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Scott Sabin is Director of  Plant With Purpose (formerly Floresta for those who are a bit out of date…)  This is one of our older organizations, having begun as a development organization in Latin America and now with projects and staff in Latin America, South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…]

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

by Lowell Bliss, guest contributor

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

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

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

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

The example mentioned in the Prayer Digest paragraphs below is of the Hindu and Muslim peoples who live among the tigers of the Indian and Bangladeshi Sunderbans Mangrove forests.  (You can access the entire article at www.edenvigil.organd even sign up for this free monthly e-letter guide to prayer.)  In considering just this one ecoregion, I learned three things I never knew before.

1. I newly learned of a goddess in the Hindu pantheon: Bon Bibi, the “goddess of the forest,” who defeats the demon disguised as a tiger.
2. I learned of a Muslim people group who apparently don’t think twice about participating in Hindu idolatry.   Why they do so is because “spiritual dynamics” invariably trump religious ones, something which traditional people group theory can have trouble computing.
3. That spiritual dynamic is fear, the result of living among the world’s most concentrated population of man-eaters (tigers possibly made more aggressive by the salinity of the tidal waters in their ecoregion.)  The people are afraid and so they pray to Bon Bibi for protection.

Just the little look I took at the Sunderbans was enough for God to put a longing in my heart to tell the people of the Sunderbans Mangrove forest that Jesus Christ is able to protect them from “the devil who prowls about like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (I Pet. 5:8).  It certainly has changed the way I pray for them, and all that’s the result of looking at them from an ecoregions perspective.

Here’s the article.  It will serve as an introduction to Christian missions seen through the lense of the World Wildlife Foundation’s Global 200, and to our plans for the Environmental Missions Prayer Digest in 2012:

Praying for the Peoples of the WWF Global 200

I’m scheduled for a phone call today or tomorrow with a publisher whose biggest sticking point on my book manuscript seems to be my environmental reflections on people group theory.  For a few decades now, the missions community has been profitably engaged in classifying the peoples of the world, with an emphasis on the “unreached,” “least-reached,” and “unengaged.”   For however much objective identification we might claim this work to be, there’s a whole lot of subjective conceptualizing in our classifications.  Exactly what cultural and linguistic factors make up this people group, as compared to that one?  What other factors might be important?

There’s actually a great deal at stake in people group theory.  Sometimes it can uncover a people who have been hidden from the Gospel.  We thought we were preaching to everyone, but we were only talking to the larger culture in which this people group had been subsumed and marginalized. People group classifications can help hone our message.  But, as in anything, a “hardening of the categories” can also be harmful.  In North India for example, our team spent a great deal of energy trying to reach a 19th Century vision of “the Brahmin caste,” rather than a 21st Century version of “the emergent middle class.”

Beginning in 2002, the World Wildlife Fund adopted an Ecoregion-Based Conservation (ERBC) strategy.  They defined an ecoregion as “a large area of land or water that contains a geograph-ically distinct assemblage of natural communities that:

(a) share a large majority of their species and ecological dynamics;

(b) share similar environmental conditions, and;

(c) interact ecologically in ways that are critical for their long-term persistence.

     With the help of the Nature Conservancy and other organizations, they reclassified this world of political boundaries and identified 825 terrestrial, 426 freshwater, and 229 coast and shelf marine ecoregions.  From this number, they further identified 238 places which they consider “the most biologically distinct. . . ecoregions of the planet.”  They call these places the Global 200, and according to the subtitle of their fabulously-beautiful photobook, they are “Places That Must Survive.”

Now, employing a definition of environment that understands it additionally as “that which surrounds those we love, those for whom Jesus died,” then people can be understood as one of those species that live in, depend on, and alter for better or worse that ecoregion.  For example, we could take a people group such as the Indian Bengali Hindu people and define them as we’ve traditionally done according to nationality/ethnicity/religious bloc.  But what if we reconceptualized that group of people as “the people of the Sunderbans Mangrove” (#139 of the WWF Global 200.)  What would that suggest for Christian love, evangelism, and church-planting strategy.  What would it suggest for prayer?

In 2012. the Environmental Missions Prayer Digest wants to find out.  Each month we’ll feature a different people group from an unlikely source: the WWF’s Global 200.   Thank you for joining us for another year of prayer.  (Although, if you bow your knee in the Sunderbans, you might sink in the mud.  If you close your eyes, you might get eaten by a tiger.)

Link: WWF Global 200

Link: book Global 200: Places That Must Survive, viewable at Amazon.com here (orderable through your local bookstore)

Lowell Bliss is the director of Eden Vigil.  Watch for his new podcast, The Agabus Project, to premier this month with an interview with A Rocha’s Peter Harris about the creation care legacy of John Stott.

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!]

While it is hard to find a mainstream newspaper or magazine that does not have one, two or more stories on environmental topics these days.  Out “in the world” the crisis enveloping God’s creation is apparent and people are concerned.  Scanning the pages of Christian periodicals and journals yields the opposite result:  Little or no coverage of anything remotely environmental.  Which is why it is encouraging to find creation care appearing in two important magazines and journals in the last couple of weeks.  Read on and click through – they are both worth your time.

My colleague in Kenya, Craig Sorley, has an important paper in the latest issue of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research.  The entire issue is devoted to the topic of Creation Care, including topics like Mission and the Care of Creation by Jonathan J. Bonk [HTML or PDF] and Historical Trends in Missions and Earth Care by Dana L. Robert [HTML or PDF].   [All these papers require free registration to read.]

Craig’s paper is titled Christ, Creation Stewardship, and Missions [HTML or PDF] and starts like this:

My Kenyan counterpart recently held a “God and Creation” workshop in a village called Mbau-ini, just a few kilometers from Rift Valley Academy and the Kijabe Medical Center, one of the largest mission complexes in the world. More than 150 missionaries live in the greater Kijabe area. The workshop that day focused on the acute problem of deforestation, and how Christians should be among the first to respond to such problems. Once carpeted by a lush cedar and African olive forest that fed streams out into the Rift Valley, many kilometers of the Kijabe escarpment now lie denuded of forest cover, and the streams have dried up. As my counterpart spoke with passion about the biblical foundations for creation stewardship and how we can honor Christ through caring for the environment, one member of the community, hearing this teaching for the first time, became obviously excited. With urgency he asked: “Why is it that for all these decades the missionaries right here have never told us that God was concerned about how we managed the forests? Why have they just watched this destruction taking place?”

Click through to read the rest of the piece.

At the opposite end of the academic spectrum, Christianity Today – too long silent on the topic of Creation Care, has been positively outdoing itself in the last few months.  Their latest issue features an important interview with evangelical statesman Eugene Peterson and A Rocha founder Peter Harris titled, appropriately The Joyful Environmentalists. conducted by Andy Crouch.  Peter is a colleague and friend with whom I have had frequent correspondence but have never met.  Peterson will be well known to many as a prolific author, most recently of The Message, a contemporary paraphrase of the Bible.

One sample question will give you a sense of what you’ll get reading the whole interview:

How do these themes connect with Americans, who mostly live in either suburban or urban environments?

Harris: That’s one distinction between a Christian take on creation and a secular romanticism about wilderness. Think about Psalm 104. In that psalm, which echoes Genesis, you don’t just have “the sea and everything in it”; you have ships on it, working. You don’t just have the land; you have people, working. There is a radical environmentalism that wishes people were not on the planet. That’s not the biblical view at all. A Rocha in the United Kingdom actually works in the most polluted, urban borough of the country, because creation isn’t absent just because people are there. The challenge is how to restore a right way of life, rather than escaping to some wilderness paradise. Fifty percent of the planet now lives in cities. That is where we live out our relationship with creation.

Other recent articles from Christianity Today:

Matthew Dickerson, Who Gets Left Behind? (a fascinating examination of the consequences of eschatological (end-times) points of view.)

courtesy Thomas Schneider

This is the message we have just sent from Care of Creation to our friends and partners around the world. It’s topic is appropriate to Our Father’s World friends and readers, I think. May you have a truly blessed and deeply meaningful Holy Weekend whereever you are!

