This summer Brittany Ederer, a student at UW-Madison, served as an intern in the Care of Creation office in Madison.  Based on her interest in camping, education nature and environment, we assigned her to start a survey project of Christian camps in Wisconsin, the upper Midwest and then throughout the country.  Are there Christian camps who are actively promoting creation care as part of their camp program?  Are they using creation care principles in caring for their properties?  This blog post is a preliminary report on a visit to one camp not far from Madison.  It turns out one of the best examples of creation care at camp is right in our own back yard.  We’re looking forward to a complete report from Brittany later on, but in the meantime, enjoy her thoughts on what’s going on at Timber-lee…

In mid-August I had the opportunity to visit Camp Timber-lee in East Troy, Wisconsin.  Timber-lee is an Evangelical Free camp that is busy year-round with summer camp, retreats, and school programs including Environmental Education.  I met with the Environmental Education Instructor/Animal Care Manager, Karen Good, and she showed me around their impressive Science Education Center.  My excitement turned to delight when I entered one of their several animal rooms and saw a myriad of snakes, turtles, and other herpetofauna  (look it up!).

While I held a beautiful orange and yellow kingsnake, Karen explained that many of their animals were adopted from rescues or donated to the camp.  The other room of animals was mostly mammals with a few birds, including a rescue squirrel that could not be released to the wild because he was raised by humans-and now thinks of himself as one too!

The rest of the tour included a spectacular “Seven Days of Creation” exhibit, classrooms with unparalleled insect collections and mounts of animals from around the world, a classroom all about energy and physics, a walk through some of their woods, and a stop at the marsh.

As I continued to chat with Karen, she explained how Timber-lee uses the resources they’ve been blessed with to teach summer camp kids and students alike.  I began to realize just how simple it could be to connect people with nature and help them develop a deep, Biblical appreciation and respect for the world God has placed us in.

Here are a few keys to the success of the environmental stewardship focus at Timber-lee:

• They introduce children to the animals in the Nature Center so they interact with living, breathing creatures that have specific habitat and diet needs.  In this way, the children can overcome trepidations they may have towards snakes, lizards, etc. while regaining an awe of nature.  It’s not always feasible to try and teach young ones about habitat destruction and the economic problems that accompany pollution, but if you can get them to care about the animals, then you’ve given them a reference point for being concerned about the environment as a whole.
• They use what they already have-for instance, they work on the section of forest they have to remove invasive species, they take advantage of the marsh shoreline to show and teach animal tracks, and use protected or endangered species already on the property to teach about conservation (like the kitten tail Besseya bullii, a threatened vascular plant in WI)
• They work with and take advantage of outside organizations, such as wildlife rehabilitation centers and conservation groups.  Numerous times rehabilitated wildlife is released on Timber-lee property because they maintain healthy native habitats.  They also have received grants from organizations like The Prairie Enthusiasts, which allows them to improve and expand their native prairie areas at camp.

This is a camp I would want my children to attend, because they’re doing it right!  The campers learn about what the outside world is like-what animals live where, how to identify their tracks, what a native ecosystem should look like.  It’s fun to learn!  Outside recreation should include more than wakeboarding or playing basketball, and can be as simple as learning about the trees around the campfire.  Also, creation care at Timber-lee isn’t just about how much money they can save or how many  “green” products they switch to, but about understanding a little better the heart of God.  Timber-lee has prayed and sought the face of God, and He has blessed them with many donations (like an insect collection) that they can use as teaching tools.

As I drove back to Madison, I reflected on a few questions:

• What would it look like for other camps across the USA to take their God-given resources to the next level?
• Many thousands of acres in this country are the property of Christian camps-how many of those acres are harboring invasive species, threatened or endangered species, or near-pristine habitat?
• How many camps are using what they have to actively engage their campers in environmental stewardship?

These are the types of questions I am trying to answer through my internship with Care of Creation, Inc.

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!]

You just never know who you’re going to meet at a conference (or a guest house). This time it was Orlando, Florida – and the person waving across the auditorium turned out to be Mark Morris, a friend and former member of the church I pastored for a time in Pakistan from about 1991 to 1995. He and Cindy were raising three of the cutest little girls… but I digress: We’ve both changed places and jobs numerous times in the last fifteen years and had completely lost track of each other. It was fun catching up personally and professionally. Our ministry at Care of Creation was new to Mark; this is how he described our conversation on his own blog. Enjoy:

Confession time. I’ll just put it all on the table…my actions and lifestyle might just demonstrate that I am complacent about the creation God has stewarded into my hands. It’s ok, because I balance this neglect with a high level of care for the least reached hearing a verbal and living proclamation of the living Lord. I invest myself in seeing churches and individuals traverse cultures in order to spread the saving name of Jesus to the glory of God the Father. So it is simply off my radar to get on the “liberal-minded” green kick of environmentalism. And yes I chew my gum and spit it out the window while driving 65 miles an hour down the highway. I don’t even know how many gazilians of years it will take for my juicy fruit to reprocess back into the environment, if it does at all. I’m obviously sinful and uncaring about God’s creation. So why am I writing in this blog about the Care of Creation?!

The reason? Something happened today as I attended Mission America, a follow up to the Cape Town, Lausanne Conference on World Missions. At the conference today I ran into an old friend and my former pastor who wrote a book and started a ministry on the subject of Care of Creation. The book is Our Father’s World: Mobilizing the Church to Care for Creation.

The book was written by my friend Ed Brown. Ed and his wife are both missionary kids from legendary missionary families who poured out their lives sharing the gospel and making disciples and planting churches in Pakistan. As an MK, Ed literally survived drowning in a Pakistani canal and he grew up to be an Intervarsity student worker. Later Ed became my pastor in Pakistan during the mid 1990′s. Thinking Ed and I would spend our time catching up on the 15 year gap since our last visit, I was surprised that I spent most of the hour extracting the story of Ed’s pilgrimage into this unlikely ministry. After our visit, I came back to my hotel room and in a very brief time read his 200 page Intervarsity Press book from cover to cover.

