetheless, it was apparently where the woodchuck lived.  I suspect it was “suppertime,” if that’s what you can call his daily allotment of popcorn and funnel cake.

The woodchuck boldly walked out into the path of the crowd.  At first, people were as unsuspecting and jumpy as those of us at the bench, but soon the crowd, which had been moving from one multi-million dollar thrill ride to another, stopped and formed around the woodchuck.   This little creature had momentarily become the foremost attraction at Canada’s foremost amusement park.  Soon, young men who had apparently been unable to win a kewpie doll for their dates at the carnival games were demonstrating their manly prowess by petting the woodchuck and feeding it by hand.   I cringed.  I wanted to say something harsh to them.

The teenage girl next to me interrupted my self-righteousness.  “What kind of animal is that?” she asked me.

“A woodchuck,” I said.

I was surprised at the tenderness in my answer.  While I wanted to be pedantic with the crowd; with her, I had a longing to teach, in the best sense of that urge.  This was partly a wave of humility, since I was unsure whether there was any difference between a woodchuck and a groundhog and maybe if I should have called it a groundhog instead.  (I’ve subsequently learned that they are two names for the same rodent whose scientific name is Marmota monax.)  But mostly I felt sympathy for her.  Woodchucks might not be the most common of animals, but this girl didn’t know what they were.

“Did you ever hear the rhyme, ‘How much wood would a woodchuck chuck’?”  I asked her.

“Yeah.”

“That’s it.”

“Cool.”

I told this story last Sunday night when I spoke to a group of docents who volunteer at our local zoo.   I wanted to thank them for their service.  In a world of technological attractions, a simple woodchuck still has the power to draw a crowd.  I told the docents that our world needs animals.  We need zoos.  But as our world moves further and further away from Nature, we also need docents and interpreters.  We need them to share their knowledge about animals.  We need them to share their passion for animals.  We need to be tenderly re-taught about wild things, even to their very names.

And of course, this little event allows me to write another verse to Bob Dylan’s song Man Gave Names to All the Animals:

He saw an animal come from under a bench

It gave respite from the techno-stench

It waddled around with courage and pluck

“Ah, think I’ll call him woodchuck”

(. . . or is that, groundhog?)

Lowell Bliss is the director of Eden Vigil and the publisher of the Environmental Missions Prayer Digest.  He is getting too old for roller coasters.

John Stott’s going-home-to-glory was announced yesterday.  I wrote the piece below last September, but the thoughts are just as valid if not more so now.  If you haven’t read Uncle John’s farewell message to all of us, please do so.  There’s a link at the bottom of the post.

There are few leaders in the Christian world greater than John Stott.  I first heard him preach at Urbana 1970 – forty years ago, when I was a senior in high school.  [You can read the actual talks here - I don't think the recordings are available on-line.]  I’ve followed his ministry career ever since, though almost always from a distance – we shook hands perhaps twice or three times, but my memory fades a bit at this point.  John is now at the end of his life, though he has not yet ended his service to the church and her Lord.  He has written one last book that is intended to be his farewell to those of us still here – and you need to read it. 

I’ve known many leaders who ended their careers in scandal.  I’ve known a fair number now whose ministries were cut short by illness or death – they left us too soon and without warning, without the benefit of any last words of wisdom to carry us forward.  There have only been a few who, knowing they were leaving, took the time to share with us from that unique and precious place that is halfway between earth and heaven.  Those who have lived their lives well, and know they are about to leave for another, better place – they deserve to be listened to. If you had an opportunity right now to spend a few hours with John Stott, knowing he is at the end of his life, wouldn’t you do that?  So get this book…

Stott has called this last message The Radical Disciple: Some Neglected Aspects of Our Calling. Like all of his teaching, his thoughts are disarmingly simple, and unarguably biblical – and because of that, dangerous to read.  Having read, you can hardly say you didn’t understand what he was getting at.  And if you are someone – as I am – who wants to build his life on the Bible, Stott leaves you with precious little to defend yourself if, as probably will happen, it turns out that you have been neglecting some of these aspects of discipleship yourself.