“Easter People in a Good Friday world.”

This phrase grabbed the attention of a few people earlier this week – in part, I suppose, because it was heard on NPR. Host Michele Norris was interviewing writer Ann Lamott about Easter. Citing the tension she feels between the world as it should be and the world as it is, Lamott quoted another author, Barbara Johnson: “We are Easter people living in a Good Friday world.”

Of course, most of the people around us are actually Good Friday people living in a Good Friday world.

I had a taste what that’s like Thursday morning this week. The setting was perfect – a cafeteria looking out over Lake Mendota at the University of Wisconsin. The sun was shining for the first time in days, the water perfectly calm with a couple of racing sculls from the University practicing. It would have been a great time to talk about the hope of Easter. But the conversation was dismal – much more fitting for Good Friday, I’m afraid. These are folks who know the environmental situation well. One has been teaching environmental classes – ethics and theology, in fact – since I was a freshman in college. I’ve had many conversations with him over the years, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him quite this discouraged. He just doesn’t see any hope in the direction things are going today. The other partner in the conversation has read the writing on the wall as she understands it, and has a basement filled with canned food, stocking up for the crash that might be coming, that she thinks is just around the corner.

A bit pessimistic? Yes, but… Make no mistake – the world these folks are living in is real. The threats they were talking about are genuine. Fresh water, climate change, food price crises, peak oil or nuclear disasters – any one of these is sufficient to keep you up at night. As one of my friends said this morning, if you are caught in a food price riot in Egypt, or one of our farmer friends in Kenya suffering the effects of climate change on his tiny farm, for you the crash has already come.

So what does it mean to be an Easter person in this kind of world? Well, the difference is not in the world. We see the same suffering, the same violence, the same disasters. No, the difference is in us: We’ve tasted resurrection power in our lives. The message of the gospel of Jesus has brought us to relationship with God our creator. We were dead in our sins, now we are alive in Jesus and in ways we’ve never experienced before. Caught before in the loneliness of despair, we have now found ourselves members of a new fellowship. Life isn’t all good because of Easter, but it’s different now – we have hope within us, even when navigating a world of despair.

So how do we live? We live on Friday as if it were Easter already. That is what Easter means. Jesus’ resurrection is new life and power and hope breaking in to our present reality. And how exactly do we bring Easter back to Friday?

By living in hope.

‘Faith is confidence in what we hope for’ (Hebrews 11:1).

We do not deny the realities of the world we live in. The problems are real. And humanly speaking, pretty hopeless. But we bring to them the hope that comes from confidence that God is working in the world and in us to bring Easter realities to Good Friday problems.

By living in power. Not the power of the world that always corrupts, but the power of the resurrection, that paradoxically, only comes to those who are willing to die:

“I want to know Christ-yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11 and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.” (Philippians 3:10-11)

And by living in love. If there is one thing the Good Friday world is lacking, it is love. It should not be surprising that one of the last things Jesus said to his disciples was this:

9 “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. 10 If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. 11 I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.” (John 15:9-12)

Which reminds me of an amazing line from Wendell Berry:

I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.

Perhaps you think of Care of Creation as an environmental organization. In some sense, yes – we care about and promote restoration and healing of God’s creation and that earns the label ‘environmental’. But we’re about so much more than that. Our goal is that comprehensive, complete “wholeness” Berry speaks of that can only come through “reconciliation and atonement with God.” We’re Easter people – like you, perhaps – trying to bring Easter back into the middle of Good Friday, to do what we can to touch the lives of people and the soil under their feet with both the love of Jesus and the power of his resurrection.

This won’t be a surprise to those who paid attention to some of the serious weather events of 2010:  When Russia’s wildfires exploded, we heard that Russia would be banning wheat exports for the immediate future.  Then Pakistan lost an entire rice harvest and a good deal of wheat due to the worst flooding in that nation’s history – requiring Pakistan to import more than it normally would have done.  And now Australia’s floods are affecting not only coal but  wheat and other commodities.

