An Unpopular Topic for Many Evangelicals

As a fifth-generation Oregonian, I grew up in a context where people were into creation care before creation care was cool—nones and Christians alike, no matter what kind of Christian we were. When our family relocated to the Washington, D.C. metroplex in my fifth-grade year, we started attending a United Methodist Church. And that congregation talked about creation care as part of Christian faith. Rooted in Genesis.  

At age thirteen, I became a Bible-church attendee in our northern-Virginia suburb. And although we focused more on “it’s all going to burn” than on stewardship of the earth in the meantime, we still never ascribed to even a passive allowance of trashing of the earth. We saw in Genesis a call to good stewardship of natural resources.

When I was fourteen, my Dad, a champion canoer in the over-fifty category, took me to canoe lessons at Thompson’s Boat Dock on the Potomac River next door to the Watergate Hotel. And that river was a filthy, rotten, stinking cesspool. I dreaded capsizing, more out of fear of the chemicals I’d stew in than of drowning.

Fortunately, lots of people on both sides of the aisle (I’m speaking politically here, not church) seemed to think cleaning it up was a good idea. Congress passed The Clean Water Act. Wastewater treatment happened. We got phosphate-detergent bans. Catch-and-release programs allowed fish to thrive again. And in the 1970s and 80s, right before my eyes that river healed.

This past spring, my husband and I took a walk on Roosevelt Island across from the Kennedy Center, and I marveled once again at how humans had taken responsibility for the damage done and worked to fix it—with amazing results.

Our calling

I think of that progress when I consider how our creation is groaning now. We still have the call to care in Genesis. And we have great resources by Sandra Richter and Douglas Moo. Yet a former Christian bookstore owner told me that a sure way to lose money in his shop was to stock books on Christianity and creation care. He always ended up returning them to the publisher because no one bought them.

While many blame dispensational theology, here in (sometimes crazy partisan) Texas, the divide seems to be more along the lines of party politics than theology. Want to get called “woke” with a derogatory tone? Mention a human cause behind the oceans warming.

Yet care for the environment should be deeply embedded in our belief system. Stewardship of the planet and its creatures is part of humanity’s God-given call. We who eagerly await Christ’s imminent return followed by, as Milton put it, “paradise regained” are charged in the here-and-now with what happens to the place God called “good.” Although our future hope includes a new heaven and a new earth, God never absolved us of responsibility to manage this one well. Perhaps in the past a fringe few have taken “subdue the earth” (Gen. 1:28) as license to engage in violent conquest. But most theologians see God “fleshing out” His intentions for what “subdue” should look like in the chapter that follows His directive: “The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it” (2:15). Distinguished professor of Old Testament, Dr. Eugene Merrill, once told me, “We, by our sin, brought creation into disarray, and we can’t restore it. But we do bear some responsibility.” We will also never solve world hunger. But we nearly cut it in half. So it’s worth trying!

As the landlord who holds the deed, God gave humans responsibility for caring for what He made, but it’s still His. David wrote, “The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it” (Ps. 24:1). Land. Water. Animals. Fish. Birds. Reptiles. Everything. As God said through the psalmist, “For every animal of the forest is mine, and the cattle on a thousand hills” (Ps. 50:10).

In the New Testament we learn of Christ’s involvement in creating the world. And we also find a reason for His doing so: “all things were created by him and for him” (Col. 1:16). The world is His workmanship and His possession, and it exists for His pleasure. Paul tells his readers in Romans that God reveals through nature His invisible attributes—“his eternal power and divine nature” (Rom. 1:20). Certainly, a clear, starry night or a fresh mountain stream or a restored river running through a city tells a more accurate story about that nature than a polluted sky and poisonous waters. Romans 1 suggests as much. And when we sing “How Great Thou Art,” we don’t think of mercury-filled fish, exhaust fumes, or smoke belching from factories. These are evidences of the Fall, not original glory. And we wrestle against—we don’t embrace—the effects of the Fall.

Yet our practices fail to line up with our theology. At the first mention of environmental issues, many Christians become entangled in debate about the causes and cures of climate change and their political ramifications. Yet we must see our politics through our grid of Scripture, and not the other way around. And our biblical environmentalism must be much broader than climate change. Think of endangered species, pollutants in the water, dirty air that makes our kids wheeze, poverty and its effect on environmental choices, contaminated grain—the consequences of ignorance and greed. If we belittle environmental concerns, relegating them to the province of political propaganda, we shirk our God-given responsibility.  

“People used to say, ‘The Great Lakes are history,’” recalls my colleague, Dr. Dorian Coover-Cox, a professor of Old Testament Studies. She grew up near Lake Ontario and Lake Erie when these lakes were dying. “Yet massive dumping was stopped,” she said, “and the lakes are much cleaner today. Decisions such as that were made without reference to global warming or cooling.” Having water to drink and swim in are good, obtainable goals, she stated. And such decisions fall right in line with our God-given responsibility.

