Welcome to the new A Rocha USA website! With the generous and talented help of web builders Patrick King and the gang at 4IP Tech (www.4iptech.com), graphic designer Sig Gustafsson, and our very own Board Chair Mark Purcell and Santa Barbara Coordinator Rich Dixon, we created this website to better reach and just as, if not more, importantly engage people in the A Rocha movement here in the US--and abroad. Movement? Yes, movement. Far from a static program or set of projects, A Rocha is a movement of people caring for the Earth--God's creation--in communities around the world in ways that reflect their local context and respond to local needs. Here in the USA, we're helping and hoping to extend that movement. And that's where you come in. Please poke around the site and read about current expressions of the movement, as well as ways that you can become a part of it. And please give us your feedback. We'd love to hear from you. We'd love to partner with you.

By Robert Campbell*, Pastor of Santa Margarita Community Church

The right place is where people meet on a manageable scale with the restorative power of divine love. I will begin this section with a lengthy quote from Wendell Berry in his article, Word and Flesh:

“The question that must be addressed, therefore, is not how to care for the planet, but how to care for each of the planet’s millions of human and natural neighborhoods, each of its millions of small pieces and parcels of land, each one which is in some precious way different from all the others. Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence—that is, to the wish to preserve all of its humble households and neighborhoods.

What can accomplish this reduction? I will say again, without overweening hope but with certainty nonetheless, that only love can do it. Only love can bring intelligence out of the institutions and organizations, where it aggrandizes itself, into the presence of the work that must be done.

Love is never abstract. It does not adhere to the universe or the planet or the nation or the institution or the profession, but to the singular sparrows of the street, the lilies of the field, ‘the least of these my brethren.’”

Elsewhere, Berry tells of  a woman who came up to him after a lecture and said, “I just love the environment.”

“No, you don’t,” he wanted to respond. “We name the things we love.”

And so the people we are called to love as the Santa Margarita Community Church have names. They are Dave and Nancy, Jason and Brooke, Dave and Lori, Matt and Su, Kevin and Edee. Personal is very different. And, often, our love is shown in part by how we spend our money. 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, 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.

It was just a few years ago, while many of these thoughts were coming to fruition in my mind, that I was sitting on a patio on the campus of Trinity Western University in Langley British Columbia. One of the pastors there said that his church was planning to reach 500 people in the next 5 years. The request came in response, “Name them.” The shock of that phrase brought us to new conversation. Why? We will do things differently when we have actual people in mind. If there are 500 nameless, faceless people, we will put an ad in the newspaper. If they are friends and neighbors we will invite them over for dinner. This is where the difference is for the local church. We can know the people where we live.

So, too, can we know and love the places where we and those people live.

Recently, at our annual creek clean-up day, we removed all the debris from the creek so that it won’t flood, as it often does. We were working next to John and Carol’s house. If we did not remove the debris, it would be John and Carol that would be flooded, not just some distant community we see on the news. The name makes all the difference in the world. We are God’s people in the right place for the job. So for us, it’s not just about loving neighbors, it’s about loving Dave and Lori, it’s about Carol, Sam and Christopher. It’s not just about the environment or some nameless creek; it’s about Yerba Buena Creek.

Let me finish with a story that connects people and place in a very personal way.  Here in Santa Margarita not long ago, a  man was arrested for dumping his own waste in his neighbor’s well. Not surprisingly, the neighbor had become violently ill and did not recover until this dreadful act was discovered and stopped. This is what I am talking about. We all know that our environmental actions have an impact…somewhere and upon someone. But if we stop and think that “somewhere” is a drinking well and “someone” is a person with a name and a face and a heart, the impacts of our actions become much more real, much more personal. It takes a hard heart indeed to pee in your neighbor’s well. And if I couldn’t do that to my neighbors, Dave and Nancy, I shouldn’t do it to anyone. Not in Santa Margarita, not in the Gulf of Mexico, not on the other side of the world.

*Robert Campbell is Pastor of Santa Margarita Community Church, an Evangelical Free Church on the Central Coast of California. Part I, II, III, IV and V of this series of essays comes from remarks delivered at the A Rocha USA symposium in Santa Barbara, CA, October 8-10, 2009.

By Robert Campbell*, Pastor of Santa Margarita Community Church

The right place is where people meet on a manageable scale with the restorative power of divine love. Let’s build on that now.

