AN ENVIRONMENTAL CHURCH

As Christians, we believe that this is God’s world and we have been placed in the world to care for it. At least in the abstract we would accept that “The Earth is the Lords and everything in it . . .”

There is lots of talk about the environment, climate warming, and a debate about our responsibility with respect to the environment. Where is the church in this conversation?

A FAITH CONVERSATION

Picture your church deciding to involve the whole congregation in a conversation about the connection between our faith and the environment. Let me suggest a framework for how that could be possible, regardless of the size of the church.

First, we need to form a committee. (After all, we are a church, so we need a committee.) This committee needs to be charged by the governing body to enable the members to discuss our faith commitment to our environment.

Second, the committee needs to identify four to five basic pillars of the faith concerning the environment. Along with each pillar of faith, they need to formulate a basic question that invites a response for how we live out our faith. As examples:

INVOLVEMENT THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA

Psalm 24:1 might be the first pillar. The question might be, “How does this truth affect how we relate to the world in which we live?”
Stewardship. “If stewardship is our responsibility to manage responsibly our blessings, how can we be good stewards to the world?”
Praise God. “What are ways that we can praise God through how we treat our natural environment?”
“If Genesis 1:28 suggests we are given dominion over the fish, birds, and animals, what are our responsibilities with respect to these living things?”
The committee can think of several more truths of our faith that bear upon how we live in this world.

Now comes the fun part. Through announcements in worship, articles in the church newsletter, web page, and emails, you will invite the members of the congregation to participate in a congregational-wide conversation. In a very large church, you could do this through a representative sample—every tenth person or family for example. However, the larger the sample the better.

Explain that on behalf of the governing body you are encouraging them to participate in a congregational-wide conversation concerning how faith informs us about our care of the environment.

For the next several weeks, your committee will send to the membership a faith statement and a question via email with respect to this issue. When they receive the email, they are asked to respond within three days. Their response should be BRIEF—no more than two or three sentences.

The committee will seek to summarize the answers they have received in a brief paragraph and send it back to the congregation. When the members read the summary, they are asked to identify one action they will act on and one action they think the church should take as an expression of this faith statement. This collection of responses will be shared without names attached to the entire congregation.

Once this is completed a second issue and question will be sent and the process will continue. The intention is to share a summary of the congregation’s understanding as it develops. Each time the committee will attempt to summarize the responses and share the summary with the congregation as a whole.

A CELEBRATION OF COMMUNITY FAITH

Once all the chosen questions have been posed and summarized for the congregation, the pastor and committee will seek to express in a confession and/or litany an expression of the congregation’s environmental faith. The congregation will then be invited to a banquet in which the faith confession will be shared, commented on. While emendations can be made to the composed document, the community needs to be aware that this is the result of the entire community’s conversation.

Recognizing that in addition to the confession, the members have given expression to their personal commitment and the suggestions for the community action as a church, a liturgical act, making use of the confession, can be shared inviting a renewed commitment to act on this faith expression.

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS

While this process needs to be adapted to the individual congregation, the basic framework provides a place to start.

An enrichment of this process would be to consult with several congregations and have them participate at the same time. Each congregation can enjoy seeing how the several congregations respond. They might even have some joint events and develop some shared ministry that affects God’s world.