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Calling all pastors! Have you ever talked about creation care or climate change from the pulpit? We encourage you to participate in the Creation Care Preaching Challenge. Keep reading to learn more about the challenge, discover creation care resources, and learn how you can incorporate creation care and climate change into your preaching.

So where does creation care appear in the Bible?

I believe that God has a plan for everyone, but sometimes that fact alone doesn’t feel very comforting. I came across the Youth Ambassador of Reconciliation Program when I was struggling with God and his plans for me. I had just graduated from university and wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my degree, or if I wanted to work in my degree’s field at all. I had decided to just take a year off to “figure it out” when I heard about this opportunity to go live among the First Nations in Kitchenuhmayoosib Inninuwag (KI), a remote reserve in northern Ontario.

Welcome to our Sacred Covenants series! You can find other posts in the series here. 

What does the Bible say about climate change? The short and obvious answer is ‘nothing’ – in the way that it says nothing about a number of other 21st century issues.

The longer, and more important, response is that it says a great deal about the earth, about humans and society. This deeply biblical message is one that must infuse our thinking as we search for answers that are faithful to the challenge of humans impacting the climate of our planet.

There are at least two important biblical concepts that speak emphatically to the subject of climate change:

This month on Do Justice we are working to unlearn the Doctrine of Discovery together through our series "In 1492, Indigenous peoples discovered Columbus". Welcome to the series! To make sure you don't miss a post, sign up here.

Christians Against Poverty (CAP) is a debt counselling charity working through Debt Centres based in local churches. Various Christian Reformed churches in Hamilton, Ontario have started CAP debt centres as ministries of their churches, so we sent them some questions to find out why and what they had learned. Here are debt coach Jan Disselkoen's (First Hamilton CRC) responses. Could this be a way for your congregation to "do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God" in your community? 

The Youth Ambassador of Reconciliation Program has officially begun! Two CRC members (Israel Cooper and Thea deGroot) and two CRC staff (Bernadette Arthur and Shannon Perez) have recently left for a week-long stay in Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (KI) First Nation, a fly-in community approximately 600 kilometres north of Thunder Bay.

In March, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced its plan to ship 500 metric tons of surplus U.S. peanuts to Haiti. The surplus stems from a 2014 Farm Bill that incentivizes an increase in peanut and other crop production. The Department planned to ship the peanuts to malnourished school children in Haiti.

Sounds like a good plan right? In reality, it’s not.

Often the toughest conversations offer the most important learning. Sometimes the conversations we work hardest to avoid, we most need to enter. Tough conversations can be hard to navigate and risky. So how do we “go there” in a healthy way?

Below are some tips for entering and staying with tough dialogue, drawn from 20 years of work in Dialogue Education. Tough dialogue ought not be feared, but can bear gifts to those who dare the journey. Which of these tips best offers a way for you to stay longer in tough dialogue?

A number of years ago, a group of us asked our Indigenous elders about their often demonstrated dedication and faithfulness, “How did you do this? How do you do this?” We struggled to get people to attend meetings and even worship, much less to get involved in leadership. For our own work as leaders, we were overwhelmed by the alternating emotion of our meetings, veering from intense mediocrity and boredom to frustrated anger and conflict.