catapult magazine

our Care for Creation small group dissolved, so there’s no organized effort at this point to “green” our church, but I am still trying to coordinate certain things toward that end (tips on the powerpoint slides each week, a guide for choosing “environmentally friendly” disposables, etc.). i’m looking to trade ideas with others who have been involved in similar efforts.

what has worked in your church? what challenges have you faced and how have you dealt with those challenges?

I don’t have anything to say about what has worked in our church because nothing has. Hearing about your group Kirstin I tried to set up a creation care small group with one other like-minded person in our congregation. He was delighted to hear that I was interested as he had tried to get a group started a few years ago. We not only invited the congregation but four other congregations in the area and we got nothing.
Is this a result of apathy, busyness or a deeper problem of the church (in my case CRC) not giving an active crap about creation care?

it’s hard for people in our churches to make the connection, I think, between their everyday choices and the biblical mandate to care for the earth. and because of the political pigeon-holing of environmentalism, i think any talk of this kind of stewardship raises red flags for people who are on guard against “lefties.”

in your situation, norb, are there any simple activities that you and the one other person could coordinate that would make a clear statement and perhaps draw more like-minded folks into your church/help existing members start to put two and two together? what comes immediately to mind is a bulletin recycling program. a blue bin with a white recycling logo can be ordered from any online office supply company and they’re pretty eye-catching. it wouldn’t take very much effort to deliver the bulletins about once a month for recycling, provided you have that type of recycling in your area.

I’ll look into it. The church recently purchased the only other property on the block to use as a meeting house for the young people. I’ve had ideas of starting a community garden on the property which might help as well. I’ll talk to some people and keep you posted. But back to your problem, why did the small group disband? How long had it been active? In what ways had it been active?

the community garden idea sounds like fun. i would probably be cautious about such a labor-intensive inaugaral activity. getting the youth and Sunday school classes involved would help.

our group met regularly for about 8 months and did mostly study, although we did organize a pretty successful Care for Creation Sunday. one thing that led to its cessation was that we changed the day and location (ironically) to try to involve more people. another was that we lost focus, which is easy to do once you start talking about “caring for creation”—it led to disccussions of lifestyle simplicity, global economics, and other topics that are necessarily intertwined with stewardship of the earth. however, tackling such big issues in discussion weighed us down and didn’t lead to practical action.

we’re thinking of evolving the group to have more broad concerns, but a more focused way of [i:9e48eb2a78]doing[/i:9e48eb2a78] through advocacy. perhaps with the specific goal of organizing a variety of monthly service projects, from letter writing to school kit collection, addressing a variety of issues, from hunger to the environment.

my concern, however, is our perpetual biggest challenge—the naysayers who are reluctant to give us “recyclers” any credit (that “red flag” response I mentioned earlier). i could ignore a certain amount of verbal condemnation, but the people who are generally opposed to us are also some of the folks who make fairly visible, important decisions for the church in this area (namely, using loads of styrofoam for community events). of course, the reluctance to give credit goes both ways, as we jump to the conclusion that the “others” just don’t care about the earth. how can we move toward a unified biblical response instead of being driven by blinding agendas? polarized political labels certainly don’t help.