Shift from consumption

Behind much of the damage done to the environment is a consumer-driven mentality of entitlement. Becoming better stewards requires more than recycling—as essential as that is. We must shift from having a consumer mind-set to a “manager” mentality.

One of my former students who ministers to graduate students at Harvard told me such a shift began for her with a change in her thinking about wealth. She and eight others met for twelve weeks to consider what the Bible says about money. She explained, “We learned four biblical principles—wealth is a blessing; it must be justly distributed; it is a potential idol; and it’s for sharing with the poor.” As a result of their contemplations, each group member worked toward practical simplicity “by remembering the poor and covenanting not to spend money on something we value but could honestly do without.” These included refraining from eating out, highlighting hair, and purchasing new music/iTunes, as well as choosing to read books they already owned or borrowing from the library instead of buying more, more, more. Their goal: to share the resources they saved.

“We also evaluated the humanness of our current purchases,” she explained. That meant investigating free-trade fruits and vegetables as well as the companies in which their mutual funds invested. “In our capstone meeting the last week,” she said, “nine of us from three graduate schools gave $4,000 to organizations we researched and selected together.”

Another of my former students, a pastor in Santa Barbara, made a similar decision along with his wife. As a New Year’s resolution, they committed to buying nothing new for a year—with the exceptions of gifts and consumables such as food and toothpaste. Why? To participate more intentionally in their community by sharing. When his wife’s watch broke, she discovered it would cost more to fix it than to replace it. But when two women in her small group learned about her loss, they both gave her the extra watches they weren’t using.

The link between consuming less and caring for the environment becomes clearer when one considers what the makers of Dixie products identified as the top levels of the “Environmental Hierarchy”:

Reduce the amount of materials and energy used

Reuse products—design them for multiple vs. single use

Recycle materials into the same or different products

Rather than electing green practices at the “recycle” level, the people mentioned above have cut back at the more fundamental “reduce” level.

Still, we must consume to some degree. The question of how best to do so requires wisdom from above. “Poverty can prohibit some people from participating in greener living,” observed my friend Sharifa Stevens. “In some parts of Africa I have visited, conservationists are more concerned with the lives of animals in the savannah than they are with the livelihood of the folks who hunt those animals for survival. And in the Bronx where I grew up, my mom would have a choice: make a larger carbon footprint to find fresh vegetables and fruits in Manhattan or settle for neighborhood markets. Supermarkets in my part of town sold a lot more processed foods and almost no fresh fruit and vegetables.” So thinking biblically on the subject comes with no easy fixes, but rather includes listening, exploring, and approaching solutions with humility.

Creation care as ministry

Although some Christian leaders have warned that environmentalism distracts the church from preaching the gospel, such thinking suggests an either/or mentality. Obedience to our call to stewardship is not only the right thing to do; it gives Christ-followers more credibility when we do speak. Consider the Wiccan friend of my former student who wept when a Christian came to one of her pro-earth events and read Psalm 8. She had no idea the Bible had anything good to say about the creation she loves so much.

I read of residents in a rural area near Buffalo, New York, who received free home infrared photography services from volunteers at a nearby church. Specially trained members took color photos using technology that detects energy loss and used the information to help homeowners save energy—and money. Church volunteers also offered home-improvement meetings where they taught about residential conservation and do-it-yourself weatherization techniques. Having established credibility through a shared value, members had ample opportunities to share about their love of the Creator.

Last summer, as I led a group of eighteen students for three weeks in Italy, we stayed in a monastery in Rome that had air conditioning. Yet the rooms felt uncomfortably warm—uncomfortable but not unbearable—as temperatures hit the low nineties. I asked the sister in charge if we could turn down the thermostat a bit. In her most compassionate voice she spoke barely above a whisper: “The Holy Father has asked us to show care for our planet, so we are setting the thermostat in the eighties.” Ouch.

So, what can we do? We can begin by correcting bad theology and seeing creation care as a reasonable act of worship. Doing so includes acknowledging our failures and demonstrating the depth of our repentance by embracing the truth—with all its ramifications—that God has called humanity to have dominion over the earth. We can take steps to keep ourselves informed—follow the links above for some good video content. We can look for ways to consume less—from  food to gasoline to clothing and electricity. We can recycle. We can consume less red meat. And we can share what we have with one another. For starters. We truly can work together to subdue God’s groaning earth, caring for it as best we can, managing what isn’t ours until the One who is coming soon makes all things new.

Photo: Australia’s Blue Mountains, 2015, S Glahn