Sometimes, we as churches forget we are in a place, we forget that we are part of communities. I served for many years as an outreach pastor. Every 4^th of July some would ask, “Why don’t we have a float in the parade?” I would point out the members of our church on the Boy Scout float, the Library Foundation float and so on. We were already a part of the parade, just not in a way that demonstrated we were separate. We were actually involved.

Not long ago I was speaking with a group from a church plant who told me excitedly about how they set up a booth at the side of their local 10k run to hand out water bottles with their church name on it. I said, sarcastically, “What a great way to show you are not part of the community.”

If we are part of the community, we will be running in the race, serving on the planning committee, helping to clean up afterwards. We would work, play, live alongside the people that God has sent us to rather than as a separate group fishing in.

When we remove place from our definition of church, the people become more abstract. The bigger the geography, the broader the demographic of people. The bigger the geography, the more general people and things become. When we become abstract, we lose our ability to restore actual people and actual place. Christian engagement in conservation has to happen on a manageable scale.

Here is the standard Random House definition of scale: A certain relative or proportionate size or extent.  When we talk about scale we are talking about size, a geographic area and number of people. In God’s economy, all things function on an interconnected scale. If we increase the size of houses, for example, it impacts soil, water, air…and people.

Scale in our conversation includes both people and place. There is a scale at which the work of the church becomes inevitably impersonal and un-neighborly. There is a scale at which it no longer matters if 1000 or 5000 sit down for worship – we will do the exact same things anyway. I don’t know what that number is, but if a local church is people and place, then scale matters.

In Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, he quotes an old agricultural text which I appreciated:“Farming is not adapted to large-scale operations because of the following reasons: Farming is concerned with plants and animals that live, grow and die.”

Christian engagement in conservation may not be adaptable to large scale either because we are concerned with people, plants and animals that live, grow and die. We are concerned with the real people and place that we are sent to. Local is always personal.

Most communities have a “localvore” movement, a movement of people dedicated to a diet of only locally grown foods. Where I live, it is a “SLOcalvore” movement—named after San Luis Obispo (SLO), our nearest “big town”. Environmental issues are always hot and personal. In Santa Margarita, it’s even more so. Any attempts to develop, build on, plant or alter the historic cattle ranch that surrounds our community will affect everyone. As a local church we must be involved in those conversations, but carefully. To actually make a difference in the lives of the people in our town, and in the place where we live, a small stumbling local church, like ours, is far better than an excellent regional church on video. Local is a manageable scale. We can actually make a difference where we live.

*Robert Campbell is Pastor of Santa Margarita Community Church, an Evangelical Free Church on the Central Coast of California. Part I, II, III, IV and V of this series of essays comes from remarks delivered at the A Rocha USA symposium in Santa Barbara, CA, October 8-10, 2009.

By Robert Campbell*, Pastor of Santa Margarita Community Church

In focusing on what it means to be God’s people in the right place for the job of redemptive dominion,  I am not making a case for localism versus globalism–though I think there is a good case to be made for localism. Nor am I making a case for local church benefits–though there are many benefits of being part of a local church. And—sadly–growing numbers of people have abandoned the local church. They say that they are part of “the Church”,but are not part of a local church, which really has no meaning at all. Church, to be experienced, is always and only local. We actually have a theological term for someone claiming to be part of “the Church” but not the local church. We call it a “cop out.” God has put us in a place to be His people in that place. He has given us responsibility for that place.

God has always combined people and place. In Genesis 1 and 2 God creates man, male and female, and places them in a garden. The garden was a place, not an undefined wilderness. It was someplace with borders. He put them there to work it or to cultivate it. God put in the seeds and Adam and Eve were supposed to work to bring the flowers. There should be more glory in the garden because Adam and Eve were in it. The same is true for us. When we walk away from the place we are living, there should be more glory, more beauty, more good than when we arrived.

We see in Genesis 12 that God chooses Abraham and brings him to a place where Abraham and his descendents will be the sources of blessing to all the people of the world. People and place always go together.

In Psalm 104, the author sings about the greatness of God’s act of creation. God separates the waters in order to form a place. The psalmist describes the divine interconnection that happens between people and place. God channels the water to cause grass to grow, grass feeds the cows and man eats the cows. It becomes this happy, ingenious cycle of people and place as God intended. In the same Psalm, God waters the grapes, grapes become wine and wine makes man’s heart glad. God has always put people and place together.