We had a food-price crisis in 2008 – (see chart) – but that one appears to have been driven by a speculative and greedy market where investors who had no interest in food were grabbing futures contracts in the hope of exploiting the competition between eaters and drivers  in the rise of biofuels, particularly ethanol.  The Great Recession seemed to have provided some relief for eaters, and prices dropped back toward normal.

[Washington Post Graphic - click image for full size]

I’m not an expert – but this year’s food crisis seems to be different.  It is being driven by a disruption in supply, not by speculation in the market, and if this is the case, we need to be listening to people like Lester Brown who says “The new reality is that the world is only one poor harvest away from chaos.”

If you are an eater 0r a driver, you need to educate yourself on this story.  The Washington Post has a good story from last Saturday.  A couple of excerpts:

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations recently warned that in December its food price index surpassed its previous peak of early summer 2008, fed by particularly sharp increases in sugar, cooking oils and fats. Corn and soy prices were also moving up quickly, with corn hitting a 29-month high Friday.

In Bangladesh, rice prices jumped 8 percent in December. In India, the price of onions soared 80 percent in just one week.

“Now everyone is having fears of going back to the levels of 2007-08,” said Sudakshina Unnikrishnan, a Barclays Capital commodities analyst.

Rising food prices may have been an ingredient in the instability in Tunisia that drove that country’s president, Zine el-AbidineBen Ali, from office Thursday…

Lester Brown has a report out this week on the topic:

Whereas in years past, it’s been weather that has caused a spike in commodities prices, now it’s trends on both sides of the food supply/demand equation that are driving up prices. On the demand side, the culprits are population growth, rising affluence, and the use of grain to fuel cars. On the supply side: soil erosion, aquifer depletion, the loss of cropland to nonfarm uses, the diversion of irrigation water to cities, the plateauing of crop yields in agriculturally advanced countries, and—due to climate change —crop-withering heat waves and melting mountain glaciers and ice sheets. These climate-related trends seem destined to take a far greater toll in the future…

…The current surge in world grain and soybean prices, and in food prices more broadly, is not a temporary phenomenon. We can no longer expect that things will soon return to normal, because in a world with a rapidly changing climate system there is no norm to return to.

The unrest of these past few weeks is just the beginning. It is no longer conflict between heavily armed superpowers, but rather spreading food shortages and rising food prices—and the political turmoil this would lead to—that threatens our global future. Unless governments quickly redefine security and shift expenditures from military uses to investing in climate change mitigation, water efficiency, soil conservation, and population stabilization, the world will in all likelihood be facing a future with both more climate instability and food price volatility. If business as usual continues, food prices will only trend upward.

Brown’s latest book, World on the Edge, is available here.

So what should a Christian response be? We need to open our eyes:  Big things are happening in our world, but Jesus warned us, didn’t he?  We need to practice stewardship in our own lives so we will be able to help others.  There are good biblical examples for this with remarkable parallels to our own day (rich Christians in one part of the world helping those in another part).  You can help practically by supporting organizations like Care of Creation - our Farming God’s Way program has great potential to increase food supply by making God’s earth healthier.

And some of us may be in a position to do more,  If we have the ear of those in authoriy, or the authority ourselves to modify policies or to move corporations who can make a difference, then the example of Esther probably applies.  Who knows but that God has placed you in the position you are in today for ‘such a time as this?’

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.

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.

William Wordsworth’s most famous work is “Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Reflections of Early Childhood.” It is one of my favorite poems, exploring the lost pleasures of childhood that Wordsworth believes are hints of the immortality we left behind:

It is not now as it hath been of yore;—

Turn wheresoe’er I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

And again,

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Setting aside theological mysteries and controversies for another day, what has preoccupied me for that last month and a half has not been immortality, past or future, but increasing intimations of mortality:  My own,as I have experienced an unusual and thought provoking spell of genuine illness, something unusual for me; but also increasing intimations of mortality in the world in which we live, highlighted by the Gulf oil spill but buttressed by a host of other events.