So what are these neglected truths that are important enough to be this man’s farewell message to his sisters and brothers? Here are a few quotes from the first four out of a total of eight:

1. Non-conformity: The church has a double responsibility in relation to the world around us. On the one hand we are to live, serve and witness in the world. On the other hand we are to avoid becoming contaminated by the world, So we are neither to seek to preserve our holiness by escaping from the world nor to sacrifice our holiness by conforming to the world. Escapism and conformism are thus both forbidden to us. (p 17)

2. Christlikeness:I remember vividly the major question that perplexed me (and my friends) as a young Christian. It was this: What is God’s purpose for his people? Granted we had been converted, but what next? …I want to share with you where my mind has come to rest as I approach the end of my pilgrimage on earth. It is this: God wants his people to become like Christ, for Christlikeness is the will of God for the people of God. [p 28-29]

3. Maturity: [Stott sees "growth without depth" as one of the greatest dangers the worldwide church faces today.  But what is this depth, or maturity?]  Paul’s most common way of defining Christians is to say that they are men and women “in Christ,” meaning not inside Christ as when our clothes are in a wardrobe or when tools are inside a chest, but rather as the branches are “in” the vine and our limbs are “in” the body, that is, united to Christ. So then, to be “in Christ” is to be personally, vitally, organically related to him. In this sense, to be mature is to have a mature relationship with Christ in which we worship, trust, love and obey him… [p 42]

4. Creation Care: [Surprised to find this listed alongside Christlikeness and spiritual maturity?]  The Bible tells us that in creation God established for human beings three fundamental relationships: first to himself, for he made them in his own image; second to each other, for the human race was plural from the beginning; and third, to the good earth and its creatures over which he set them. Moreover, all three relationships were skewed by the Fall. …It stands to reason therefore that God’s plan of restoration includes not only our reconciliation to God and to each other, but in some way the liberation of the groaning creation as well. [p 49-50]

That last happens to be the central theological pillar on which Care of Creation’s ministry is built – and fascinatingly his brief outline of three broken relationships (God, others, creation) restored by redemption is completely consistent with the  four relationships (God, self, others, creation) that I have made a key part of my own teaching and writing.  The fact that Stott has made it the first of his “application” truths reflects both his life – he has been one of the world’s most famous birders – and, I believe, his deep understanding of the wisdom of God and the word of God.

Creation care is not simply “one more nice thing to do”.  It is central to the message of the word and to the mission of the church, because it is a key part of God’s redemptive work in the world.

So let’s get to work.

[For completeness, the remaining four truths Stott expounds are Simplicity, Balance, Dependence and Death.  I won't take the time to develop those - you really do need to read this book!]

Via Flickr-click for source image

["Old Literature" is an occasional series of posts on works from the past (and in some cases, the not-so-long-ago-past) that still speak today.  Here are some of the earlier posts.]

Wendell Berry maybe best known for his essays on agrarian (hence environmental and ecological) topics; his greatest work, to my mind, is in his novels, all of which take place in and around and concern the “membership” of Port William, a small river town in Kentucky.  My wife Susanna and I recently finished reading (aloud, of course!) Hannah Coulter, and we are now halfway through Jayber Crow.  Yes, I know we’re working backwards – that’s how life is sometimes.  Anyway – last night’s selection caught my attention and seems worth sharing.  Enjoy the selections – but better, get out and read the book!

Jayber, whose religion is real and deep and passionate and mostly of the unorganized variety, is the town’s barber – and gravedigger – and permanent bachelor – and, in this chapter, has just become the Port William’s church janitor.  Jayber’s  observations on the nature of the preaching (and preachers) in this rural church are important, and reflect Berry’s perception of a fundamental flaw in the Christian faith as practiced at that time and in that place:

We must lay up treasures in Heaven and not be lured and seduced by this world’s pretty and tasty things that do not last but are like the flower that is cut down [the preachers taught]…They [had] a very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of his works – although they could tell you that this world had been made by God himself.