At the end of the Bible, in Revelation chapter 21, God will create a new heaven and a new earth. That is, a new place for his people. God’s people are never without a place.

God has sent YOU to a people with the Gospel message AND to a place as stewards, acting toward that place as God would act. You can’t separate the two. You can not share gospel with your neighbor after peeing in his well. I know that sounds crude, but it will make sense in a subsequent posting.

*Robert Campbell is Pastor of Santa Margarita Community Church, an Evangelical Free Church on the Central Coast of California. Part I, II, III, IV and V of this series of essays comes from remarks delivered at the A Rocha USA symposium in Santa Barbara, CA, October 8-10, 2009.

By Robert Campbell*, Pastor of Santa Margarita Community Church

The church is a local gathering of believers. It’s a gathering of people defined both by their faith in Jesus and by the dirt they walk on. I think of that introduction to 1 Corinthians where Paul wrote, “To the church of God which is at Corinth.” Both the people and the place seem to matter.

Eugene Peterson writes about this gift of place in his book Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places:

“Everything that the creator God does in forming us as humans is done in place. It follows from this that since we are his creatures and can hardly escape the conditions of our making, for us everything that has to do with God is also in place. All living is local; this land, this neighborhood, these trees and streets and houses, this work, these people.

This may seem so obvious that it doesn’t need saying. But I have spent an adult lifetime with the assigned task of guiding men and women in living out the Christian faith where they raise their children and work for a living, go fishing and play golf, go to bed and eat their meals, and I know that cultivating a sense of place as the exclusive and irreplaceable setting for following Jesus is mighty difficult.”

It is very difficult. But we are a people that always have a place.

My family moved to Santa Margarita, California just over one year ago. Santa Margarita is a unique town because it is entirely land locked by a working cattle ranch. The “village reserve” houses about 1200 people and it multiplies as the circle widens all the way to San Luis Obispo with a population of 45,000. In 1889, the railroad decided to build a town at the southernmost end of the tracks along the coast. The train would travel south from San Francisco and stop in Santa Margarita where the stage coach took passengers over the Cuesta Pass to pick up the train again in San Luis Obispo headed for Los Angeles. In Santa Margarita I am learning much about the way place defines a people. I am also learning about the local church.

The strength of a church is in its local mission. We are sent to a particular people in a particular place. Santa Margarita Community Church started with a local mission 60 years ago when a group of ladies, including Grandma Hazel, decided that the children of the community needed a Sunday School. It began in Hazel’s living room, before the church on the hill that we still use today was built. It started as a local mission and it still is today.

Not surprisingly, local mission requires being in and part of the community: David and Ashlee being part of starting A Rocha in San Luis Obispo; Su serving on our local Advisory committee where she takes part in all the bureaucratic and environmental conversations as a Christian woman; Karin and others starting a community-wide clean-up day; Jeff and Lindsay running a fine local restaurant, buying the food they serve from local farms and dairies; many in the congregation participating in local Community Supported Agriculture. It’s just normal everyday participation that makes us a local church bringing people and place together. That is what we are trying to do because our greatest impact will always be with the people we live among, on the dirt we walk on every single day. The local church is God’s way of getting His people in the right place.

*Robert Campbell is Pastor of Santa Margarita Community Church, an Evangelical Free Church on the Central Coast of California. Part I, II, III, IV and V of this series of essays comes from remarks delivered at the A Rocha USA symposium in Santa Barbara, CA, October 8-10, 2009.

By Robert Campbell*

I am a Christian man. I am a believer and a lover of the Gospel of Jesus. I believe that the eternal God, self-sufficient and happy in Himself, became a man in Jesus to die in my place, to save me from my sin, to restore me to the life that God intended and to bring me into restored relationship with Himself. That is where I begin all things. That is where I start all that I am and all that I do.

And when I look at the mission that God has called me to as a redeemed man, and I look at the mission of A Rocha, I see just how well the two fit together.

God calls me, and all of us, to be involved in a redemptive dominion in our world. When He first created Adam and Eve, He put them in a garden “to work it”, and He gave them dominion. That is, He put them—and us–there to act as His representatives, to act as God would act towards God’s creation. He didn’t give it to us for our own ends, but put us there to act on His behalf. And that dominion becomes redemptive as the story goes on when we see that God will glorify Himself, not just through creation which reflects His glory, not just through man and woman who reflect His glory, but through redeeming fallen men and women by His own sacrificial death and through restoring the groaning creation. So, as a Christian, I now take part in a redemptive dominion because of the sacrifice of Jesus, which includes both the people God created and the place God created.

