Results tagged “Christians Environment”

Joshua told the people, "Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the LORD will do amazing things among you."

-- Joshua 3:5

Gotta tell ya, I read tons of stuff about Christians looking for transformational change in our attitudes toward Creation. Most seem to be attacking these problems in their own, albeit collective, strength.

The simple truth in this passage from Joshua is this: The walls don't come down in the world - political and regulatory issues, public attitudes, pollution problems, ending deforestation - until the walls between each of us and our Savior come down. Once that happens God will do amazing things among us almost immediately.

Really want to change the world, brother? Start by hitting your knees.

This article is featured this week at SustainLane.com's Green Faith page.

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But someone may say, "You have faith, and I have actions." Show me your faith without any actions, and I will show you my faith by my actions.

James 2:18, NIV

CAN I ASK A small favor of you all to let me visit with the family for a sec? I need to share something that's been on my heart for a while. You see, there's an odd thing going on in Christian creation care circles.

There's this bit at a Baptist seminary's website posted last week. Like Randy would say, "Yo dog, check it out":

A temptation to Southern Baptists in the next generation will be to speak to issues because of how well received they are in the culture around them. The issue of the care of the environment is one such issue. Should the church speak to environmental stewardship: yes. Can such a discussion lead to discussion about evangelism and the Gospel: no.

Did "Can such.." mean should it? Or did it mean is it possible for creation care and evangelism to co-exist? Either way I thought the answer should be a resounding YES! Well, I emailed and got this non-answer back. LOL! OK, I get it. Must be an anti-green dominionist bunch. Maybe progressive Christians would be more connected to evangelical ecology. I turned back to my notes from an interfaith environmental conference I attended in January. At the time I waxed at length about not seeing Jesus anywhere. The keynote speaker, a Christian bishop and leader in creation care circles, wrote:

It is an interfaith ministry and I try not to focus on Christian doctrine with an interfaith audience.

I could find you more examples. What I'm seeing all over the place, my brothers and sisters, is the notion that it's great to be a green Christian. In fact, it's a moral necessity. But at the same time it's apparently bad to be up front about using ecology as a way to offer other greens the opportunity to become a Christian. I'm not talking about doctrine here. I'm talking about wanting what He wants. Wanting what the whole earth wants.

In short, we are running from green evangelism. And it ain't good.

Evangelism. The word conjurs up images of Jack Chick tracts in Halloween candy bags or folks in shiny suits with equally shiny hair waving huge King James (is there any other?) at passing cars. Shudder...

We gravitate to that passage in James above because it describes faith at work. Yeh! That really describes Christian ecology well. But we can't run away from is James' declaration that people should plainly see our Christian testimony at work. Or better, see Christ working through us. And let's be real here - the only reason we have a testimony at all is so that Christ can use us to draw all men unto Him. If we're to believe Paul in his letter to the Roman people, creation is crying out for as many Christians as it can get.

If that's the case, why aren't we after that too?

I just love hearing Tri Robinson talk about when they first put their church logo on recycled shopping bags. The guy totally lights up when he says people came to Vineyard Boise because they couldn't believe a church would do something like that and want to check it out. And then you see him soften up when he recounts person after person being baptised because they find Christ's love a church family that loves people and God's planet. Or my favorite blogger-sharpens-blogger brother Ed Brown. If you haven't picked it up, buy and read his book on Christian ecology as a mission field. These guys get that a conversation about God's green earth should naturally gravitate to what it means to be part of His family. 

WELL, LET ME personalize this and then I'll get off my soapbox.

A decade ago I was the environmental director at a naval air station up in northern Japan. Every Earth Day weekend we led a large group of folks from the base on a clean-up of Lake Towada Park. We were usually joined by a hundred or so people from the surrounding area.

It wasn't uncommon for locals to track me down afterwards to talk about why a bunch of Americans were picking up trash at a Japanese park. Atsiko-san was one of those. She said she was a devout Buddhist. She said Buddha would like what I was doing.

I said I was a Christian. I asked if we could talk.

As we sat under that pink canopy of Japanese cherry trees, I told her Buddha's teaching didn't explain why we should take care of creation. Buddha told us to attain enlightenment and be one with nature, but that there's no way sinful people can do that perfectly the way God intends. Just looking around, I said, it's obvious that people are natural polluters. If we weren't, we wouldn't be there picking up trash.

I shared with her Genesis 2, how the earth and everything in it was created by God to be perfect, and how people were created in His holy image. I told her the earth was cursed by mankind's sin in Genesis 3. I told her Jesus came to die for the sins of the world, and when He did that, he also broke the curse on the earth. I told her what Paul said in Romans 8, that all creation groans for the salvation of mankind, because only a new heart could understand God's heart and how to care for what He made. And I told her the only way she could be free of that curse herself and truly desire God's heart for creation was to ask Jesus to be her Savior.

She sat quietly for a moment. She said she'd never heard a Christian say something like that before. She sat quietly again. Then she asked me how she could become a Christian. We prayed together and she accepted Christ.