What they didn’t see was that it is beautiful, and that some of the greatest beauties are the briefest.  They had imagined the church, which is an organization, but not the world, which is an order and a mystery.  To them, the church did not exist in the world where people earn their living and have their being, but rather in the world where they fear death and Hell, which is not much of a world.  To them, the soul was something dark and musty, stuck away for later…

…This religion that scorned the beauty and goodness of this world was a puzzle to me.  To begin with, I don’t think anyone believed it.  I still don’t think so.  Those world condemning sermons were preached to people who, on Sunday mornings, would be wearing their prettiest clothes.  Even the old widows in their dark dresses would be pleasing to look at.  By dressing up on the one day when most of them had leisure to do it, they signified their wish to present themselves to one another and to Heaven looking their best.  The people who heard those sermons loved good crops, good gardens, good livestock and work animals and dogs; they loved flowers and the shade of trees, and laughter and music; some of them could make you a fair speech on the pleasures of a good drink of water or a patch of wild raspberries.  While the wickedness of the flesh was preached from the pulpit, young husbands and wives and the courting couples sat thigh to thigh, full of yearning and joy, and the old people thought of the beauty of their children.  And when church was over they would go home to Heavenly dinners of fried chicken, it might be, and creamed new potatoes and creamed new peas and hot biscuits and butter and cherry pie and sweet milk and buttermilk.  And the preacher and his family would always be invited to eat with somebody and they would always go, and the preacher, having just foresworn on behalf of everybody the joys of the flesh, would eat with unconsecrated relish. [Jayber Crow, Counterpoint Press, p 160-161]

This kind of world-denying religion has largely passed from the scene.  In fact, some would argue that today’s evangelicalism has moved the pendulum far in the other direction – we are so in love with this world and its gadgets that we have lost a sense of the spiritual.  And they could be right. And in that, I don’t think Wendell Berry is any more impressed with our current love affair with everything that begins with a capital I (I-Pad, I-Phone, I-whatever) than he was with the gloom and doom gospel of rural Kentucky.

But still:  It is surprising to me how often I encounter people who  need to be convinced that this present world – the world of “good crops, good gardens” and “hot biscuits and butter and cherry pie” – is of value to the one who created it.  That it really is worth caring about.   It’s almost as if we are in love only with the world we have made ourselves – the world of gadgets and parking lots and gas stations.  Passionate about our technology, we still see God’s world as unworthy of our attention and effort and care.

What is sad about all of this is that it is so unnecessary.  There is no great divide between the visible and the invisible, the material and “spiritual”.    Jayber tells us that after church “they would go home to Heavenly dinners”.  The capital “H” on “Heavenly” is not accidental or incidental:  There’s a connection between Heaven and the dinner table at least when it (the dinner) is done right.  Have we forgotten that our experience with God begins with a marriage feast?  And that God so created this world that when looked at rightly, it would reveal true and permanent realities to us?  The heavenliness of Sunday dinner may say as much (or more) to us about God – his love of beauty, the goodness and yes, even the tastiness of his creation – as some sermons do.  “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” (Romans 1:20)

The answer is not to turn our backs on preaching – I am not suggesting we skip the sermon and go right to the pie.  Please – I am a preacher, this is my trade!  No, the answer is to bring the loveliness and beauty of God’s creation into the sermon.  That way we can have our cherry pie and eat it, too.

Lowell Bliss is the director of Eden Vigil and an occasional guest contributor to this blog. He and his wife Robynn publish the Environmental Missions Prayer Digest.

This photo of people immersed in the Flint Hills is linked to flinthilstallgrass.org

An Ed Brown comment and a Tom Rowley blog posting ruined for me what could have been a perfectly good civic meeting. Tom, if you recall from this site, was telling the story of “a recent discussion with colleagues about using Internet videos to teach and encourage environmental stewardship.” Tom said Ed made the conversation-stopper: “Isn’t there a fundamental disconnect here?” Ed asked. “We are working to heal creation, to put people back in touch with the glories of God’s world and everything that goes along with that: I don’t think it’s going to happen by trying to get people to watch more pixels!”

On Monday night, I joined a small group of other citizens of Manhattan, Kansas to hear a presentation about the new Flint Hills Discovery Center, under construction and scheduled for opening in Spring 2012. This multi-million dollar facility, according to the flyer, “explores the geology, biology and cultural history of the Flint Hills of Kansas—the last remaining tallgrass prairie in North America and one of the most unique and important ecological regions of our nation.”