My particular roles in carrying out this redemptive dominion are as a father and a husband and as a local church pastor. It is in the last role, pastor, that I write here.

I remember learning to love the local church while in seminary. Each year, during commencement, the first-and second-year students would become a tremendous choir – singing to the graduates, launching them out into ministry. We would sing “A Mighty Fortress is our God”, as well as a hymn I had never heard before: “I Love Thy Church, O God.” It goes…

I love thy church, O God

I prize her heav’nly ways,

Her sweet communion, solemn vows,

Her hymns of love and praise.

And indeed I did I learn to love the church.

Actually I learned to love a facsimile – a theory of the church.

When I got out into the real world I found out…they lied! The local church is dirtier, it is uglier and it is messier than you ever get out of the classes, the textbooks or the hymnals. And yet, as a pastor of a local church, I am learning to love the real local church–one in particular, Santa Margarita Community Church in Santa Margarita, California. Those are the people I walk with and that is the dirt I walk on.

And as a local church pastor, I believe that the local church—ours and every other–should care about and actively engage in the conservation of God’s Earth.

Why?

Because the local church is God’s way of getting his people in the right place for the job of redemptive dominion. More on that in my next few posts.

*Robert Campbell is Pastor of Santa Margarita Community Church, an Evangelical Free Church on the Central Coast of California. Part I, II, III, IV and V of this series of essays comes from remarks delivered at the A Rocha USA symposium in Santa Barbara, CA, October 8-10, 2009.

by Thomas D. Rowley*

When I was a kid, my mother—queen of catalog shopping—bought a hand-held, squeeze-trigger device with a dial on top. It being the early seventies and I being a TV-addicted adolescent boy, my recognition of the contraption was instant: Star Trek Phaser!

Instant, but wrong.

It was, alas, a label maker—one of those things with which you squeezed out letter by raised letter on thin plastic tape such useful identifiers as “wedding photos,” “washers,” and “underwear.” And though useless against such menaces as the dreaded Salt Vampire of planet M-113, it was for a while fun. Soon every box, drawer and cabinet in our house had a label stuck on it. Now, the theory went, everything had a place. Everything could be stowed properly, found easily and used efficiently. Life under control.

Or not.

It turned out that wedding photos also contained grandparents, aunts and uncles. Should they be filed under “relatives” instead? Washers come in several kinds: flat, lock, and rubber to name a few. Could one box hold them all? (At least we got the underwear right.) Labels, it turns out, are tricky business.

Especially when slapped on people. Take me, for example.

When I lived and worked in Washington, DC, I was often the “conservative” in the crowd. Why? Because I owned cowboy boots, read the Bible and voted Republican at times. Now back in small-town Texas, I’m regularly viewed as that “liberal” who wears Birkenstocks (for the arch support), works for “some kind of environmentalist group” and votes Democratic at times. (For the record, I still have the boots, read the Bible and vote Republican in some elections.)

In which drawer do I belong?

None, I hope. And that is the point. Labels are all too often an excuse to stick someone in a drawer. A means of dismissal. At A Rocha, a Christian conservation organization with community-based projects in 19 countries, we see it all the time. For many who care about the environment, “Christians” are the bad guys; for many who follow Jesus, “environmentalists” wear the black hats—if not little red horns.

But little by little, the glue on the back of those labels is failing. Christians—even so-called “conservative” ones—are starting to take seriously the biblical command to steward the Earth. For their part, environmentalists—seeing the need to have all hands on deck—are starting to welcome Christian involvement. (Witness E. O. Wilson’s appeal in his book Creation.) Consequently, and perhaps miraculously, the two camps are beginning to get along, at least well enough to cooperate occasionally.

We see this, too, all the time.

In Boise, Idaho, A Rocha is mobilizing churchgoers to help the local chapter of Trout Unlimited plant streamside trees to shade the water and improve fish habitat. In northwest Washington, we’re working with environmental groups and farmers alike on eco-friendly ways to protect the region’s blueberry crop from ravenous Starlings—an invasive exotic species that devours some 40 percent of the annual harvest. In Lebanon, we partner with the Society for the Protection of Nature to identify and protect endangered habitats critical to migrating birds. In Kenya, working with a range of interests, we crafted a program that both protects the last remaining stands of the Arabuko-Sokoke Forest and generates income with which families living in and around the forest can now send their children to school and help free the next generation from poverty’s grip.