I’ll use another person’s words to describe my reaction to Ed’s message. One of our speakers today talked about a YWAM ministry in which he mobilizes saved and unsaved college students to action around the cause of human trafficking. In the process of taking action for a cause, this YWAM worker begins the systematic process of sharing the gospel with those students and discipling them as they engage in their action-oriented response to a cause. As he explained his ministry, he said, “I communicated the Gospel through the lens of justice.” That’s a great description of Ed Brown’s ministry called Care of Creation. He and his global missionary staff, communicate the Gospel through the lens of the care of creation.

Today I learned that unlike many other “green” efforts, this is not a Christian facade for a liberal political agenda. Ed Brown’s ministry was actually the brain child of a visionary missionary out of John Piper’s church, Craig Sorley, who serves in Africa.

The vision of Care of Creation is:

Mobilizing the worldwide church toward a God-centered response to the environmental crisis that brings glory to the Creator, advances the cause of Christ and leads to a transformation of the people and the land that sustains them.

The ministry involves educating the North American church and engaging the church in sharing Christ while using environmentally responsible technologies around the world: Farming God’s Way, Planting God’s Trees, and Harvesting God’s Water Responsibly. I’m reminded of some of the excellent agricultural work of the Asian Rural Life Development Center. Ed emphasizes that sound theology is at the heart of sound practice. He articulates that Christ-centered theology, calling for a theology in action.

Many of the innovative, non-traditional churches that I serve, are serious about the care of creation and are looking for resources. Here’s a good one. These churches want to know what you and I are doing as Christians about the environment? So, here’s what I’ll do. I’ll confess that it is absolutely sinful for me to spit my gum out the window. Perhaps I should not even be chewing gum? But I’ll repent and at least stop spitting my chewing gum out the window. Yes this is a ridiculous little example, as if it were the worst thing that I do to the environment. I’ll also take seriously my stewardship of this earth, and like Ed I will bolster my commitment to the communication of the Gospel among the least reached around the world. Is there a place for me in the Care of Creation? After reading Ed’s book I’ll reluctantly admit that I must cease to ignore the issue and I’ll admit that there certainly better be a slot that I fill in this matter of stewardship. What about you?

If you are looking for guidance in how your church can address the issues of Creation Care, I’m sure Ed Brown will be glad to visit with you. He offers weekend seminars and training on the topic and you can simply read the book. Contact Ed Brown at ed@careofcreation.org. The book is an excellent resource for any Christian who wants to grapple with the theological foundations on this topic. It’s also a helpful tool to familiarize yourself with the issues inherent to this discussion. Brown’s book forced me, and perhaps it could you, to stop and listen to the issues, not from a left or right wing political perspective, but from an intelligent, theopraxical, conservative evangelical perspective.

This is my final Cape Town post for the time being.  The Cape Town Congress is over, but the work of the Lausanne Committee continues with the now-in-process writing of Part 2 of the Cape Town Commitment, a plan of action for the global evangelical church.  I am eagerly awaiting that document, and will share observations on it with you in due course.  Meanwhile, my final thoughts on the Congress itself, and the remarkable Cape Town Commitment document released at the end of that meeting:

My particular interest at Cape Town was understandably creation care.  I had come to do a presentation on the topic, and personally and professionally I was curious as to what this gathering of the global church would have to say to itself on this topic.  My observations are three:

At ground level, the global church is very concerned about creation.

The hallways of Cape Town 2010 could be considered somewhat representative of the grassroots of the global evangelical church.  To the extent that is true, creation care is a topic that is full of interest and that generates a lot of concern among church leaders in almost every corner of the world.

I found myself in continual conversations with people at meals, in the hall ways, waiting for sessions to begin – and it wasn’t because I was looking for these conversations.  All I had to do was introduce myself:  “I work with a Christian environmental organization…” We would be off and running with a conversation ranging from the state of creation in his or her particular country to what evangelical theology has to say to this issue and everything in between.  Out of hundreds of conversations, I can only recall two people who questioned the reality of the crisis or the need for the church to respond: One was a wealthy businessman from Texas, and the other a sister from Australia.  Everyone else was unanimous:  “In my country, things are bad, are getting worse, and people are suffering.”

These conversations naturally moved to what can be done – and I came away with a stack of business cards and too many requests to come and visit.

On the other hand, at ministry level, there is little or no awareness of the crisis in creation, and very little action.

It is safe, I think, to use the program content of the Cape Town congress as representative of the kinds of ministries that the global church is involved in.  The days of the congress were organized under Lausanne’s motto: “The whole gospel from the whole church to the whole world,” and we were treated to reports from all the different parts of the world as well as surveys of various types of ministry, including evangelism of unreached people groups, Bible translation efforts, outreach to displaced people (refugees and international students) and ministry to HIV/Aids victims.   If you were to measure by the content in the main plenary sessions, you would conclude that there is no environmental crisis, or if there is, the church is unaware of it.

There was an afternoon program of smaller gatherings (called ‘Multiplexes’), and one of these was devoted to environment.  In a list of 160 still smaller ‘Dialogue Sessions’ there was just one presentation on creation care.  One.

I was not alone in thinking that there was a strange disconnect on this topic between what the participants were talking about in the hallways and what was being presented from the platform.  It is possible that this is an example of time-lag:  Ministry focus responds to needs as perceived in the world, but it takes time to change directions, develop strategies and move sometimes large organizations.  The people I was talking to ‘on the ground’ know things aren’t going well – but those in the control tower haven’t got the word yet.

The Cape Town Commitment makes a powerful theological statement about creation care, suggesting a new awareness is coming, and new initiatives won’t be far behind.

When I saw an early copy of the Cape Town Commitment, I was astounded.  I could not believe that this issue would be stated so explicitly.  Here is the relevant portion (click here for the source document):

We love the world of God’s creation. This love is not mere sentimental affection for nature (which the Bible nowhere commands), still less is it pantheistic worship of nature (which the Bible expressly forbids). Rather it is the logical outworking of our love for God by caring for what belongs to him. “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it.” The earth is the property of the God we claim to love and obey. We care for the earth, most simply, because it belongs to the one whom we call Lord.23

The earth is created, sustained and redeemed by Christ.24  We cannot claim to love God while abusing what belongs to Christ by right of creation, redemption and inheritance. We care for the earth and responsibly use its abundant resources, not according to the rationale of the secular world, but for the Lord’s sake. If Jesus is Lord of all the earth, we cannot separate our relationship to Christ from how we act in relation to the earth. For to proclaim the gospel that says “Jesus is Lord” is to proclaim the gospel that includes the earth, since Christ’s Lordship is over all creation. Creation care is a thus a gospel issue within the Lordship of Christ.