The Discovery Center will be, in a word, glorious. I can’t wait to bring my kids and our out-of-town guests there. (One of the exhibits will feature under-the-ground ecology where you can witness the elaborate root systems of perennial prairie grasses. Check out the latest issue of National Geographic (April 2011) for some stunning visuals from the Land Institute in nearby Salina.)

The director of the Discovery Center, and Monday’s presenter, is a competent and articulate man who I don’t doubt will become one of our small city’s leading citizens. The architects, exhibit designers, and multimedia producers all have nationwide reputations. The grasslands deserve no less. But the more I listened, the more troubled I became. For example, the director showed us one artist rendering of a future exhibit that portrayed an open glass atrium with a cloudy Kansas sky visible from below. (The beauty of the Kansas sky is the real reason why some pioneers refused to cross the Rockies and proceed on to California.) But what I mistook for a window was actually “projection capability” where the Center could electronically project—you guessed it—a cloudy Kansas sky. Later we saw artist renderings of what the director is calling “the Immersive Experience.” Forty visitors at a time will sit in a domed theater where images and sounds will surround them, walls and ceiling. In the words of the director, people can be “immersed in the Flint Hills.”

The Flint Hills Discovery Center is being built just south of our mall. It is located a scant seven miles from the Konza Prairie Biological Research Station, where, if you and your kids are willing to brave some chilly morning temperatures, you can witness a real prairie chicken thrumming for a mate. It is located sixty miles from the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve which just this year re-introduced free range bison, so that you can hike out among these shaggy beasts just like you do at Yellowstone. The Discovery Center is a great introduction to the Flint Hills, but what if it ends up replacing a real-life experience of the Flint Hills?

The whole story is that the Discovery Center is part of a $50 million STAR bond award from the State of Kansas and the U.S. Department of Commerce and was a requirement for the city’s South End Redevelopment Project of hotels, a conference center, and new big box stores. The Project was required to be anchored by “an attraction” which would draw in out-of-town guests. I am glad the Discovery Center chose to feature the Flint Hills. But the construction of the Discovery Center really isn’t about the Flint Hills; it’s about tourism. And it really isn’t about tourism; it’s about the stores and hotels.

There’s a spot at the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve where you can hike in so far that you can’t even see power lines on the horizon. You are surrounded by grass, wildflowers, meadowlarks, and sky. All that visitors to the “Immersive Experience” will be immersed in is pixilated images and synthesized noise.

Let me share two last ironies from the evening. The Discovery Center will be LEED-certified (environmentally-friendly design and construction), at least up to the silver standard but possibly to gold. This is good. Secondly, outdoor ramps will be interrupted with some stairs so as to prevent skateboard usage. (This too is good; there’s a skate park on the other end of town.) The former’s irony is that with LEED standards, we often seek to protect a creation that we never get around to enjoying. The latter’s irony is that the one group of kids we actually have physically exerting themselves in the out-of-doors aren’t necessarily welcome.

Come visit us in Manhattan, Kansas in the Spring of 2012. Robynn and I will proudly take you to the Flint Hills Discovery Center. (I’m genuinely excited about it.) But if we don’t immediately load you up in the car and drive you out to the Konza Prairie or the Tallgrass Preserve, please shout from the back seat, “shame on you!”

Oil Spills are bad enough – but how do you pray about a Tsunami?

It hasn’t been a year since the Gulf oil spill, which we rightly saw as the worst environmental disaster in memory.  At that time I wrote a piece trying to come to terms with that situation: “How Do You Pray about an Oil Spill?” And now I sit pondering a disaster that could turn out to be exponentially greater than the BP/Halliburton fiasco.  I am doing so at my dining room table, in a part of the world that is seismically if not politically stable, many miles from the nearest nuclear facility.  I am looking out at a landscape where the first birds of spring have arrived and are singing up a storm: Robins, redwing blackbirds, a cedar waxwing and (I think) a pine warbler (see pic below and tell me if I’m right, birders!)  just this morning.  The contrast between my window and the stories on my computer screen could not be more different, and I am forced to ask the same question I asked last summer: How do I pray about what is now happening in Japan?

Let’s start by experiencing the disaster just a little bit.  The clip below is one of the first live reports of the wall of water and debris engulfing the flat land bordering the sea in Miyagi Prefecture north of Tokyo.  I don’t expect you to watch all 18 minutes, but take it at least through the first four or five, remembering that every house, every vehicle being swallowed has people in it.

