Climate Change

From the very beginning of God’s walk with his people, the blessings they enjoyed because of their relationship with God were meant to overflow. “All peoples on earth will be blessed through you,” God promised Abraham.

Negotiations at the COP23 climate change conference have been slow, but some progress has been made. The ACT Alliance, along with leadership from the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), who together have combined constituencies of more than half a billion Christians worldwide, have been proactive throughout COP23 calling for action by governments on climate change.

“Sustainability” might be a modern term, but it’s an ancient value. Parents were reminding children to turn out the lights generations before Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth. Elders have long taught youth not to take more than is needed, to live in harmony with one’s surroundings, to protect the soil from wind and water erosion, and to protect creatures so they can continue to reproduce.

Welcome to our Speaking Up for a Faithful Budget series! Want to see other posts? Sign up here to receive them in your inbox. Next week we’ll be hearing about refugee resettlement.

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?

Lent might well be the most challenging season in the Christian calendar. Advent is about anticipation of things to come. Christmas and Easter are both celebrations of good news. But Lent? Lent is a season of sacrifice.

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 see other posts in the series and make sure you don't miss a post, visit this page.

I had escaped from the concrete jungle one August summer day to be connected with the land once again. Every summer, it is my tradition to harvest medicines for ceremonial and spiritual practices. Being Cree, two of those medicines are sage and sweetgrass. With every medicine I took from the land, I would place tobacco down & offer my prayers. With every prayer, I acknowledged Creator’s masterpiece all around me. With every acknowledgement, I was reminded that I am a mere strand in this web of life. There I was, in the thick of this web of life, in the midst of creation, on the prairies

I love to eat food, and the food I eat is intimately connected to the lives, the environments, and the well-being of people all around the world.