Such love for God’s creation demands that we repent of our part in the destruction, waste and pollution of the earth’s resources and our collusion in the toxic idolatry of consumerism. Instead, we commit ourselves to urgent and prophetic ecological responsibility. We support Christians whose particular missional calling is to environmental advocacy and action and those committed to godly fulfilment of the mandate to provide for human needs from the abundance of God’s creation. We remind ourselves that the Bible declares God’s redemptive purpose for creation itself. Integral mission means discerning, proclaiming, and living out, the biblical truth that the gospel is God’s good news, through the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, for individual persons, and for society, and for creation. All three are broken and suffering because of sin; all three are included in the redeeming love and mission of God; all three must be part of the comprehensive mission of God’s people.  [Emphasis added.]

We are evangelicals.  Our beliefs and actions are guided by scripture, and expressed in our theology.  Thus should not be surprising that the thoughtful work of a group of theologians would lead toward a resolution of the disconnect described above.  If the program content of Cape Town 2010 represented the past, and the high level of interest in the hallways represents the present, it is my hope that this document represents the future:  This where the global evangelical church is going, and it is where it needs to go if we are really going to base our belief and action on scripture.

And this is exactly what we mean at Care of Creation when we talk about mobilizing the church toward a God-centered response to the environmental crisis.

The word “ordeal” was what caught my attention first.  It was a news story about the Carnival Splendor, one of the largest cruise ships in the world, disabled off the coast of California early this week.  Ordeal?  Amid all that luxury?  This must be journalistic overstatement.

Little by little, the details started to emerge as the ship was towed back to San Diego, then came a flood of reports yesterday after the ship reached port.  Smoky corridors.  Blocked up toilets.  Stench filled hallways.  Interior rooms with no light or ventilation.  And two hour waits to be served hot dog salad and Spam.  (It is a strange footnote to this entire episode that the only thing the cruise line has disputed is that Spam was served to the passengers.  What’s the big deal about Spam among all of the other hardships?  But I digress…)

Some on the internet have taken to mocking the reports of an ordeal – but I’m not one of them.  I’ve checked the floor plans for this ship – it looks like a good third of the staterooms are on the inside, with no views, no natural light, and no ventilation if the air conditioning system breaks down.  The plumbing runs on a vacuum system – gravity won’t help if the power is out.  And considering the presumed average age of people who take these cruises, most are retired, and therefore  have plenty of health issues.  So put yourself in an interior cabin on a lower deck with no light, no air, no water, no toilet, no elevator to get to the upper floors where your food might be waiting for you, and no way to climb the stairs.  I would say this easily falls into the category of an ordeal.

Fortunately, the US Navy was close at hand to bring in supplies, the ship was ‘only’ 50 miles off the coast, and the seas were calm.  There was no danger of losing the ship – life was just a bit unbearable for about 3 days,  though I know “things could have been worse” is small comfort  for those who went through this, I completely sympathize with those passengers who are saying “Never again!”

But setting that aside for now, there’s a deeper lesson here.  I see in this incident a powerful parable concerning our planet, and a warning that we need to hear.

Like the Splendor, human civilization on earth depends on invisible but critical supporting systems.  When these fail, ‘normal’ life falls apart.

The advertising for the Carnival Splendor is unequivocal:  You are in for the experience of a lifetime:

Our ships are built with one goal in mind: to make sure that every time you walk up the gangway, you get the sense that you’re crossing over into a whole new world of fun.

Once on board, let the good times roll because just about everything is included. Enjoy delicious meals in various onboard restaurants, including your comfy accommodations with the complimentary 24-hour stateroom service. Wear the nickname “Night Owl” proudly as you revel in the awesome nightly entertainment; then wonder at all the fun stuff there is to do the next day.

Nothing warns you that the entire system is dependent on an engine power plant that might fail, and if it does, all bets are off, and “fun” is not a word you will be using very often.

This is exactly how our planet works:  A quote I use often in my talks goes like this – “The entire human enterprise depends on two things: Six inches of topsoil and the fact that it rains.”  Of course, it’s a bit more complicated than that.  The “engine room” of our planet consists of topsoil, and healthy forests and a balanced atmospheric system, and all of these have sub-systems that in many cases we are only now beginning to understand.  The system provides us with oxygen, water, food –and everything we do, from walking in our gardens to listening to a concert to driving to work to worshiping in church depends on this system.  If the system fails, we’re in big trouble.  [My colleague Cal DeWitt does a great job of summarizing the provisions provided by this planetary engine-room in his book Earthwise.]

Like the Carnival Splendor, the engine room of planet earth is failing. This isn’t alarmism, and we’re not talking about “might fail” or “will fail in the future” but “is failing now.”

For example, overall rates of biological extinctions are skyrocketing; half the population of the earth is now living in water-stressed areas, and this number is projected to rise to about ¾ of the world’s population within twenty to thirty years; deforestation, one of the big causes of water problems, continues unabated and in many places is accelerating; many resources that we need to run the world economy are in increasingly short supply, leading to economic and political tensions wherever these resources exist; and then there’s global warming/climate change.  Think of global warming as if the Splendor, already wallowing in passenger misery and filth, had also to contend with a tropical storm on the horizon, and you’ll have an idea of how to fit that problem into the overall picture.

The entire situation can be summed up by the World Wildife Fund’s Living Planet Report:

• Global biodiversity is down 30 percent since 1970.  This decline is due mostly to habitat loss in tropical regions, where biodiversity has declined by 60 percent.
• Many species have experienced significant population declines in recent years, including Atlantic bluefin tuna, peary caribou and whale sharks.  One species, the white-rumped vulture, declined by more than 50 percent between 2000-2007, while the population of leatherback turtles fell 20 percent between 1989-2002.
• Natural resources are being consumed faster than the Earth is replenishing them. We are currently consuming the equivalent of 1.5 planets to support human activities. If current trends continue, by 2030 we will need the capacity of two planets to meet natural resource consumption needs and absorb CO₂ waste.
• Humanity’s ecological footprint has doubled since 1966, largely because of the carbon footprint, which has increased 11-fold since 1961.

Like the passengers on the Splendor, many of us are not aware of how bad things are ‘down below’.

One of the things immediately apparent in passenger reports was that some folks had very different experiences than others.  If you had paid enough to have a stateroom with a balcony on an upper deck, you had light and air, and your toilets probably worked.  The episode was more like an adventure than an ordeal.  If you were inside, not so much.

The connection to our situation in the world today is obvious to me.  My recent experience in Cape Town is a case in point.  My days were full of conversations with people who, when they heard that I work with a Christian environmental organization, could not stop talking about the state of creation in their countries.  The only exception to this was a brief conversation with a wealthy businessman from Texas (read: oil) who dismissed me and my work, and any possibility that there might be problems in God’s creation in about three sentences.  This guy has a cabin at the top of the ship, and he’s clueless about what 90% of the attenders at Cape Town live with every day.

Along these lines, there’s a storyline from the Splendor incident that is completely missing:  I would love to read that people who had those staterooms-with-balconies invited others who were stuck in the bowels of the ship to share their space in order to lessen the misery.  I haven’t seen a report about this, and sadly, I’m doubting that it happened.  Just as it seldom happens in our world today.

But finally, a big difference between the Splendor and our planet: There is no navy to resupply us.  There are no tugboats.  And there is no port to sail to if there were.

So we have one option:  Start repairing the engines.

Help us repair the engines!  Care of Creation is an organization seeking to do just that by mobilizing the church around the world to respond to the environmental crisis.  Join our contact list, send me a personal note, and consider a donation.  We can do this – together.

I recently returned from a three week trip to South Africa and Kenya.  The South Africa portion of the trip was to attend and participate in Cape Town 2010 – the 3^rd Lausanne Congress on World Evangelisation.  Today’s post is my first reflection on that meeting.  Note that these are general comments, not limited to the particular focus of this blog, which is creation care.  That topic did come up, and I’ll address it in a separate post in the near future.  The second half of the trip involved a visit to the Care of Creation project in Kenya, and that also will get its own post later this week.

My seat-partner on my flight from Johannesburg to Cape Town was moaning about the problems she had getting a hotel reservation in Cape Town for the Microsoft software conference she was attending.  None of her usual hotels had anything available.  ‘Oh, I can tell you why that is,’ I said, helpfully.  ‘That’s because of the conference I’m attending.’  Five thousand church leaders descending on Cape Town was not what she expected, and I could tell it was stretching her categories a bit.  On the other hand, I’m a veteran of many large (usually Christian) conferences, and I thought I knew what I was coming to.  Not so much – Cape Town 2010 turned out to be much more than I expected as well.

There were many highlights.  Thinking back over those 8 days, a number of images come to mind:  Libby Little, her husband having been one of those martyred in Afghanistan only weeks before, testifying to the grace of God in a time of intense grief.  A teenager from North Korea, having lost one parent to cancer, the other to political persecution, sharing her desire to serve God no matter what.  John Piper, eloquent and passionate in his exposition of scripture.  A brother from Rwanda describing how he suffered – and survived – the holocaust in that country, and sharing with us his thoughts on the inadequacies in the gospel that made that tragedy possible.  Two giants of the faith, Samuel Escobar and Renee Padilla, interviewing each other about their own experiences serving in Latin America over the last 50 years, and looking ahead to the next.  Exuberant worship in the African vernacular, along with many other flavors .  Praise songs in half a dozen languages and old English hymns in dozens of accents sang equally well.  And through it all the joy of spirit-engineered encounters in the hallways – old friends from earlier conferences (“Yando!  What are you doing here???” “Same thing as you, Ed!”) and many, many new sisters and brothers.  Not least among all these images, the sight of 4000 people all seated at assigned tables in the main hall doing “manuscript Bible study” (IV/IFES people will know what I mean).  It was kind of required small groups.  And it worked – Christian conferences may never be the same.

But this feels like talking you through a massive collage of photos – interesting for me, but a bit boring for you.  So, sifting the experience for the most meaningful nuggets, I come up with these three:

As part of the world wide church, I am (we are?)part of something far bigger than I usually realize.

The numbers speak of diversity:  Four thousand participants from 198 countries, all carefully chosen for their differences.  This was an ‘invitation only’ conference and the organizers worked hard to create an assembly that would do justice to the glorious variety in the global church.  Men and women, young leaders and old, battle scarred veterans and seminary students, professional church leaders and business people, leaders of denominations measured in the millions and pastors of tiny worshiping groups in the jungle – this crowd had nothing in common with itself.  There were six official languages – need I say more?  No, we had nothing in common – except Jesus.  There was a deep “shared culture” evident that included shared beliefs, a common respect for biblical preaching and teaching, and a great deal of shared music.  If one of the marks of a culture is its folk music, the way in which both new and old music crossed language and cultural boundaries at this event would seem to be proof of the organic unity of the worldwide church.

I have had some experience of multinational gatherings in other contexts:  Groups of workers or organizations brought together by disaster or convened around a cause by an agency like the United Nations.  Countries meeting over a common problem or challenge.  These meetings are minefields where every statement is offered in measured and nuanced phrases, and is parsed oh-so-carefully to discover the agenda behind the meaning behind the words.  Mutual suspicion and backroom attempts to maneuver for advantage are the name of the game.

But not here.  Oh, sure – there were disagreements.   John Piper’s view of the atonement, Os Guinness’ take on “truth” were not taken as universally valid statements, and there were plenty of participants who would be happy to let you know that.  But these were the kinds of discussion that my own family is famous for: loud and passionate and possible because we are part of the same family.  We can disagree and still love and trust each other.

And, honestly – what other institution in human society could gather a group of people from every corner of the earth and discover that there are songs almost all of them already know?  That what they agree about and what they believe in is so substantial that it overwhelms those occasional areas of disagreement?

I wonder what it might be like as a person with no previous experiences like this to walk into an assembly like Cape Town in the midst of the singing of ‘Crown Him with Many Crowns’ (Link – jump to 5:20 on the video).  It is possible that we really don’t appreciate what we are part of as members of this glorious, worldwide body we call ‘The Church.’

We are close to realizing the fulfillment of Jesus’ last command.

Jesus words in Matthew 24:14 came to mind frequently:  “And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.”

