Through my work with Son Safaris I have developed a strong desire to see Christians take a more active role in caring for God’s creation. The term “creation care” may be new to you but it simply means being stewards of God’s creation of which we are apart. But why is this stewardship important? To oversimplify I believe creation care is a “gospel issue”.
The “gospel” (“Good News” in Greek) is a way of speaking of the teachings at the heart of the Christian faith -the redemptive death, burial and resurrection of Jesus. When I place creation care as a “gospel issue” I am saying that it is an expression of our worship to God for our redemption through Jesus Christ. That means that we should care for God’s creation whether it were in crisis or not.
However there is a real crisis in God’s creation now. People, animals and plants are dying because we human beings have abused God’s world. But I believe this present environmental crisis is not the primary reason for creation care. Christians should be set apart from other environmentalists because we do what we do because we love God and His creation. So if we lived in a world with no environmental problems, we would still be tending God’s world. As the Lausanne Cape Town Commitment put it:
“Therefore, our ministry of reconciliation is a matter of great joy and hope and we would care for creation even if it were not in crisis.”
Just imagine if the global community of Christians were to accept the premise that caring for God’s creation is a core part of our identity. Love God! Love others! Care for God’s creation. Perhaps we would not have such a critical crisis in God’s creation as we do today. But we haven’t taken creation care seriously and there is an environmental crisis that must be addressed by everyone in society, especially God’s people. Today both God’s human and non-human creation is being devastated by violence against the environment in multiple ways, of which global climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss, water stress, and pollution are but a part. Just imagine if Christians were to lead the charge to solve these ecological challenges.
Much suffering and devastation is directly tied to human activity. Some of the damage is directly caused when poor farmers abuse their land in a futile attempt to wrest a little more food from already exhausted soils. Much of the suffering though, comes not from their own actions but from that of others. Excess consumption in the richer parts of the world is creating great problems among people who have had nothing to consume.
We are failing in the sacred trust given to us by God to care for His creatures. In the last 40 years we have lost half of earth’s entire stock of wildlife, according to the World Wildlife Fund. This should bother any human being; it should devastate those of us who are Christians.
Christians have a unique role to play in guiding human society toward a healthier and happier relationship with God’s creation. The church has global reach – a truly multinational network. The church has political influence. The church has money. And the church has people – billions of them. All of these are reasons why anyone who cares about God’s creation or the environmental crisis should want the church to be involved.
But there is another deeper but more important reason why the church needs to take on this task. Bluntly stated environmental problems are sin problems. What I mean is that the root causes of every environmental issue in some way gets back to flawed human beings and sinful hearts: Materialism, greed, selfishness, fear. All of these lie at the root of the things that we do as individuals and as a society that have produced the crisis we now find ourselves in.
For environmental problems to be conquered, human hearts must be reconciled to God. Human hearts can only be reconciled to God by the Gospel – the redemptive death, burial and resurrection of Jesus. What better platform for the Gospel could there be than to mobilize the church to care for God’s creation? Imagine the impact if Christians were leading the charge to care for God’s creation!
The Shadowlander 