[Click here to go the clip - embedding has been disabled.]

My first reaction to this is that Hollywood’s disaster flicks don’t come close to duplicating the real thing.  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything even in fiction like this monster as it races across the landscape, belching smoke and flame, swallowing everything in its path.  My second response is similar to how I feel when I stand at the base of Niagara Falls – very small and inconsequential.   Look – everything human is being obliterated.  Our greatest works hardly slow it down; instead, as human artifacts are swallowed they become part of the monster, swelling its size and increasing its power to destroy.  There is powerful metaphor here – read on.

This 20 minute disaster by itself is enough for a lifetime.   But this is only the middle act of a three-part tragedy.  To this we have to add, on the front end, approximately three minutes of the worst earthquake in recorded Japanese history, and on the back end a still unfolding nuclear disaster whose effects could last from decades to centuries.

Now would you like the really bad news? This is happening in Japan.

This is one of the wealthiest, most technologically advanced countries in the world.  Japan is not only the source of many of our cars and electronic gadgets – she is the most prepared-for-disaster country in history.  Japan knows earthquakes as Oklahoma knows tornadoes.  Building codes are possibly the strictest in the world.  Public education, early warning systems, disaster drills:  Everything that could be done in anticipation of a disaster was being done.  There is no way to blame this tragedy on greed (the Gulf oil spill), poverty (Haiti), or political ineptness (Hurricane Katrina).  No – it seems like this is one tragic event that was going to happen and there was nothing anyone anywhere could have done to prevent it or to adequately prepare for it.

An article in the New York Times on disaster preparedness sums up the situation nicely:  No matter how high the levee or how flexible the foundation, disaster experts say, nature bats last.

[Note for international readers: That last phrase comes from the American sport of baseball, in which teams have to take turns at bat, the only time a team can score runs.  The home team always bats last and therefore always has the last opportunity to win the game.   In the great game of life on earth, we human beings are the visiting team, and nature will always have the last say.]

So let’s get back to the original question:  In this situation, where the best that human society can offer is less than inadequate, how should we pray?

First, we need to put God back into the picture. “Nature” is a euphemism – God is the reality.  Nature does not control the movement of tectonic plates, the displacement of billions of tons of sea water.  But God does.  Isaiah 40 might be a useful chapter to run to in these times of trouble and chaos:

²¹ Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood since the earth was founded?
²² He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth,
and its people are like grasshoppers.
He stretches out the heavens like a canopy,
and spreads them out like a tent to live in.
²³ He brings princes to naught
and reduces the rulers of this world to nothing.
²⁴ No sooner are they planted,
no sooner are they sown,
no sooner do they take root in the ground,
than he blows on them and they wither,
and a whirlwind sweeps them away like chaff.

Does putting God at the center of the Japan disaster make you a bit uncomfortable?  It should.  “Fear God” is a common exhortation in the Bible for good reason – over familiarity with the God of earthquakes and tsunamis is not a good idea.

This leads directly to our second item:

We need to understand our frailty and adopt an attitude of humility. There’s a line I use often in my talks that applies here:

“The entire human enterprise depends on two things: Six inches of topsoil and the fact that it rains.”

No matter how clever our inventions, no matter how beautiful our artwork, no matter how profound our works of literature or how powerful our weapons or how vast our (imaginary) wealth, we are in the end biological creatures who suffer and die quickly without air, food and water.  Our frailty is evident in every disaster – water and food become matters of top priority, and lack of these is often a major reason for breakdowns in security and social norms.  But absent a disaster, we human beings act like teenagers who are invincible and will live forever.  Could there be a better description of an economic system built on the premise that perpetual growth is possible, desirable and inevitable?

Perhaps James’ caution could apply here:

¹³ Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” ¹⁴ Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. ¹⁵ Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” ¹⁶ As it is, you boast in your arrogant schemes. All such boasting is evil.

