The Green Church

by Tri Robinson

In all my years of ministry, I never saw this coming. Caring for the environment was a value I rediscovered through a series of conversations and hours spent seeking God about what my response as a Christian leader should be to growing environmental problems. My conviction grew that the church must be diligent to tend the garden God has given us. I brought this value to our leadership team and then challenged our church to care for creation merely because it was a biblical value. But I never expected what ensued.

In bringing the value of caring for the environment to our church, what I did expect was a backlash. I thought they might throw me out of the pulpit and accuse me of becoming too liberal. I expected other evangelical churches to cast a suspicious eye upon what we were doing. But I wouldn’t have guessed in a hundred years what resulted from our church embracing the value of caring for creation.

Since leading our church to care for the environment in our community, suddenly doors have opened to me I never dreamed would be opened. Conservation and environmental organizations have asked me to sit on their boards as well as speak at their conferences on the biblical perspective of environmental stewardship. By embracing a value shared by many unbelievers, I have been allowed to have intelligent and productive conversations with people outside of the church. I’ve made friends with people who always viewed me as an enemy simply because I was an evangelical Christian. And I’ve had honest conversations with people about why conservative Christians have so struggled to embrace this value.

How I arrived at this place full of opportunity to be a follower of Jesus outside the church might be considered even more unexpected.

IT’S ALL GOING TO BURN ANYWAY

I was an ecology major at the end of the 1960s during the height of the environmental movement, but eventually began a career as a school teacher. My wife Nancy and I spent the first 14 years of our marriage without electricity because we lived in an older home on our family ranch in southern California. We truly lived off the land; we grew some of our own food and always valued the natural balance of our surroundings. Because of that lifestyle, our two kids grew up knowing the worth of nature. But later in life when I became a Christian, somehow I disconnected from all of these values and affections. I never stopped loving nature, but it was set aside because environmental stewardship had no value in the church. The evangelical church in the 1970s was rife with a theology known as dispensationalism, which implied—and explicitly stated at times— that “Jesus is returning and the earth is going to burn up anyway, so go ahead and use it up.” During that time, Christians who had once cherished and protected the environment lost this ideal. It didn’t seem to have a place in the Kingdom of God.

Since 1989, I have led a church in Boise, Idaho, a place surrounded by God’s beautiful creation on every side. Outdoor recreation is a high value here. People hike, ski downhill and cross-country, mountain bike, fish, and hunt. A few years ago during a wedding reception at our church, I was cornered by a woman who asked me, “Are you the pastor of this church?” I confessed that I was and braced for whatever criticism her tone implied was coming. “This wedding reception should be a crime,” she stated matter-of-factly. “I’ve never seen so many items going to waste instead of going into recycling bins.” I was embarrassed by the stinging truth: Our church generated an unbelievable amount of trash and I had never given it a thought. As the leader of this church, I was responsible even for the trash. Because I had not led our church in this area, we had no church-wide recycling program.

God had already been at work in my heart about the issue of environmental stewardship, but this incident began to push me toward taking action. While the pressing question was, “How can I make caring for the environment a value in my church?” the more troubling question for me personally was, “How did this once strong value in my life all but disappear?” Since my environmental education had been outside the church, I decided to do some research in Scripture about this topic. And the Bible did have something to teach me.

GOD VALUES CREATION

As the Bible opens, the author of Genesis chronicles God’s magnificent creations—man, woman, plants, trees, animals, sun, moon, stars, land, sky. With the creation of Adam, the scene shifts to the new garden, where the fall of humanity eventually occurs and introduces sin into the world. Suddenly, the garden was defiled. But as we read ahead—all the way to the end in the last book in Scripture, Revelation—we see the way God brings us back to a restored garden. The Bible begins in a garden and concludes in a restored garden.¹ Shouldn’t this make us sit up and take note that there’s something important about a garden, something that tells us God values the relationship between His people and the rest of His creation?

Loving care of the earth is the biblical responsibility of God’s people. One of God’s first commands to mankind was to “tend His garden.”² He exhorts Adam and Eve to be caretakers of the gift of creation. And then, after the great flood, God made a covenant, not just with Noah, but between Himself, the earth and humanity. We refer to it as the Covenant of the Rainbow:

I have placed my rainbow in the clouds. It is the sign of my permanent promise to you and to all the earth. When I send clouds over the earth, the rainbow will be seen in the clouds, and I will remember my covenant with you and with everything that lives. Never again will there be a flood that will destroy all life.³

All of God’s creation is important to him, down to the last sparrow and blade of grass. So important that he made a permanent promise to it. But why? Paul tells us in Romans that all of humanity knows there is a God because God has revealed Himself, and His very nature, through creation.⁴ God directed this assurance, this undeniable proof, to people who are struggling with the most basic spiritual issue: The very existence of a loving Creator. If one of the ways God reveals Himself to people is through His creation, doesn’t it stand to reason that we should share in His high value of caring for the environment?

ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDSHIP DEFINED

In order to become good stewards of the environment, we need to define environmental stewardship. Environmental stewardship is the idea that we should care for, manage, and nurture the creation we have been given. In our desire to take a biblical perspective on environmental stewardship, four ideas guide our thinking and actions on this stewardship: resource and provision, accountability, blessings, and passing it down.

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Comments

Wes Widner

There is a great danger with Christians jumping on the popular environmental or green bandwagon. The danger is not that we will start taking care of the environment like we have for thousands of years as members of the environment, but that we will start to see men as a virus or scourge on the environment. The danger is that we will stop focusing on ways to save our fellow human beings from the plight of poverty and real injustice as opposed to the imagined social injustices of environmentalism instead of advocating and teaching time-tested principles of wisdom that have helped lift whole nations out of poverty and greatly improve the lives of millions.

As Michael Creighton rightly pointed out, environmentalism is a religion, and God help us if we think that we can mix foreign contaminants with Christianity with no ill effects.

waseem yousaf

Dear Brother,

Greetings

I am Waseem Yousaf from Pakistan. I have studied your web site, and

have found it to be one of many wonderful sites offered on the

internet which gets to the Truth of the Word of God. As is the case

with others whom I have contacted, you have created material which is

full of knowledge concerning development of religious faith. Living in

Pakistan, weChristians face many obstacles in getting access to God's Word. Most

people in Pakistan speak Urdu, and are not capable of understanding the

English language. Because of limited access in our native tongue, my

people have a true hunger for fresh Christian Perspectives.

Proficient in both English and my native languages, I would like to

offer my services as a translator to you. Presenting your material in

both Urdu and Punjabi would be a true blessing to the Pakistani and

Indian people. For a nominal fee, I will enable you to bring the message

of Salvation to a most deserving people.

Blessing you in advance for your consideration,

In Him,

Waseem Yousaf

Email: wygodblessyou2@gmail.com

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ALSO IN CHURCH

The Green Church

IT’S ALL GOING TO BURN ANYWAY

GOD VALUES CREATION

ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDSHIP DEFINED

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