The goal of the church from the time of the earliest disciples right to the present has been to preach the gospel of Jesus to the very ends of the earth.  This was, after all, the third “Congress on World Evangelization”, and this meeting made me think we’re pretty close to achieving that goal.  It’s only taken 2000 years, but the end may really be in sight.

The conference location was significant and highly symbolic.  Geographically, Cape Town is about as close to the “end of Africa” as you can get and as such is a decent proxy for the “ends of the earth”.  What was a lonely outpost of empire not so very long ago is now the site of a great celebration of the gospel having gone, almost, to the ends of the earth.  And Africa, once called the “dark continent” by Europeans, is now the continent where the church is growing fastest.  For example, there are more Christian students in Nigeria than in all of North America.

Frequent references to “the global south” were reminders that the great nations of the world that were mission fields a century ago now represent the new center of the worldwide church.  Many of them are in fact sending missionaries to the countries from which missionaries came to evangelize them in the last century.  The largest missionary force in the world is Korean.  Need we say more?

No, the task is not yet finished.  A session on “missing peoples” reminded us that there are still pockets of tribal, ethnic or linguistic units where there is no witness to the gospel, and missionaries are still needed.  A fascinating development (new to me, at least) is an emphasis on “orality” – finding ways to take the message of Jesus to people who cannot, or do not read the written word.  This is a fascinating parallel track to the long effort to translate the Bible into every language on earth.

Not finished, but amazingly close.

We have a lot of work left to do.

If basic evangelization has been remarkably successful in my lifetime, the uneven development of the church shows some serious gaps.  Planting the seed is only part of Jesus’ command – what he actually told us to do was to ‘make disciples’ (Mt 28:19) and some of the problems in the world can be directly tied to our failure to move from evangelization to discipleship.

One of the most powerful talks at Cape Town was from Antoine Rutayisire from Rwanda.  A survivor of the Rwandan holocaust, he offered a perceptive critique of the church – and missionaries’ – roles in that tragedy.  The problem for us is this:  At the time of the Rwandan genocide, that country was one of the most “Christian” in Africa, yet those same church members used machetes to hack each other to pieces, and church buildings to burn their own spiritual brothers and sisters to death.

Antoine’s critique (you need to listen to his talk or read the original paper) was but an extended version of Renee Padilla’s very brief answer to a simple question:  What concerns you most about the future?  Three things, he answered:  1. The lack of discipleship in churches.  2. Globalization.  3. The ecological crisis.

Renee would have connected his sentence with Antoine’s talk like this: We have tragedies like Rwanda in Christian nations because we have neglected discipleship.  We have tremendous poverty in large parts of the world, in spite of the advance of the gospel, because of the perpetration of a fundamentally unjust economic system that has seduced large portions of the church.  And we are threatened with a global ecological collapse in part because the global church has done nothing about it.

And so we come back to the central theme of this blog – creation care.  Though there was little in the main sessions about the crisis in God’s creation, the Congress produced a document called the Cape Town Commitment that has a powerful statement on Creation Care.  Some of us are in communication with Lausanne leadership on this topic – stay tuned.  Meanwhile, please take the time to watch some of the Cape Town videos, and even join the Lausanne Conversation web site.  Your voice matters.

This is the final post in a series leading up to the third Lausanne conference that begins in just a few days – on Sunday, 17 October in Cape Town.  Earlier posts in this series are here; up to now, these have been summaries and excerpts from my book, Our Father’s World.  Today’s post is different.  This is a call to action that summarizes the challenge I will be sharing with a group of delegates at Cape Town.

We have been making the following case in this series:

• the environmental crisis is a direct result of human sin;
• God’s redemptive plan in Jesus Christ includes the restoration of all of our broken relationships, including our relationship to non-human creation;
• The church – the people of God – can respond to the environmental crisis in ways that no one else can;

From this case, it is hard to escape the following conclusion:

• Because we can respond, and because we have been commanded to respond, we must respond.

All that is left is to ask and answer the question, How?  What should we then do?

There are three steps we need to take as individual christians and as churches to begin to move forward.  Each one could be a full post or a full chapter  in a book, but here are a few thoughts:

1.  We begin by Repenting.

We have established that the problem is sin.  Biblically, there is only one way to handle a sin problem: Repentance.  Biblical repentance has a couple of important dimensions that go far beyond “I’m sorry!” -

Repentance means admitting we are wrong, acknowledging we are at fault.  We have disobeyed.  We have ignored God’s first command to us, to care for his creation.  We have used the authority he gave us over his creation to satisfy our own selfish cravings rather than using it to govern his creation according to his purposes.  We have sinned.

Repentance means, first,  changing our minds. When we repent of sin, we are in effect changing our minds and agreeing with God that what we did, and how we thought about it, was sinful.  In the present context, this mean changing how we think about God’s creation.

Repentance also means that we begin to stop sinning.  In this setting, true repentance means that we start, to whatever extent is possible, to do no more harm to God’s creation.  Changing lightbulbs, reducing our use of toxic chemicals in our homes, using public transportation all become acts of repentance.

None of these actions are by themselves sufficient – but they are necessary.

Repentance means making a start.  Now.

2. We work to Restore God’s damaged creation.

It is not sufficient to stop harming creation.  The world we now live in is a far cry from the bountiful and flourishing world God gave us.  As stewards we are called to care for creation.  Our mission should be to seek to do everything in our power to increase the value of the Master’s property in the little time we have on this earth before he asks for an accounting.

What might this look like?  I know a half a dozen people in several countries who have taken the call to restore creation very literally.  They either purchased – or in some cases inherited – small to medium size tracts of land, and have worked for many years to bring the land back to health.  One example in particular is spectacular – a broken down plantation in Jamaica 25 years ago is now a flourishing rainforest and a major tourist attaction.

Not all of us will have the resources to work with a piece of land like that – but we can start where we are.  If your church has land of its own, what a perfect place to start.  But even public areas – parks or watersheds – can be arenas in which we can work to begin to bring health back to God’s creation.

To do it right will be a big job – we will need the help of scientists, we’ll need to recruit members of our larger communities.  We need to learn to see things on a long time scale:  In my experience, 25 years seems to be what will be needed to do the job right.

