Activist Lowe goes beyond the immobilizing "what can I do" perspective about environmental concerns to highlight the collective power of church, community, and campus groups to make a change in caring for creation. Sharing real-life stories, Lowe illustrates God's plan for his world---and our place in it; and offers practical action ideas.
How can churches get more involved in the movement to care for creation?
Churches are particularly important in the movement, because this is where we regularly come together to study the Bible and learn what it means to live and grow in community. They consume a lot of resources, which makes them easy targets for conservation. Also, churches are usually planted in the same neighborhood for many years, where they can develop lasting relationships and initiate long-term projects to impact the local community.
Ideas for projects include developing the church grounds into a natural area that welcomes both the neighbors and native wildlife, participating in community-supported agriculture or community gardens, training volunteer "green teams" to help lower-income residents retrofit their homes with energy-efficient appliances that will save money and pollution, organizing community-wide tree-planting celebrations every Earth Day, or just providing bike racks and lockers to encourage churchgoers to bike, blade or walk to church.
Why is it important for us to take our role in caring for creation seriously?
Individuals can care deeply about the planet and take an active role in caring for it while not making it their primary focus. At a very basic level, we all consume resources-food, water, energy and raw materials for iPods-and otherwise impact the environment. In turn, the environment has an impact on each of us. This is an unavoidable fact of being alive.
Therefore, we are all called to be stewards of creation as we live out our lives on this earth. We are all called to love God and love our neighbor, and to continue moving from being part of the problem to being more of the solution. And, wherever we have wandered, we are called to remember God and return home.
Our common calling to creation care applies on both an individual and a corporate level. This is where our theology and worldview are translated into action, where our faith and what we have learned are integrated into how we live.
Describe your work with A Rocha.
We more authentically experience God's original intentions for the world when we participate in the good work of tending his creation, whatever form that takes for each of us. This is the underlying premise of A Rocha.
A Rocha (AR) is an organization of Christians in conservation that is actively working in over twenty countries on five continents. It was started in 1983 by Peter and Miranda Harris, an Anglican missionary couple who moved from England to southern Portugal, when they established a field studies center to help the local community protect a valuable estuary from outside development.
Since then, A Rocha projects have sprung up in Kenya, Ghana, Lebanon, India, France, the Czech Republic, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States and elsewhere. These various national projects are all very different because they reflect the local culture and needs. What they all share, however, is an emphasis on moving past discussing creation care to fully living it out within Christian community.
How has the church become like the prodigal son in relation to the environment?
Faced by environmental crises on every side and all around the globe, we are awakening to a desperate reality: we have wandered far from God's good intentions for us and for the world. We are hurting and have nowhere else to turn. It is time to remember our Father God. It is time to go back home.
The church today, like the prodigal son, is returning for imperfect reasons. The prodigal did not want to head home because he had wronged his father, but because he was hoping for a better life again. Likewise, the trigger for our recovery of a vision of environmental stewardship today is not foremost because we have been drifting from God, but because we can no longer ignore our ailing environment and are worried for our well-being. It starts out as a selfish reason but, as with the son, we learn to take on a position of true humility and repentance.
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