While at the 'Faith & Climate Change' conference I recorded an interview for the Open University's Creative Climate project telling the story of how we are responding to the challenge of climate change at St John's Seven Kings. What follows is that story pegged to key themes from the recent lecture (sponsored by the Christian environmental group Operation Noah) which the Archbishop of Canterbury gave setting out a Christian vision of how people can respond to the looming environmental crisis:
Beginning with the story of Noah and the Flood, Dr Williams highlighted the “burden of responsibility for what confronts us here and now as a serious crisis and challenge”. Our relationship with the rest of creation is intimately bound up with our relationship with God. The Bible offers “an ethical perspective based on reverence for the whole of life”. “To act so as to protect the future of the non-human world is both to accept a God-given responsibility and, appropriately, to honour the special dignity given to humanity itself.”
At St Johns we teach regularly from these, and other biblical perspectives, on the necessity of care for our environment. We do so particularly through our annual Stewardship Campaign, our Harvest Festival and our support of Christian Aid and their campaigns. We have also linked our teaching to the related theme of Peak Oil, the idea that the world’s supply of fossil fuels has peaked and that increased fuel costs in future will necessitate lifestyle changes.
Dr Williams warned against looking for a single solution to the complex environmental challenges which face us. “Instead of a desperate search to find the one great idea that will save us from ecological disaster, we are being invited to a transformation of individual and social goals that will bring us closer to the reality of interdependent life in a variegated world”. He urged action at the personal and local, as well as at the national and international, levels saying, “When we believe in transformation at the local and personal level, we are laying the surest foundations for change at the national and international level”.
At St Johns we have a Peace & Justice committee who regularly involve us in campaigns calling for global change politically, such as Christian Aid’s ‘Countdown to Copenhagen’ campaign on which theme they are currently preparing a service. As a church, we intend to install solar panels on our roof and are currently exploring how this could be done using the new arrangements for supporting the introduction of renewable sources of energy being introduced by the Government in 2010. On the individual level, during our Stewardship month we give our congregation a list of simple changes, such as sharing transport, turning heating thermostats down, saving water, switching to green energy and so on – that they can make to begin to transform their individual carbon footprint.
The Archbishop urged leaders to take bold decisions at the Copenhagen summit in December. He encouraged the taking of effective collaborative local action to reduce carbon emissions and to maintain pressure on local governments and businesses to do the same. And he encouraged the small actions which mark a break with destructive patterns of consumption and waste and help “to make us more aware of the diversity of life around us”.
At St Johns our understanding of Christian care for the environment and those in need increasingly leads us to view Western consumerism as selfish and wasteful, although we recognise that we are also implicated and need to repent of our own levels of consumption. Our initial discussions of peak oil have led us to begin to consider transition initiatives while also recognising that our love of affluence as a society currently means that the radical changes needed as individuals, communities and society are not being made as fully or rapidly as the crisis demands.
Dr Williams underlined the particular role that belief can play in recovering a sense of balance and interdependence. “What we face today is nothing less than a choice about how genuinely human we want to be; and the role of religious faith in meeting this is first and foremost in setting out a compelling picture of what humanity reconciled with both creator and creation might look like.”
In conclusion, the Archbishop emphasized that “the Christian story lays out a model of reconnection with an alienated world: it tells us of a material human life inhabited by God and raised transfigured from death; of a sharing of material food which makes us sharers in eternal life; of a community whose life together seeks to express within creation the care of the creator”. Quoting Moses in the book of Deuteronomy, he concluded “I am giving you a choice between good and evil, between life and death… choose life”.
At St Johns we are seeking to choose life but are also very aware that the global challenge needs a far greater level of change and transformation than we have yet implemented.
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Nickel Creek - When In Rome.
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