To paraphrase an old proverb, if a journey is going to be a thousand miles, it would be best to start today.

3. We Prepare for the inevitable disasters ahead of us.

In the fall of 2009 I was scheduled to travel to Manila, Philippines, to present my ‘Our Father’s World’ seminar.  Just weeks before I was to come, Manila was hit by several typhoons.  Much of the city was flooded, including the homes of several of my hosts.  I offered to cancel the trip – it seemed like the wrong time to bring in a foreign speaker – but my host organization insisted that I come as planned.  “We know from these disasters that we have been guilty of sins against God’s creation.  We need your message more than ever.” [Several posts on this situation are here.]

It is evident both from current events and from a logical analysis of our situation that the abuse of creation globally has reached the point where environmentally related disasters are inevitable.  The typhoons in Manila were not caused by humans – though there is some evidence that their unusual power might have been exacerbated by global warming.  No, typhoons are a normal and natural part of creation.  The damage and human suffering came from the fact that Manila has been built in a watershed area.  The region’s orginal marshes and wetlands would have absorbed the power and the water of these typhoons and would have been better and stronger because of them.  These natural buffers have been replaced by streets, houses and concrete culverts.  The result was massive flooding, great damage and enormous human suffering.

The same lessons apply in this summer’s floods in Pakistan, China and most recently in Indonesia.  And every time a hurricane strikes Haiti.  And in the increasing numbers of wildfires in the US west every year, as well as in Russia this last summer.

No matter how quickly we repent, and no matter how energetically we work to heal and restore creation, there will be more of these disasters.  Thus the final word to the church is to prepare:

First , we should prepare for disasters in our own communities:  Every congregation has the potential to organize itself as a first-response agency for its own community, whether the danger is flood, fire, toxic chemical release or any of the myriad other ways that our abuse of creation might endanger us and those we love.

Second, we should prepare to assist sisters and brothers in other places as disasters strike.  This is difficult – when tragedy is heaped on tragedy, those in unaffected areas asked to respond lose interest.  The nonprofit community calls this ‘donor fatigue’.  We dare not grow weary in well doing; at the same time, it is apparent that our resources will have to be managed carefully if we need to plan on several major disasters every year.

Much more could be said in this area – perhaps I will expand on these thoughts in the future.

The conclusion, though, is clear:  We are called to be God’s people in this world at this time.  Let’s get moving.

This is a continuation of a series of articles leading up to the third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization that begins in Cape Town South Africa on October 15.  Today’s post is a continuation of the last as we continue to explore the answer to an important question:  When the problems raised by the environmental crisis are as big and technical as they seem to be, what exactly does the church bring to the table?  Do we really have anything to offer? [Find the whole series to date here.]

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An agent for change

We concluded in chapter four that the environmental crisis is essentially a disease caused by sin and by sinfulness.  Essentially, bad behavior (materialism, greed, selfishness) caused and perpetuated by a tendency toward and an inability to break out of bad behavior patterns lies at the root of the whole problem.  Any psychologist or psychiatrist could tell us what we need to do:  Break the pattern so we can stop the behavior.  If this sounds like therapy, you’re right.  Therapy is what we need.  And this is something the church is very, very good at:  Helping people to understand their sin and guilt, coming to God for forgiveness and help, and changing how we live.  We need to apply our ability to confront and change behavior to creation care.  Environmental problems are sin problems – and sin is something the church knows how to handle.

Will it work?  Can Christians make a difference?  These are early days – but the signs are promising.

Here’s one brief example:

In the Chesapeake Bay area, a community of local fishermen listened to a graduate student, Susan Drake (now Susan Emmerich); they became aware of the disconnect between what they said they believed in church on Sunday, and how they were actually acting when they abused the waters and shellfish beds from which they made a living.  They signed a public covenant together – in church – and changed the way they lived and worked in a dramatic fashion.  The entire environmental community of Maryland took notice.

In the Pennsylvania farm country, some of those same fishermen took the time to show their Christian brothers who were farmers that how they fertilized their fields was damaging the bay and hurting the shellfish beds the fishermen depended on.  The farmers determined, before God, that they had to change the way they were farming.  How else could they be said to be loving their neighbors?  And they changed.  [These stories are told in an award winning film documentary, When Heaven Meets Earth.]

In Kenya and East Africa, at the conference I described earlier,  260 church leaders signed a public declaration in March, 2006, declaring that “we believe God calls us to be good stewards of his creation” and calling on all Christians in their region to “begin developing God-centered strategies to educate, disciple, and mobilize the entire church to action.”  A number of churches have since started their own tree nurseries and plans are being proposed for a Kenya-wide tree planting effort every year the week after Easter.  The Church in Kenya will call the nation to celebrate the resurrection by planting God’s trees.

A mobilized church can make an impact.

A spiritual organism and a human organization

I love my Bible.  Not just “the Bible” as a general term, but the particular copy of the Bible that is mine.  This copy is getting a bit worn.  The leather is seriously frayed on the back, and my wife is starting to talk about how tattered it looks.  She wants to get me a new one.  She’s right, of course, but I’m not quite ready to retire the one I’ve got.  I’m much attached to this one, though I could find the same words in a nice new one.  The marks on the pages, even the pages that have been torn, remind me of experiences I have had with God while reading this book.

That strange mixture of the divine and human is what the Bible is all about.  On the one hand, it is a very human document.  Written by ordinary people, it was copied by hand for centuries, and accumulated typos and spelling mistakes.  Its thousands of manuscripts and papyri have been the subject of and have stood up under academic research and scrutiny more intense than that given to any other document.

And yet the Bible bears the marks of God’s hand as nothing else that we possess.  It faithfully records history about God’s dealings with humanity, and teaches about God in language that surpasses any other human literature.  Was there ever a poem in any language that could surpass the last half of the eighth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans for eloquence and passion?  Any more universally loved and moving poem than the twenty-third Psalm?  And with all this, for millions of us it is an almost direct connection to God.  Often I start my day with a cup of coffee and this old, tattered Bible. I read passages that grow more familiar as the years go by, and still I discover new truth every time.  I hear the voice of God’s Holy Spirit encouraging, or prodding me or in some other way showing me what I need to know today.  I don’t mark my Bible, but you can still tell which parts have been most meaningful to me over the fifteen years or so that this particular copy has been my mainstay.  And that’s why I hesitate to give it up.  It is a map of a spiritual journey – marking times and ways that God has stepped into my life in a very direct and personal way.

