A Greener Church

What role dose the church play in caring for the earth? Should the church care about global warming?

For all of my life I have loved the outdoors. I have loved hiking, backpacking, cycling, fly fishing, and just spending time outside. I have enjoyed the outdoors so much that it impacted my selection of a major, Environmental Studies, and Minor, Outdoor Recreation, in college. It even impacted my first steps into ministry. I spent two summers in college working as a backpacking guide at Christian camp in southern Colorado. For me God's creation has played an important role in my life of faith. But I have always struggled with how I could connect faith and environmental preservation...

While serving a church as their youth director, members of the church, being moved by Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth began an environmental ministry team. Though I was never sure what their main goal was, I did see that they were working diligently towards something.

Upon entering Seminary this fall, I enrolled into an Ecology class. This class, I had hoped, would among many things re-ignite my passion for the care of the environment, as well as help me connect what I knew about the science and study of the environment, and the language of faith. Though I am still struggling with finding the language of faith, I have been convicted that we as humans play a special role in all of creation. We have the ability to use, abuse, and destroy what God created, with the mentality that in the end we will be boarding a life boat in the sky piloted by Jesus and off we will go to Heaven, leaving the earth and all the problems we have created behind. But I have come to find that this notion is not biblically accurate. The earth plays a special role in the end of time, according to John's Revelation. There is no mention of humanity leaving the earth behind, but that the earth will be renewed and heaven and earth will be one. We even pray that life on earth will be as like life in heaven, "thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

So I do feel strongly that the church, and Christians, should be working to protect the environment. We are called to be stewards of what God has given us, and the earth is included in what God has given us.

As part of this I am taking about Ecology, I am working on a project about what churches can do to be more environmentally friendly. As I do more thinking and researching I will be posting things that churches can do.

Here is the first thing churches can do, and I am sure many already do. This is nothing new I think I learned about this when I was in elementary school... RECYCLE!!!! Recycling does so much to lessen the amount of garbage going into land fills. It also helps us to not have to keep taking from the earth the resources we need. Also buy recycled goods, yes they may cost more in the financial since, but they are so much better on this earth we have been given!