And we need to admit the reality of our sin and repent. Think back to the image of the tsunami wave racing across the landscape, engulfing cars and buildings and then carrying them along, adding them to itself and using them to consume and destroy yet more cars and buildings.  There is a powerful metaphor here:  All of our economic, political and social structures have been built, like the Tower of Babel on a foundation of arrogance and greed.  We have in fact “added house to house until there is no more room and we live alone in the land” (Is 5).  We have “destroyed the earth” and unknowingly lived on the blood of millions trapped in poverty.   And the system we’ve built for our comfort and prosperity is in the process of destroying us, more slowly but just as effectively as that tsunami wave whose destructive force was magnified by the cars and houses it had swallowed.  (See previous posts that relate here and here and here and here.)

Biblical repentance calls for a change of attitude as well as change of direction.  “Go and sin no more,” says Jesus to an admitted sinner.  Can an entire global society learn to “sin no more”?  I’m not sure we can, but I suspect this is the great challenge of our time.

And this brings us to our one hope in all of this:

We can appeal to the mercy and grace of a God who is not only wrathful but also loving:

¹³ “When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people, ¹⁴ if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land. [II Chronicles 7:13-14]

And while we confess and pray, we can also hang on tight to the words of Jeremiah at one of the darkest periods of Israel’s history that are the source of one of our greatest hymns of prayer and praise:

⁹ I remember my affliction and my wandering,
the bitterness and the gall.
²⁰ I well remember them,
and my soul is downcast within me.
²¹ Yet this I call to mind
and therefore I have hope:
²² Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
²³ They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
²⁴ I say to myself, “The LORD is my portion;
therefore I will wait for him.”   [Lamentations 3:19-24]

And so I turn from visions of disaster and tragedy to think again of the warbler I saw this weekend, who has survived a long, hard  winter and a flight of thousands of miles, and who spends his morning singing praises to his creator, and mine:

Is it a warbler?  Let me know…

Lowell Bliss is the director of Eden Vigil and Care of Creation’s partner in environmental missions.  He’s appeared already in these pages as a guest blogger and has now agreed to be a regular contributor. Having spent fourteen years in India and Pakistan, Lowell, his wife Robynn, and three kids now reside in Manhattan, KS.

I know that YouTube is primarily used to apprise ourselves of this week’s media spectacle, but it’s also a wonderful tool for nostalgia.  Every once in a while, sitting at the computer, I announce to my family, “Classic Rock Night!”  The kids groan and the speakers play Creedence Clearwater Revival.   One day I went to YouTube in order to relive my childhood environmentalism.    When the world celebrated its first Earth Day in 1970, I was still in second grade.  YouTube allowed me to revisit the Ad Council PSA familiar to my generation of Saturday morning cartoon watchers.  I typed in “Crying Indian,” the name under which the ad is apparently archived in our collective memory, and watched the old chief paddle his canoe past a riverfront factory.  He beaches it on a littered shore and climbs an embankment alongside an eight-lane highway.   The narrator’s voice is deep and accusatory, “Some people have a deep abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country. “  We then see a bag of fast-food garbage flung out from a car window.  It splatters the Indian’s moccasins.  “And some people don’t.”    The camera then pans closely to his face and we see the famous tear.  “People start pollution; people can stop it.”

Here now are the comments that appeared under the video on the day that I watched it:

• GENESIS101 (5 days ago)
  • this makes me want a burger now.
• accountabilabuddy1 (2 weeks ago)
  • I hated this psa as a kid. They used to play it all the time in the 70′s. Nealry [sic] ruined Saturday morning cartoons for me!
• Greebrew1 (2 weeks ago)
  • the indian in this commercial is actually sicilian.
• SanLUZARDO (3 weeks ago)
  • They should run this again on Primetime…It will never be out of time.
• Pking2death (1 month ago)
  • The thing about this commercial is that, you can rape our women, you can kill our entire race, you can take our land, but if you litter I’m going to break down and cry.
• patu8010 (1 month ago)
  • So that’s where Simpsons got the idea.
• DexFlames (1 month ago)
  • I lol’d anyway.