Through these efforts and many others like them, common cause between Christians and environmentalists (and advocates for the poor, health care, farming and more) is forged, conversations begin, labels peel away and behind them persons—sometimes friends even—emerge. It’s a wonder what the sweat of shared work can do—not just for the goal, but also to the people pursuing it.

That doesn’t mean we will all agree on everything—whether the root cause of a problem or its ultimate solution.  And certainly not on politics! But evidence is growing that we can, and do, agree on this: the Earth—however one thinks it came into being—is worth caring for. And that seems a pretty good place to start.

So, as Jesus himself might say, woe to the label makers that seek to dismiss, divide and put us all into drawers. Let’s turn them all into Phasers, go outside and together zap some Tribbles—those fuzzy pink but dastardly invasive exotics.

*Executive Director of A Rocha USA

by Thomas D. Rowley*

In the three years since PBS’ Bill Moyers asked “Is God Green?” the answer from American Christendom has become a resounding “yes!”  Proclaimed by everything from eco-friendly Palm Sunday fronds to the soy-based, Kermit-hued ink in the Green Bible, God’s color has been decided.

But what about Satan’s?

I know. I know. Talk of the devil these days is déclassé. Too fire-and-brimstone for our post-everything mindset. Plus, everyone knows he’s red with horns, tail and a pitchfork. Right? But what if C.S. Lewis were still uncovering missives from that diabolical Undersecretary of Temptation, Screwtape to his nephew and Junior Tempter, Wormwood?  What might that reveal about Hell’s slant on the environment? With apologies to Lewis, perhaps something like this…

My Dear Nephew:

I see a certain despondence in your last correspondence. The long-delayed awakening of Christians to the Enemy’s directive to steward the Earth has gotten you down. Particularly, the awakening of that pesky group called evangelical Christians–a label that writers of the New Testament might well have thought redundant! Do not let it. As with all surges of that army, this, too, can be redirected. Confusion is the order of the day, dear Wormwood. Confusion!

To begin with, keep striking the chords that have proven so successful for us already. Keep your patients focused on the politics of it all–feeding the notion that the Enemy simply could not mean them to side with those they growlingly call “tree-hugging liberals.”

At the same time, nag them with doubts about science; keep them asking, albeit subconsciously, how something associated with abortion and evolution (thanks to your good works, Nephew) could ever be trusted?

Play, too, the note that says “it will all burn anyway, and the sooner the better.” Ah, there’s nothing finer than bad theology mixed with hopelessness for turning them aside.

Finally, addle their puny brains with false dichotomies: Surely, they cannot evangelize and care for the poor, for example, while also stewarding nature! Needless to say, you must keep hidden from them the indisputable facts that nature sings so disgustingly of the Enemy who created it and that upon nature the poor of the world so heavily depend.

As always, keep them from thinking deeply on any of these matters. There lies our undoing! Instead, fill their minds with the busyness of life—the grocery list, the children’s piano lesson or the church committee meeting. Should you detect a serious thought forming, however, simply give a nudge that now is the perfect time to text message, email or turn on some enlightening talk radio. Oh, how I love that last one! What victories it has given us!

Should these attempts fail to keep them off balance and ignoring the Enemy’s directive, we, too, can become green—at least our own shade of it. Here, I, of course, mean money, that ancient yet infallible tempter. How they love their money! Forgetting as they so laughably do that it is not theirs and that the Enemy has warned them again and again about what He ridiculously refers to as idolatry. I’ve also learned of a new shade of green developed by our labs: that of the perfect green lawn. How delightful! The illusion of health and beauty fostered by poison, copious amounts of precious water, and the weekly toiling behind a deafening, fume-belching machine! Brilliant! Simply, brilliant!

Above all–and I really shouldn’t have to warn you of this–keep them from opening that dastardly book the Enemy gave them! Rare indeed is the patient who can be retrieved once he has devoted himself to study there.

Finally, make sure to keep our correspondence secret. Human ignorance of our plans is one of our very best weapons. Nevertheless, should this letter leak to the press, I am confident that misunderstanding and emotion (never forget the power of emotion) will cause such a disturbance that you and I will be dismissed as the depraved imaginings of some witless human writer.

As always, your affectionate (and green if need be) uncle

Screwtape

* Executive Director of A Rocha USA