I flew into Dubai early yesterday morning from a two week stint in Kenya and Tanzania.  Coming from one of the least developed areas of the world – I spent a week without electricity and running water – into one of the most developed cities on earth and home to the world’s tallest building, I was reminded of this article which I wrote for The Other Journal three years ago after a similar trip.  Enjoy…

There are few air hops that will give you a greater contrast than the four-hour trip from Nairobi to Dubai.

Nairobi is the capital of one of the poorer nations in the world, the home of the infamous Kibera slum, and a textbook case of how population growth, rapid unplanned development, and massive environmental degradation result in poverty and human suffering. Flying out of Nairobi, you can see signs of distress in every direction just by looking out of the plane window.

Dubai is one of the wealthiest cities on earth. Flying into Dubai, evidence of prosperity is as obvious as the poverty of Nairobi. High-rise buildings grow out of desert sands, massive highways clog with traffic. The terminal itself is more of a shopping mall with jetways than an airport: a temple to consumerism. Every imaginable gadget, garment, and trinket is on offer at prices that may be as low as anywhere else in the world.

But there’s another way to look at these cities. Let’s rewind and put on a different set of glasses:

Read the rest of the article here.

If the theme interests you, pick up a copy of my latest book, When Heaven and Nature Sing at careofcreation.net or on Amazon.

This post comes to you from an airport lounge in Nairobi, Kenya, where I am waiting for my flight to Tanzania to visit the new Care of Creation project in Iringa.  Meanwhile, I am thinking of the many people, sights and sounds from the last week.  One of the most important events is actually one that happened on April 28, a week before I arrived, when an unaturally large rainfall event caused a portion of the mountain above the community where our project is located to slide down.  Such an event is a natural part of God’s creation – or is it?

The evidence of God’s grace and mercy in the aftermath of the April 28th landslide in Kijabe, Kenya, is clear.  The slide happened after midnight on a Saturday night, so the path the slide took down the main street of the town (which runs straight down the slope) hit no vehicles, no houses and  no people.  It did wipe out several hundred meters of the boundary fence of Rift Valley Academy, and could have done serious damage to a local high school and the famous Kijabe Christian Hospital but for a strong fence and row of trees at the bottom of the street – and because of the damming effect of a railway line above the town – but we’ll come back to that in a minute. Read more »

The following is the text of a newsletter just sent out to friends of Care of Creation Inc. (If you are not on our e-newsletter list, please join us!)
We have some exciting news to share with you!  The Lausanne Movement has appointed me as Senior Associate for Creation Care.  This appointment represents a new chapter in the history of Care of Creation as an organization, and an exciting opportunity for me personally.  It also represents a dramatic advance for the evangelical creation care movement.
Read more »

I have recently returned from a Creation Care conference in the country of Haiti – an event that provides an exciting glimpse into one possible strategy for ‘mobilizing the church to respond to the environmental crisis’ on a nation-by-nation basis.  Let me know what you think.

Background

At Care of Creation our strategy, our goal and our dream has been to “mobilize the church” to respond to environmental challenges.  More recently, we’ve grown bolder by saying that we wanted to “mobilize the worldwide church to respond to the global environmental crisis.”  That’s a statement that serves well as a branding tool, but as an actual goal?  Moving the entire global Christian community in any direction seems like a big stretch, even to us.

That is what makes my recent trip to the country of Haiti so interesting.  I don’t need to tell you that Haiti is a country where disasters seem to happen almost on a schedule.  Where the level of poverty displayed on city sidewalks can shock even seasoned travelers.  And where more than one author has used the word “hopeless” to describe one of the world’s worst environmental situations.

But Haiti also has a church.  The people of God are represented in this nation.  And it might be that they are actually starting to wake up and to take responsibility for their own country in a way that they have not done before.  It is dangerous to proclaim that a particular event is historical when it has only just occurred, particularly when that event is a conference.  Can a conference actually accomplish something?

Read more »

One of the highlights of my job is the opportunity to correspond with people from all over the world.  If it is true that the environmental crisis pays no attention to national boundaries, it is equally true that the Spirit of God is moving his people to respond to that crisis in every corner of the world.  Many of those involved in this kind of ministry are simply following their own instincts as they respond to what they see happening in their own regions.  Here’s a neat story from a friend and brother I haven’t met – Damitha – about how he and his family became involved with creation care as a means of ministry.  Enjoy – and if you like what you read, ‘like’ his work on Facebook (see the link at the end).

Sri Lanka is a country blessed with rich plant diversity, 4000 plant species and 800 are endemic to the country and long cultural heritage more than 2500 years combined with ancient agriculture and most of these plants were well utilized in building up healthy rural communities.

In Sri Lanka, God has blessed us with a wide variety of indigenous plant species that can be used for food, medicines, buildings, animals and birds. They are connected with ethical, cultural, spiritual and social activities recognized from earliest days of human history useful in solving global acute health problems.

Read more »

This year is starting off fast and exciting for Care of Creation.  I am just back from a week-long trip to our project site in Kijabe, Kenya along with Lee Hardman and Nelson Hard, two of our U.S. board members, and I’m excited about what God is doing through our efforts in that part of the world.  Let me share some of what we heard and saw during this visit. 

Farming God’s Way
Farming God’s Way (FGW), a conservation no-till agricultural program that is presented as part of an intensive Biblical-worldview training program, continues to generate a lot of interest among farmers and with the staff of other development organizations in East Africa.  The project site at Moffatt Bible College now features 8 test plots, four for FGW crops with the rest serving as controls.  The week before we arrived, a large group of farmers witnessed the harvesting of beans – the FGW plot produced 3.3 times as much as the control (that’s a 330% increase in yield!).  Read more »