If nostalgia is a function of the past and the present somehow mediating through each other, then these comments I suppose are as significant as the replayed video.  Wow!  I never remember wanting to laugh out loud about this Indian’s pain, something I always accepted as real and sincere.   Maybe if I had known he was actually Sicilian.  Back then I don’t think I could have imagined cynicism anymore than I could have imagined cartoons taking a leap from Saturday morning to the Simpson’s primetime slot.   Pking2death’s comment on crying over litter, as compared to Native America’s loss of land, life, and health, does make sense to me, but only because I’ve grown up and seen how complicated justice can be in an adult world.  It makes litter seem silly.  Nonetheless, at some elemental level in me (that convergence of the 8-year-old me and the 48-year-old me), I still consider litter to be part of that injustice.  I still find that Indian’s tear human and sincere—be he now Native American, or Sicilian, or Pakistani, or Maldivian.

The environmentalism of my childhood was simple.   For everything that I may have read in My Weekly Reader about smog in Los Angeles or Lake Erie catching on fire, most of my consciousness could be contained on a poster made with stencils and magic marker: “Don’t be a litterbug.”   Woodsy the Owl’s admonition was a rallying cry for my Cub Scout troop as we picked up garbage in the city park.   Now I try to picture Woodsy before the licensing commission of a coal-fire power plant.  “Give a hoot; don’t pollute,” he says into the bank of microphones.  (I can’t picture it.)  And all of those bags of litter we Cub Scouts picked up, now I’m informed that the landfills are too full to accept them.   We may as well go out for burgers and fries.  It’s a slow but inexorable drift from complexity to cynicism, making the canoe in the commercial a fitting metaphor.

But of course, we can stop.  We can beach the canoe in a sandbar and get out and reflect.   Grief is the first line of defense against all sorts of evils.  Then we can choose.  “Some people have a deep abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country.”  Hey, that’s me!  Still now, four decades later.  And then we can choose to keep it simple.  “Give a hoot; don’t pollute” is exactly what industry and government need to hear.  Maybe the rhyme and the whimsy of that slogan is an integral part of the value of creation.  And maybe there is no more glorious activity for a Saturday afternoon than to grab a bag and go out into my neighborhood and pick up litter.   In my next guest blog at Our Father’s World, that will be my topic: picking up litter as a spiritual discipline.  Maybe the planet doesn’t need it, but our souls do.  Maybe two bags of pop cans and candy wrappers mean nothing to the complexities of the environment, but it can mean the world to our childlike faith.

Last Sunday’s New York Times yielded a couple of articles interesting in themselves – but more so for how they connect with each other and with a couple of books I’ve been reading recently in ways that you might not expect. Neither seems on its face to have much to do with the subject of this blog – caring for God’s creation – but I think you’ll agree with me in the end that the subject these two articles raise is inseparable from that topic.

Without really intending to, I found myself recently reading two books that touch on the subject of happiness.  I picked up The Geography of Bliss by Erik Weiner in a guest house lounge on a recent trip and found it fascinating.  It’s a travel book with a difference – Weiner had done some research on the relatively new field of ‘Happiness Studies’ (did you know there is even a journal with that title?) and decided to find the happiest (and otherwise) countries in the world.  He takes us from Bhutan (“happiness is a policy”) to Moldova (“happiness is someplace else”) to Iceland (“happiness is failure”).  This book is a fun read – but what strikes me, as the author intends, is that there is almost no connection between material prosperity and happiness.  Poor people are not overwhelmingly less happy, and rich people are most definitely not consistently more happy than the rest of us.  It is hard to escape the conclusion that the richest country Weiner visits, the Arabian Gulf state of Qatar, is one of the more miserable on his list.

The second book took me by surprise because it isn’t supposed to be about happiness.  The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability by James “Gus” Speth is a comprehensive analysis of what seems to be wrong with the world’s economy as it is now being practiced.  This is a surprisingly easy read even for non-economists; written before the 2008 crash, one wonders what Speth might have had to say afterwards.  Expecting to read about economics and business, I was surprised to find halfway through a chapter on, yes, happiness.  The chapter is called “Real Growth: Promoting the Well Being of People and Nature”.  Like Weiner, Speth points us over and over again to research that indicates that above a ‘meeting basic needs’ income level, there is little correlation between wealth and what he calls ‘subjective well-being’:

“As incomes skyrocketed (post WWII) in the United States and other advanced economies, reported life satisfaction and happiness levels stagnated or even declined slightly.” (p 130)

And this shocking statement:

“The average American child in the 1980’s reported greater anxiety than the average child receiving psychiatric treatment in the 1950’s.” (p131, quoting researchers Diener and Seligman)

Both these books drive me to a not-surprising conclusion:  The material abundance of our consumer society, while doing great damage to God’s creation, is not making us happy and in many cases is actually making us miserable.