My church is like my Bible, exhibiting the same mix of divine and human.  It is a human institution, existing under a charter granted by the secular authorities of my community and my state.  It has founding and guiding documents that are legal in character and that are not very different from those of other nonprofit organizations.  It has leaders that are very human, and members that are even more so.  It struggles with pragmatic issues like budgets and finances and organizing dozens of volunteers and complaints from the neighbors about cars blocking their driveways.

But my church is not just a nonprofit organization.  Its human elements are all tangled up with spiritual realities.  It is a divine organism as much as a human organization, and there are times when the Spirit is very real as he moves among us while we worship and sing praises together.  I have no question that important actions taken by this church – like buying a new building – have been conducted through the ordinary human medium of taking a vote, but I can believe that that vote was mysteriously guided by the Holy Spirit working through the lives of the people in the room.  The divine element in church life is hard to pin down – it defies analysis – but is nonetheless real for that.  And I suspect you might agree with me, and you might also have laughed and cried at the strange combination of joys and frustrations that come from trying to live with the strange organism/organization that is the church of Jesus Christ.

It is this very hybridness of the church that allows it to bring something to the real problems of the environmental crisis that will be found nowhere else.  The church can deliver spiritual power to practical problems.  The environmental crisis is a confusing tangle of sinful individual human behaviors, sinful corporate behavior, and the ecological realities caused by too many people, too many cars, the proliferation of invasive (nonnative) species and the global effects of climate change – and a whole lot more. It is a scientific problem, an economic problem, a political problem, a security problem, and a moral problem – and a matter of life and death for millions.  But at its root, it is a spiritual problem.  The church – properly understood and functioning in the full power of God – is the only institution or organization available to the human race that can address a problem with this many dimensions.  The church is capable of addressing every issue – repentance from sin, motivation for individual action, courage and influence to change corporate behavior, and the ability to recruit and mobilize millions of people from volunteers to scientists to move into creation and do everything from tree planting to weed removal.

[Note: This article is excerpted and revised from my book, Our Father’s World: Mobilizing the Church to Care for Creation, chapter 6: “Ambassadors of Redemption”.  Order the book here.]

This is a continuation of a series of articles leading up to the third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization that begins in Cape Town South Africa on October 15.  Today’s post is a continuation of the last as we move from the Fall to Redemption. Find the whole series to date here. Today we begin to answer an important question:  When the problems raised by the environmental crisis are as big and technical as they seem to be, what exactly does the church bring to the table?  Do we really have anything to offer?  Let’s find out…

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So how do we get the mission of the church out to onto the environmental Mifflin Streets of the world? How can a group of people that might know how to conduct a prayer meeting but doesn’t know anything about water quality make a difference?  What, really, does the church bring to this crisis?

A values-based organization

One of Wendell Berry’s phrases sticks in my mind:  “the people who might have been expected to care most selflessly for the world have had their minds turned elsewhere.” [Wendell Berry, Art of the Commonplace, p 23] Everyone who wrestles with the problem of Christians and the environment starts at the same point:  “These people should care more than anyone else.”  Berry’s complaint is a pointer to truth:  The church has been expected to care, and should care about these things more than other people because of what she already believes.

My own experience is instructive.  When I first began what turned out to be a major shift in career direction toward environmental stewardship, I had to do some intensive self-examination.  This had not been part of my thinking.  But I discovered something that surprised me.  I was already an environmentalist.  I just didn’t kn ow it yet. I already believed God made the world. I believed that he reveals himself through his creation. I believed he put me here to do his will, and doing his will includes taking care of his creation.  I had an entire theology – value system, if you prefer – that was deeply embedded with environmental or creation care principles.  It was packed away in the attic, and needed to be dusted off.  But it didn’t take much to get it out and functioning again.

The same can be said of all of the material I’ve presented this far in this book.  Nothing here is new; if you are a ‘bible-believing Christian’ you know that everything I’ve presented is already part of the church’s belief-system.  And I have to say that what has been happening among Christians in this area in the last few years is exciting.  If outsiders can figure out that ‘we ought to care’, it shouldn’t be that hard for those of us already in the family to figure it out – and then to act on it.

It’s time for us to wake up.

A laboratory for community

If we are going to successfully respond to the environmental crisis, we – the entire human race – are going to have to learn how to live in community again.  Think about how many of the responses to environmental problems have to do with community:  Community gardens, farmer’s markets, car sharing programs, public transportation systems.  They all have to do with living together, working together, travelling together.  When we live together in harmony – sharing with each other, buying and selling locally, travelling with other people instead of alone, we make fewer demands on God’s creation, and we live healthier – and usually happier – lives.

It should not surprise us that in a creation designed by a God who loves community, patterns of living that emphasize community work better than those that don’t.  God created human beings out of the community of his eternal Trinitarian existence:

Then God said, Let us make man in our image, in our likeness… [Gen 1:26]

The entire biosphere God produced has community written all over it.  Plants can’t live without the services of pollinators.  Pollinators depend on plants for survival.  Even parts of creation that seem at first glance to be in violent opposition to each other – the wolf and the deer, for example – depend on each other.  Populations of deer without predators – as in much of North America today – rapidly expand to the point of sickness and starvation.  Healthy numbers of predators mean healthy deer herds.

And God designed us human beings for community.  He made us male and female, anticipating the community of marriage.  He placed us in a garden, so as to enable community with himself.  All through history, God has been working to form a community.  Abraham was chosen not for himself – but to be the father of a great nation.  Jesus was raised from the dead as ‘the firstborn of many brothers’ (Ro 8:29).  History will culminate gloriously and majestically in what John calls ‘the marriage supper of the Lamb’ (Rev 19) – and you can’t get much more community oriented than a wedding.

One of the most important functions of the church now, in this in between period of history, is to be a demonstration community – to show the world how community is done.  Let’s face it:  Community is hard!  It’s hard in marriage.  It’s hard in a family.  It’s difficult in a small town. It is almost impossible in a city.  But community is part of how God’s creation works, and we will never live in harmony with creation – that is, we will never solve the environmental crisis – without learning to live in community again.  The church was designed by God as a community.  As a community we have what the world needs if the world is to successfully navigate through the storm of environmental crisis now upon us.

