Faith Journal

With Ray Waddle

Churchgoers are watching the weather, dreading the electric bill and starting to talk.

Light bulbs (the florescent, earth-friendly kind) are going off in their heads.

After idling for years on the sideline, churches are starting to care about an overheating earth.

The scientific evidence only grows that we are to blame for excessive carbon emissions and rising temperatures, and it is rallying consensus and alarm like never before.

More coalitions than ever are linking people of faith to ecological issues and stirring congregations to action. See web sites for the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, the Regeneration Project, the Evangelical Climate Initiative, and the Presbyterian Church (USA)'s own Environmental Justice Office, which was founded nearly 20 years ago.

Evangelical leaders meanwhile proclaim that "Creation Care" - stewardship of God's earth, support for policies that slow global warming - is the only responsible position for Christians who believe the Bible.

This spring, the National Council of Churches sponsored its first eco-sermon contest. An expectation is mounting: pulpits can no longer avoid sermons about saving the environment.

On Earth Day, April 22, more churches than ever will ring with earth-oriented preaching. Al Gore's recent book and Oscar-winning documentary about dangerous climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, turned the tide for Phil Leftwich, executive of the Middle Tennessee Presbytery. Leftwich is busy organizing public forums on eco-education, sending emails regularly to 130 clergy, pressing them to see connections between fossil-fuel pollution, super-sized consumption and the power of Christian faith to question our comfortable but unsustainable routines. The faith's love-of-neighbor ethic must extend its definition of neighbor to include future generations who must live on a depleted earth that we hand to them.

"If we don't do anything about global warming, we're going to be in serious trouble in 50-70 years," Leftwich says.

The fear is this: hotter temperatures will melt polar ice caps, induce violent storms, drought, famine, water shortages. Melted ice will force oceans to rise, threatening islands and coastal cities, and generate staggering numbers of refugees and political instability. In all cases, poor people will be hardest hit.

"It's a moral issue, not just a political issue," Leftwich says. "It's not just about buying hybrid cars and changing light bulbs but a change in attitude, a change in diet and the way we relate to people across the world."

Until recently, church alertness to environmental issues of clean water, land conservation and energy policy was patchy, unfocused. Reasons for indifference are not hard to find. Many churches dismissed environmentalism as a secular liberal cause or pagan earth-worship, not the Lord's work. Or they thought it was irrelevant because of apocalyptic expectations of the Return of Christ. Or they were consumed by a relentless parade of intramural struggles and debates over sexuality, foreign policy and biblical interpretation.

Outlooks started to change, and theology turned hues of green, in the 1990s when science reported measurable depletions of ozone, forest and species counts.

People of faith began asking, "Is God pleased by this?"

Whether or not humans are decisively to blame for newly elevated temperatures, it stands to reason that society's consumption habits are, in the long haul, insane. We devour the earth as if oil and water and land are unlimited and no consequences await.

Nothing will change — and churches will provide no moral leadership — until believers feel a pange of actual biblical shame, shame that we are offending God by polluting rivers, trashing meadows and lapping up more than our share of resources. The wasteful status quo is safe until we rediscover a Genesis-like awe for creation, the belief that a Creator really made the world and cares what happens to it.

It sounds like an overwhelming problem. But no one is helpless. We can break bad habits, turn down the thermostat, drive less, do a home energy audit that tests for leaks and efficiency. We can put it on the agenda and ask questions. Where does the water come from, and where does the sewage and garbage go? The food in the frigdge where was it raised, how far away, and which pesticides were used? Why not buy food closer to home and support local farmers instead of depending on a fragile, long-distance delivery system?

Read the writings of Wendell Berry and Bill McKibben, or a book such as A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet's Future by Roger Gottlieb.

Talk at church. Look up web sites. Call Phil Leftwich. Chances are, a lot of other worshipers are worrying too, and tired of staying silent, and are ready to act.

Ray Waddle can be reached at .