Engaging with the topic of Creation Care in church
Written by Christina Edwards-Teope
In 2019, our church, Massey Community Church in West Auckland, ran a four week series entitled ‘Creation Care’. For the first time in my long experience of church, I encountered in-depth teaching on the biblical mandate we have as followers of Jesus to care for creation – the earth as well as its people.
Sunday morning sermons considered biblical stewardship and unpacked its implications in terms of sustainability and fair trade. Four documentary evenings were also run. The nights included the feature length films 2040 (depicting a hopeful future which has adopted current eco-friendly innovations) and The True Cost (exploring the human and environmental costs of the fast fashion industry). We also viewed clips from A Plastic Ocean, videos from Wheaton’s The Seven Minute Seminary, the Zero Waste movement, and also videos depicting local initiatives at the Raglan Recycling Centre. Over the four weeks, the Sunday kids’ programmes mirrored the adult learning - with practical activities such as the consumption of Fair Trade bananas one Sunday.
Although I was personally involved already in some creation care initiatives, the series fuelled within me a passion to value more fully the world God has entrusted to us… and to help others come on board with this journey. For many in our congregation, this was all very new. “I’ve never really had to grapple with this before,” I heard one person comment. Others already on the journey were, like me, deeply encouraged. And others still require more convincing: “Shouldn’t we be focusing on the people not the planet – aren’t people more important to God at the end of the day?” More work is needed. Many Christians still aren’t aware of the massive upheavals coming our way in the next 100 years as the result of climate change or the implications these will have on the people God loves.
Towards the end of the year, I was asked to run an all-age Sunday service at a New Year Camp I was attending. I could think of no better topic to land on than that of Creation Care given the camp was in a very outdoor setting. And so one late December morning a group of 120 adults and children sat in a beautiful, sunny glade and contemplated Old Testament laws on the environment and their implications for today. Younger children had a colouring sheet depicting God’s beautiful world, while older ones wrestled with their parents and other adults to work out the principles behind Sabbath land laws, and laws which forbade the felling of trees during battle, and laws which prohibited the killing of mother birds. And then wrestled more to work out how these principles should be lived out today. At the end of it everyone was buzzing. People were so engaged with this seldom-preached-on topic and excited to see how practically Scripture spoke to this huge issue of our day.
I’ve seen that a follow up Creation Care series is planned at our church for some time in the next year and that is super encouraging. We have a role to play in this issue as followers of Jesus, a voice to contribute to the discussion, and answers that offer a different, bigger kind of hope.