And that leads me to the two articles in this last Sunday’s New York Times that caught my attention:

First, an in depth examination of a new heavy-industry development coming to Myanmar (formerly Burma):

The vast, pristine stretch of coastline here is almost deserted, save for fishermen hauling their bountiful catches onto white-sand beaches. But a deal signed this month would transform these placid waters into a seaport for giant cargo ships. Cashew nut groves and rice fields would be plowed under and replaced with a warren of factories, refineries and an expansive coal-burning power plant.

…The deal, signed Nov. 2, calls for what would be by far the largest industrial area in Myanmar, which is also known as Burma. In an impoverished, relatively cloistered country where malnourishment is widespread, the factories and refineries could provide jobs on an unprecedented scale, not unlike the special economic zones that China and Vietnam set up in recent decades.

“We need tons of workers,” said Premchai Karnasuta, the president of Italian-Thai Development, a conglomerate based in Bangkok that was awarded the contract after years of negotiations and surveys of the area. “We will mobilize millions of Burmese.”

On the one hand, what’s not to like?  This is economic development on a grand scale for one of the most impoverished countries in the world.  The Burmese do suffer poverty, malnutrition and all of the misery that goes with them.  Surely jobs will help.  Thomas Friedman would love this – he’s convinced that one way to break the iron grip of a government like that in Burma is with just this kind of progress.

On closer examination, though, the picture is not really that simple:

For Thai companies, the business environment in Myanmar could hardly be more different from that at home — or more convenient for them. In Thailand, new private development requires environmental impact reports and hearings with local residents, obstacles that have snarled a number of high-profile projects.

In Dawei, the government simply told local residents to leave.

…For foreign companies, the project also means less environmental oversight. In the case of Thailand, new laws that require more environmental safeguards have slowed the expansion of the industrial complex at Map Ta Phut, the country’s largest petrochemical facility.

So, industrial development is coming to Myanmar.  Jobs (after a while).  Better education (hopefully).  Increased income (eventually).  On the other hand, increased rates of cancer and other environmental diseases (almost certainly).  Massive displacement now for those unfortunate enough to live where the factories are going to be.

It’s an ‘on the one hand… on the other…’ kind of situation, isn’t it?  One is tempted to conclude, as many do, that the costs are worth the price.  Sure, a few people lose their homes, but many more thousands will (eventually) have jobs and can join the consumer society, as millions in China have done in recent decades.  They will be wealthier, healthier and, of course, happier…

But will they?  Don’t forget the two books I started this discussion with, as we turn to the last New York Times article – a completely unrelated description of a young man returning to his homeland of Sudan in preparation for next month’s elections after many years in the West:

Joseph Gatyoung Khan made a vow, uttered in the back seat of a Land Cruiser on a very bumpy road, as he headed home for the first time in 22 years: I will not cry.

He had not seen his parents for two decades. He had not set foot in his village since he marched off in 1988, an 8-year-old boy on a barefoot odyssey through one of Africa’s worst civil wars.

It’s a nice story – you should read it.  What struck me powerfully and what ties this story to an industrial complex in Burma and the two books above is this brief comment near the end:

He was sitting in a plastic chair, dozens of women in ripped dresses singing and dancing around him, little children with runny noses and distended bellies squeezing his hand. He later said he saw himself, 22 years ago, in those children. He broke the vow he made in the back of the Land Cruiser.

“They were more happy than me,” he said. “They don’t have schools, they don’t have good hospitals, there’s a lot of mosquitoes around here, but still, still, within them, they were so happy, happier than all of us with bank accounts.”

This is a lesson learned over and over by Peace Corps volunteers and others.  When it comes to happiness, more means less.  Less often means more. On this week after Black Friday, as we approach another consumer-driven frenzy, maybe – just maybe – we need to realize that if we had less, we might have more.

And if we could learn to live with less, God’s creation would have more.  And God might be happier.

Seem’s like its worth a try.