Bill McKibben’s latest book, whether he intends it this way I do not know, is an exposition of this concept.  Deep Economy, playing on the concept of deep ecology, takes us ‘deeper’ than the balance sheets and profit and loss statements that normally encompass what we think of as the economy.  McKibben shows us, gently and effectively, that one of the basic assumptions of our modern world, that “More is Better”, is a fallacy.  In fact, once our basic human needs are met, more affluence and increased levels of technology seem to result in a lower quality of life rather than a higher one.  And one of the reasons increased affluence results in less happiness and satisfaction is that it almost always comes at the cost of community.  We have grown immeasurably wealthier in the last decades – and incalculably more lonely at the same time.

McKibben shows us that the answer to the environmental crisis is the same as the answer to our quality of life problem:  We need to restore and strengthen our communities.  One of my own principles is demonstrated over and over in the pages of Deep Economy: “If it’s good for community, it’s probably good for the environment” and it’s corollary: “If it’s good for the environment, it’s probably good for community.”  As McKibben sees it, one of the answers to the environmental crisis is to regain the kind of community we human beings used to have, and which in some parts of the world we still do have.

We have lost community at the same time that we’ve been sliding toward environmental disaster.  Whether this is cause and effect, or the two phenomena flowing out of a deeper cause that has given rise to both doesn’t really matter.   What is important – what McKibben is pointing us to – is that we will not solve the environmental crisis without learning community again.  The road back to environmental sanity takes us back to community, from the Supermarket to the Farmer’s Market, and maybe from the drive-in church to the old Wednesday night prayer meeting.

The church is marked by a set of beliefs or values that call her to care for God’s creation (among other things).  And the church already is what the world needs to learn to be to solve this problem – the church is a community.  The church can begin to respond to the environmental crisis simply by being the community she is called to be.   We’ll come back to this in the pages ahead, as it deserves exploration.  Obviously, a church that gathers to race SUV’s through a nature preserve is probably not using the concept of community to advance caring for creation!  But for now, it is sufficient to recognize this basic truth:  An effective response to the environmental crisis requires that we learn community again – and this is what the church does.

[Note: This article is excerpted and revised from my book, Our Father’s World: Mobilizing the Church to Care for Creation, chapter 6: “Ambassadors of Redemption”.  Order the book here.]

This is a continuation of a series of articles leading up to the third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization that begins in Cape Town South Africa on October 15.  Today’s post is a continuation of the last as we move from the Fall to Redemption. Find the whole series to date here.

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I live in a college town in the US – Madison, WI.  Our university is known for “partying”, and one of the annual events loved by students and despised by residents is known as the Mifflin Street Block Party, with a history that goes back to the days of Viet Nam war protests.  The party is normally leaves behind an incredible mess that the city has to clean up, at considerable expense.

But in 2005 something different happened.  That year several people from a local church here got a crazy idea.  “Let’s serve our community by cleaning up after the Block Party.”  Word went out by email and text message.  At six am on Sunday, more than 50 people, rubber gloves and trash bags in hand, formed a line and began marching down Mifflin Street.  In front of them, a carpet of bottles, cans, paper trash and worse.  Behind them, the street was clean.  By midmorning, the job was done – but the repercussions were just beginning.  Television crews showed up at the church.  No one called them.  The goal was not publicity.  But they came because they could not understand what had happened.  Why would Christians – opposed to everything that “The Party” represents – get out at six in the morning and do the clean up?  The answer was simple:  “We wanted to show what it means to love your neighbor.”

This is true Christianity.  This is the church at work in the world.  When this kind of thing happens, the world notices.  It can’t help it.

Here is an example of a church doing exactly what it was created by God to do.  As that line of people formed early on that Sunday morning, they were demonstrating the redemption/reconciliation pattern that we have been describing:

• Individuals whose relationship with God had been restored by an experience of forgiveness from God (the first relationship)
• and who were therefore at peace with themselves (the second relationship)
• joined hands with other people to work together (the third relationship)
• to clean up a mess in the world (the fourth relationship).

The Mifflin Street Block Party clean up shows what happens when God’s redemptive plan hits the street.

This image is the heart of what I believe it means for the church to respond to the environmental crisis.   If the environmental crisis is a result of our sin, and if God desires, as part of his redemptive plan, that the effects of that crisis be reversed and his creation be restored, this can only happen through the church.

Mobilizing the church goes to the very heart of what the church was created to be!

“Think globally; act locally” describes nothing so much as it describes the church of Jesus Christ being and doing what Jesus has created it to do.  The redemption, reconciliation and restoration that God is accomplishing in the world is being accomplished through the church.  Cleaning up a Mifflin Street should not be occasional, newsworthy add-ons to a church’s program.  They should be the church’s program – as closely tied to the church’s reason for being as performing baptisms or celebrating communion.

What was God  thinking when he decided that this frail, all-too-human fellowship of people should be at the center of God’s plan to bring his redemption not only to all people, but also to all of creation?

Reading the mind of God is presumptuous at best.  Granting that, it appears to me that God’s plan of reconciliation rests on redemption taking place in the same arena where the curse has reigned supreme – that is, in this physical creation.  Isaac Watts put the idea into one of our favorite Christmas carols:

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found…

(Isaac Watts, Joy to the World)

In God’s wisdom, he seems to have decided that the creatures that caused the curse in the first place – you and me, the human race – should be those charged with the job of reversing its effects.  It is as if he were saying to us, “You broke it. I’m going to let you fix it.”

Think about what that means.  Unable to earn our salvation or in any way make ourselves right or righteous before God, he has done more than forgive our sins and offer us a restored relationship with himself.  He is giving us an opportunity to help set right what we caused to go wrong.

So how do we get the mission of the church out to onto the environmental Mifflin Streets of the world? How can a group of people that might know how to conduct a prayer meeting but doesn’t know anything about water quality make a difference.  What, really, does the church bring to this crisis?  That is the subject of our next post.  Stay tuned.

[Note: This article is excerpted and revised from my book, Our Father’s World: Mobilizing the Church to Care for Creation, chapter 6: “Ambassadors of Redemption”.  Order the book here.]