Creation Care

“Hope is what you get when you suddenly realize that a different worldview is possible, a worldview in which the rich, the powerful, and the unscrupulous do not after all have the last word.”
― N.T. Wright

Updates from Ukraine

A Russian fighter plane has crashed into a residential building in the southern Russian city of Yeysk, near Ukraine killing 4 civilians. Footage on social media, which has been verified by BBC News, showed a large fireball erupting from what appeared to be a multi-storey building.

This past May, Climate Witness Project hosted a Sustainable Investments webinar featuring Kurt Holzhueter, an advisor with ClearView Investments. For those who are serious about mitigating climate change, a powerful advocacy tool is financial investments. Taking money OUT of fossil fuels and instead channeling those funds to companies with a commitment to sustainability is an important step. But how to go about making that change? 

Another summer of extreme heat, wildfires, drought, and flooding events around the world may have you and your church more concerned than ever about climate change. The CRCNA’s Climate Witness Project offers resources, events, and projects to help churches explore our role as people called by God to help heal a suffering earth. If your church is ready to go deeper, you might join Christians around the world this fall in observing the Season of Creation. 

Songs about the end of the world and stuff.  [Actually] we have a great conversation about ways churches in North America can think about their relationship with creation in a new way through the music offered in the Climate Vigil Album created with The Porters Gate.  

Climate change can feel heavy and dark. The Climate Vigil is a project to bring prayer and light to the topic. Global participants met during COP21 in Glasgow to sing and pray for creation.  Isaac Wardell and Peter Fargo are guests.

It’s summer in the U.S. and Canada. Besides the long days and fresh local food, summer is increasingly associated with “danger season.” As in years past, stories of wildfires, heatwaves, and deaths due to these and other extreme weather events around the world frequently make headlines. A growing percentage of us have experienced these events firsthand. And they are connected to a larger story of change that is difficult to face.

A friend of mine visited a low-income congregation in New Jersey several years ago. The pastor told him the congregation had huge energy bills every month equal to the pastor’s salary.  The building was old and not very energy-efficient. The building lost heat all the time.

Many of us are trying hard to reduce our household carbon footprint.  We’re changing the sources of our electricity, switching to solar power and electric heating, using public transit, reducing waste, recycling, composting, and more.  As we continue to make these changes in our lives, we are meaningfully reducing our emissions and living in increasing balance with God’s creation.  There is one lifestyle choice, however, that can undo all of our annual emissions reduction work in a matter of hours – and that is air travel.

 "God of the poor, Friend of the weak
Give us compassion we pray
Melt our cold hearts, Let tears fall like rain
Come, change our love, From a spark to a flame."

- A prayer in the words of Graham Kendrick

Single Use Plastics

Canada has announced a ban on the manufacture and import of named single use plastics to take effect next December.

Lord of all, even our inventiveness,

What happens to you when you die? No, this question isn’t about your soul. It’s much more literal. What happens to your actual body when you die? This is an often uncomfortable question, only broached upon necessity, for the consideration can be gruesome. Yet for Christians concerned about caring well for the environment, how we choose to have our physical body interred after death is an important decision.

Why should we care? The process of traditional burial is surprising in its toxicity for the environment. Consider the following:

In one of this Sunday’s lenten lectionary texts, the prophet Isaiah conveys a vision to exiled Israel: