By Robert Campbell*, Pastor of Santa Margarita Community Church

I hope you hear the irony intended in the title. I certainly do care about what is happening to our world. But, climate change is merely a symptom. The cause: a lack of care. To address the symptom, we must address its cause. We must begin again to care.

Gaining a distinctly Christian ecology will enable us to care. It will free us to live more consistently in our world...and it will be good both for us and for our world. And the effects of climate change will be reduced  as you and I are radically transformed in heart, mind and actions.

Beginning with your heart...As you believe that God is distinct from all of creation, bowing to His ownership of all things, you will actually honor the tree as a fellow creature, just for being a tree. As you honor the tree you will honor God whose goodness is reflected in a tree much more than in a cathedral, you will find your place in the world…and you will begin to reduce the effects of climate change (more on this in Part I).

Considering your mind...As you understand your role as a steward of God’s world, your actions will begin to bring good to the Earth…and we will reduce the effects of climate change (more on this in Part II).

Now, considering what kind of actions flow naturally from that heart and mind, the Scriptures teach,

The Lord God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there He placed the man whom He had formed…Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. Gen. 2:8, 15

God, who our story begins with, had a purpose for us in creation. He intended for us to cultivate and keep the garden that He called “good.”  Our role is to take care of it and bring its good fruit on His behalf. God planned for us to act as He would act toward His world. If we believe that God owns all things and we are His stewards then we will use His world toward His ends. What is His end? That His world would reflect His goodness and that you and I would see that reflection and worship Him.

These beliefs enable a new kind of living that is built one brick at a time. But what kind of life is consistent with belief in God and is working towards God's end? Here are a few thoughts on living in God's world with both people and place for God's end.

Live like you are free

The heart that believes in God's ownership and that takes stewardship seriously is free to live in joy. God created the world out of the overflow of His happiness. Therefore our life in this world can be good and joyous because the Earth is good and joyous. You are free to live for the purpose of God within the boundaries of God in a world He created, in part, for your joy. You can now arrange the details positively without fear.

Starting anywhere other than with God will just leave us with the false religion of guilt and fear: "The world will end if you drive another mile!" As A Rocha's Dave Timmer has written so beautifully, "Environmental legalism is still legalism." He goes on to say,

Creation care is so much more than taking the reusable tote to the grocery store, changing light bulbs, or eating organic produce. It is so much more than even giving everything we own to the poor. It is following Jesus. Creation care is reaching to grasp what God is doing in the places where we live.

Beyond the “Green” Commandments

Worship results when we live in light of God's joyous freedom in our world rather than from the fear and despair that comes from the preaching of imminent doom. Believe God, not the doomsday prophets. The first thing we must do is to relax; we have the right starting point.

Live like this is home

Our community has an annual clean-up day every May. Just after the storms end, we head out to serve our older neighbors, paint the downtown benches and pull weeds in the Santa Margarita Demonstration Forest. As my family I and freed the magnificent native plants from the encroachment of invading grasses, I remembered something true and important. Since the fall of mankind in the original garden, the natural tendency of all things earthly is toward weeds and thorns. If we just let it go, the world would end up covered in Star Thistle and Kudzu. No, we have a part in these things! Humans are not unnatural. You belong here. The word "ecology" simply means the study of home. God's world is our home. Worship results when we live like we belong here, like this is home. First, relax because you have started with God and then commit to the place where you actually live.

Live like you have hope

I am not suggesting that the current state of the environment is not dire and in need of our attention. It is! I am suggesting that the pagan religious action of much of the secular environmental movement is not needed and probably not adequate for solving the problem. All environmental action is religious action. Every action happens within a story, defines a problem, banks its hope on some form of redemption and then establishes a set of actions consistent with that religious belief. A distinctly Christian ecology does so most adequately because it is true to the way things actually are.

When God created all things good, He also put into it a created purpose to bring about good and He intends that it will one day achieve that end in spite of the brokenness that we inflict on our world everyday. Right now, our world is not as it should be!

The manner of that redemption is what Christians call the “good news.” God Himself has entered into His created world in order to take the brokenness and wrong seriously and to put the pieces back together. I am suggesting that Jesus is the only true ecologist. He lived in light of God's story and assessed the problem rightly as being rooted in the heart of mankind. He sacrificed Himself in order to set things right by forgiving our true guilt, carrying away our real shame and removing the need for blame. In calling us to “follow Him,” we not only enable our people to find forgiveness, but live all of life under the Lordship of King Jesus, doing His will in our place.

Worship results when (1) we enjoy the freedom that comes from starting with God, (2) commit to the place we call home and (3) live in the hope that God's redemption in Jesus has restored us and then join Him in restoring the world, its people and its places. I call that a redemptive dominion, ruling as God would rule if He were here doing it Himself.

A call to act as distinctly Christian ecologists

These truths force us to act. We cannot wash our hands of it. We must act in light of God's redemption in Jesus. That is the role of the local church and A Rocha serves as a support in the Church's call to action.

As a local church Pastor, I believe that the local church should care about conservation because it (the church) is God's way of getting his people in the right place for the job of redemptive dominion. The church is a local gathering of believers. It's a gathering of people defined by their faith in Jesus and the dirt they walk on. We are a people that always have a place. We are concerned with the real people and places that we are sent to. Local is always personal. When we act locally, we put ourselves in a position to suffer from our decisions. When we act locally, we act freely and with hope in the place we call home. When we act locally, we love our neighbors.

My local church lives in a place called Santa Margarita, California. Our ecology works out there, with the people that live there with us. We buy breakfast from Carrie. We buy tea from Carol, wine from the Arnold Family, a fine dinner from Jeff and Lindsay Jackson (whose daughter went to school with my son), gas from Chris, Chris and Brandon, and beer from Chris over at Dunbar Brewing. These are particular people in a particular place. This is the kind of impact that a local church can have that no one else can have because God has placed us. (I have developed these thoughts further on another A Rocha USA blog post) My main point here is that, for the average person, to act as a distinctly Christian ecologist involves simply making our daily decisions in a way that results in worship.

A Rocha serves the local church in a unique way by guiding us to remember that people are always placed and to bring those called to the vocation of science, agriculture etc. to serve the rest of us in the local church for the purpose of worship. And just like the local church, the work of A Rocha is placed.

•  A Rocha is working to restore and protect a watershed in northwest Washington.
  
•  A Rocha is working with food distribution programs in Santa Barbara, CA to give food grown at the Five Loaves Farm to low-income families.
•  A Rocha is restoring and protecting headwaters of the Frio river in the hill country of Texas.
•  A Rocha is partnering with the local church and Land Conservancy in San Luis Obispo, California to educate children about the place where they live.

In all of these places, A Rocha is just a gathering of believers like you, who belong to local churches. Those believers have developed a distinctly Christian ecology and are living in the light of God's story in a particular place with a particular people...and that daily, immediate action is limiting the symptoms of climate change.

 *Robert Campbell is Pastor of Santa Margarita Community Church, an Evangelical Free Church on the Central Coast of California. Part I, II and III of this series of essays comes from remarks delivered in the SLO A Rocha "Christian Ecology Series", March, April and May 2011 (TBA).