First, my own encounter with mortality:  Around the first of July I started to experience unusual intestinal symptoms.  No, not what you are likely thinking but rather the opposite:  My entire system began to shut down – a phenomenon known in the medical world as ‘paralytic ileus’.  This continued for the better part of a month, and included several doctor’s visits, one trip to Urgent Care, one to the Emergency Room of our local university hospital, 24 hours in-hospital “observation” (whatever that means), and finally laparascopic surgery for an obstruction that turned out not to be there.  At the end of the experience, all I had was ‘Maybe you had a virus – and the surgery slowed your recovery.’

In the process, I lost 20 pounds in about two weeks.  I missed two conferences for which I had done much of the planning and in which I had significant leadership roles.   I would have told you 3 months ago that these events were among the most important things I would do all summer.  Instead I found myself just trying to get from one day to the next.  You will note that this is the first post in almost two months – now you know why.

The lesson I’ve taken away from this?  The reality of my own mortality.

Let me explain.

I had great plans this summer, important things to do.  People were depending on me. But all it took was a paralyzed intestine to blow the schedule to bits.  I have talents and abilities, thoughts and dreams, just as you do.  But it all depends on a body that works.  When the body doesn’t work, I don’t get much done.

There’s a bigger lesson here – the mortality of the human enterprise.

Consider the BP oil spill.   A company decides to drill for oil in deep water.  They’ve done it many times before, they know there is a lot of oil on this site.  They are convinced that chances of something going wrong are almost zero.  And if something were to go wrong, it’s almost impossible for them to imagine anything more than a minor problem that will be taken care of almost overnight.  But everything does go wrong.  The well explodes.  The “blowout preventer”, an expensive and intricate piece of equipment designed to be the final and fail-safe preventer-of-disaster of last resort turns out to be useless.  The result is more than 100 days of oil exploding into the Gulf of Mexico, billions of dollars lost, one of the world’s most profitable companies reduced to insolvency, hundreds of thousands of human lives disrupted, and unknown damage to some of the richest ocean waters in the world.

Of the millions of people living and working on the shores of the Gulf on the 19th of April, 2010, not one expected that their entire season – tourism, fishing, even oil drilling – was about to be canceled.  But it happened, and looking back from the vantage point of the present, it is hard to understand why we all didn’t see it coming.  Our economy, indeed our entire lives, rests on a foundation much more fragile than we want to think about.

And now bigger things are happening that should call us to the same caution about our biological foundations.  Hundreds of wild fires are blazing in Russia, amid a heatwave that the Russians claim is the worst in a thousand years. Torrential rains and mudslides in China that have wiped out a city and killed hundreds – maybe thousands.  And in Pakistan, a ‘super monsoon’ greater than any ever recorded before has affected more than 10 per cent of the population (15 million is the current number but that is certain to rise).  The flood has wiped out half of Pakistan’s agricultural land in the last two weeks (see the map).  Crop losses alone are in the billions of dollars after the first flood wave, and another is on its way as I write.   No one is yet able to calculate the cost of replacing roads, bridges, oil refineries and power plants.  One UN official guesses that this disaster is worse than the tsunami, the Kashmir earthquake of 2005 and the Haitian earthquake combined.

A friend was in the town of Gilgit, in the far north, when the floods hit.  Here’s his description:

All roads are blocked – to Hunza, to Ghizar & Chitral, to Kohistan and both Kaghan routes. The estimate is it will take 3-4 more weeks to re-open the [main highway]. So supplies are low – no diesel and increasingly less food. We are fine at the Serena but many people are suffering. Local floods and landslides have destroyed and damaged houses as well as taken lives, and the water channels people depend on for daily life as well as their crops have been heavily damaged.

In a phone conversation with another friend in the area I learned that in the same town banks are closing.  Why, are they out of cash?  No, they are running out of fuel to run their generators.