My friends, it's reasonable to be concerned with interfaith harmony, and to be cautious in approaching the green cause de celebre. But please - be yet more passionately consumed by the fact that so many of those around us recycling their trash and cutting their CO2 are on their way to hell. We must not be ashamed of the Gospel at the exact moment when our very act of caring for creation affords us the opportunity to share Christ with people who would never darken the door of a church.

Every act of healing Christ did met both the physical and the spiritual needs. Shouldn't it be clear to everyone around us that we're after the same things?

Grace and peace,

Don

WSJ.com this evening has quite a story. Check out the effect the Catholic Church is having in the Philippines on mining specifically, but ecology in general.

The Church plays a prominent role in the Philippines. The Spanish conquistadors enlisted friars to convert many local inhabitants to Catholicism after arriving in the sixteenth century. They used religion to govern this unwieldy archipelago and unite it into a single nation.

The Church's political role has resurfaced throughout the Philippines' history. In 1986, Church leaders urged Filipinos to take to the streets of Manila to support a military coup against dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

In recent years, Church officials have stirred protests against other mining projects, including the Tamapakan site in the southern Philippines led by Xstrata Copper, a division of Xstrata PLC, and Australian firm OceanaGold Corp.'s planned gold and copper mine in Nueva Vizcaya, north of Manila. Both companies say their operations follow environmental safeguards.

When the Church began campaigning against mining in the 1980s, more than 50 mines operated in the Philippines, contributing a fifth of the country's exports. The number of mines declined to 12 in 2003 as opposition increased. 

Read the whole thing.

The most striking thing is this: The reason the Philippine Catholic Church has been so effective in conserving that nation's ecology is the great influence it continues to have in the public square.

Evangelicals of late have been "secularizing" themselves by aligning with scientists, politicians and others. Certainly we've been moving away from our Christian roots as a nation. Most of the churches actively involved in ecology in the US are dying progressive denominations.

What bodes well for the Philippines must be a wake up call for the U.S.

James Lewis:

I’m not a climatologist. Like most scientists I rarely judge what others do in their fields. And yet it’s been flamingly obvious for years now that the hypothesis of human-caused global warming violates all the basic rules and safeguards that protect the integrity of normal, healthy science. That’s why AGW (anthropogenic global warming) looks like a massive fraud, the biggest fraud ever in the history of science.

If that’s true, anybody who cares about science should be outraged. Even if you don’t care about that ask yourself if you want your next medical exam to be honest. Or the next time you drive across a traffic bridge, do you want the engineering tests to be falsified? If scientific corruption becomes endemic, we risk losing one of the great jewels of our culture.

So here are some fundamental violations of scientific integrity that any thoughtful person should recognize. I’m not going to touch on climatology — the case against the warming hypothesis has already been made very well by experts. I just want to talk scientific common sense.

Threatening the skeptics. [snip]

That is Stalinism; it is never, ever done in real science. Stalin shot real scientists and promoted scientific frauds who helped to kill Soviet food production. Right there we know we’re looking at political corruption and not real science. 

Skepticism is GOOD in science. Being humble and admitting we don't have all the answers and can't predict the future with complete certainty just four decades away and still have a lot to learn is a GOOD thing.

Lots of people who do Faith for a living don't get that.

"Behold the fowls of the air" - their main aim is to obey the principle of life that is in them and God looks after them. Jesus says that if you are rightly related to Him and obey His Spirit that is in you, God will look after your 'feathers.'

-- Oswald Chambers

[Photo source: AmO Images] 

23 The whole land will be a burning waste of salt and sulfur—nothing planted, nothing sprouting, no vegetation growing on it. It will be like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which the LORD overthrew in fierce anger. 24 All the nations will ask: "Why has the LORD done this to this land? Why this fierce, burning anger?"

 25 And the answer will be: "It is because this people abandoned the covenant of the LORD, the God of their fathers, the covenant he made with them when he brought them out of Egypt.

Non-Christian religions are so little understood in the Western world that it is not commonly realized that in stark contrast to Christianity many religions teach that everything physical is an illusion, and others claim that everything physical is evil. And, of course, atheists see nature as the product of mindless chance. Why go to pains to preserve an accident or an illusion or something evil? And godless philosophy teaches that advance comes through survival of the fittest (ie the extinction of the less fit). If for millions of years so much good has come from mere chance and from the strong displacing the weak, why suddenly change the rules?

Environmental protection makes so much sense that many non-Christians leap on board without even noticing that it clashes with their basic beliefs. Christianity, however, has these beliefs at its heart. Followers of Jesus reject greed and the ‘might is right’ mentality. They stress the protection of the weaker and the defenseless, and they exalt the physical realm, insisting that it is good and that nature is as much a work of God as our own souls. The Bible opens with God giving humanity the responsibility to look after nature. (Genesis 2:15) And it indicates that nature is so important that the final result of the death Jesus suffered will not only be the salvation of every person who will accept it, but the restoration of nature. (Romans 8:19-23)

-- Anonymous Drunk Driver