What is the long term outlook?  Here’s the first friend’s analysis:

The talk in Gilgit-Baltistan is about whether or not we are entering a phase of sustained environmental instability. The spectacular Attabad slide / dam from January followed by a summer unlike any seen for a long time raise questions about the stability and predictability of life in this region. Global warming is mentioned though some also mention a history of patterns like this, the previous one being almost a century ago. There is little doubt, however, that this level of natural activity, if sustained, will require significant human adaptation. For example, keeping any roads open to China and down country will become difficult. And now life here depends on those roads, unlike 50 years ago.

To summarize:  We modern humans have developed an increasingly complex society on the same fragile biological foundation we have always had to work with, without remembering how fragile that foundation really is.  ‘Six inches of topsoil…’  We have assaulted our foundation in a variety of ways, not least of which is, of course, climate change or global warming:

NEW YORK — Floods, fires, melting ice and feverish heat: From smoke-choked Moscow to water-soaked Iowa and the High Arctic, the planet seems to be having a midsummer breakdown. It’s not just a portent of things to come, scientists say, but a sign of troubling climate change already under way.

The weather-related cataclysms of July and August fit patterns predicted by climate scientists, the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization says – although those scientists always shy from tying individual disasters directly to global warming. [AP via Wash Post][Picture is smoke from the Russian fires from a NASA satellite - click for larger image]

What is the solution?  When talking about climate change, scientists and policy makers usually speak of two different but complementary approaches: Mitigation and Adaption – and these approaches work with a variety of human problems:

Mitigation means trying to prevent  a bad, difficult or unpleasant situation from happening in the first place.  Adaptation means learning to cope after that situation has already happened.
In terms of my intestinal difficulties, mitigation involved trying to find the source of the problem and using various techniques to resolve the issue, up to and including my unsuccessful surgery.  Adaptation meant changing what I ate until I found something (like beef broth) that would go down and stay down and still provide me with some nutrition.

Mitigation with regard to the oil spill might have involved extra safety devices as are already in use in many other parts of the world, more inspections or even a decision not to drill in some places even if we can because the cost of a possible accident is simply too great.  Adaptation is what we’ve been watching for the last 100 days – and that experience alone is a valuable lesson that adaptation is always more expensive and more difficult than mitigation.

In terms of the climate change driven phenomena we are seeing this summer, it’s already too late to mitigate.  While we should do all we can to avoid additional green-house gas driven climate change, these fires and floods have already happened.  What these events show is that sometimes it is not just difficult, but actually impossible to adapt.  There is no way to prepare for a flood like that now devastating Pakistan, and you cannot do anything to lessen the impact of the hundreds of fires in Russia.  Both of these are minor events compared to many other predicted effects of climate change, like  increases in sea level.

What does all this mean?  It means we – the human race – are already reaping the harvest of centuries of abusing God’s creation.  We need to prepare for a difficult time ahead.  And we need to repent.  Perhaps God will hear:

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 will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.  2 Chronicles 7:14

[See also How Do You Pray About an Oil Spill?]

Care of Creation and Eden Vigil are cohosting a Consultation on Environmental Missions in Manhattan KS July 12-16.  A small group of environmental and missions leaders will spend three days together hashing out issues that will help us to establish Environmental Missions as a new category of missions.  You can read the announcement of the event here – and you can contact Robynn Bliss, event registrar, here if you would like to join us.

Meanwhile, Lowell recently wrote the following piece for the Evangelicals for Social Action newsletter, answering the question, What do we mean by “Environmental Missionary”.  Enjoy!

What Is an Environmental Missionary?

Munnu-ji was my best Indian friend. He was my first landlord, renting me a small room off Assi Ghat before I was married. I’m not sure Munnu ever believed on Jesus. He was a man of peace, however, and assisted numerous Christian workers. He died when a mosquito, borne off the polluted waters of the Ganges River basin, bit him. Munnu-ji contracted cerebral malaria.

The basic idea was to combine the environment and missions in a way we don’t think anyone else is doing. On an organizational level, no mission organization in North America is openly both environmental and missional. It’s very similar to medical missions in its approach to the mission field. When you take out the word ‘medical’ and put in the ‘environmental,’ that’s what we are. We want to do practical things where we help people by sharing the Gospel, but we want to serve people and serve the church by helping to heal the land through various means.