By Peter Harris
James Davison Hunter’s new book, To Change the World has been exciting a lot of comment and makes vital reading for anyone involved in any kind of culture-changing enterprise. So not surprisingly it makes A Rocha people think – after all we believe this is God’s world that we are living and working in. More than that, we are working to find a way beyond some of the major environmental and social impasses that confirm the analysis of Romans 8 – the creation does seem to be truly groaning. In a week that follows a devastating explosion that caused great loss of life, where tonnes of oil are washing up onto the Louisiana coastline and images of oiled pelicans haunt our eyes, the apostle Paul has never seemed more prophetic.
So it was heartening to see that A Rocha’s way of working might resonate with Hunter. He warns that two major dangers await those who wish to change the world in which they live. Either they develop a pure and clear alternative, and build movements and organisations that have very little impact out where major decisions are made in the institutions of power, or they rise within those institutions, now outside the Christian sub-culture. If they do the second they may reach the élite level where a difference can be made - but by then they have often paid a terrible price in loss of identity and distinctive Christian character. Of course there are wonderful exceptions, but as Andy Crouch’s fine review of Hunter’s book points out, while such “élite insurgents” may succeed in keeping their own personal cutting edge, they will likely find that change is not easily delivered, even by those mighty institutions that the Christian believer succeeds in storming. In contrast to this, Hunter argues for “faithful presence.”
From its earliest days, A Rocha has intentionally looked to the incarnation of Christ for its model of action. As we never had great hope of changing anything much beyond a Portuguese estuary, a Kenyan forest, a Lebanese marsh or an area of London wasteground (together with some modest community renewal among those who lived around and from these places), “faithful presence” has always been the name of our game. Unlike many environmental organisations, we have never been able to offer our few supporters the prospect of “saving” much, let alone the planet. And being attentive to history and to local politics, we have tended to keep the vocabulary of “saving” attached to its proper Subject.
But here’s the irony of what we have encountered in living a quarter century of “faithful presence” in the “environmental community”. Or to be precise, this is how I have personally encountered a paradox all around the USA over the last twelve years of travel there. “The environment” is an area of work and concern that American Christians have left largely to its own devices. They have been keenly aware that environmental circles frequently overlap with political or quasi-religious ones, and so are inclined to dismiss the whole thing as “environmentalism” – by implication this is not a good place for any self-respecting Christian to stray into. It is easy to see how it happened - many of the early years of the environmental movement were marked by rhetoric uncongenial to Christian beliefs. Even if it wasn’t for the unfortunately strident atheism of some of its leading scientists – Richard Dawkins is only the latest and most extreme exemplar – there was an almost misanthropic love of “nature” and “wilderness” that seemed indifferent to the cares of human society in some of the environmental writings most influential in the 60’s and 70’s. To add to the confusion, heated debates about creation’s origins dogged early exchanges between the church and the environmentally concerned, and that was followed more recently by the politicisation of discussions about “global warming”.
Meanwhile a corresponding mistrust and even hostility towards Christians has taken root in many of those who work for environmental organisations. They point to the church’s indifference to what they consider the most urgent issues of our times: water quality, pollution, resource depletion and the church’s silence or collusion with consumerism. Right from the outset of the modern environmental movement, fifty years ago give or take a UN conference or two, many of them concluded that the church itself was the enemy. To this day nothing much has happened to make them change their minds.
So here’s how the irony plays out. A Rocha’s “faithful presence” has meant that we have been working in an area from which Christians have been almost entirely absent. Not surprisingly therefore it can seem very “secular” and so our Christian friends think we are wasting our time at best, and betraying them at worst. However their understanding of what “environmental” means has been entirely shaped by those who are indifferent or even hostile to their beliefs, and not by the “faithfully present” who are living it all rather differently and working to a different music. Trust me, very little attention is given in most churches to a biblical understanding of the environment, its stewardship and how that plays out in landscapes and communities. So again, no one is to blame.
Perhaps even more sadly, because Christians have been almost entirely absent from this Godly work of caring for Christ’s own creation, it is often shocking for our “secular” project partners to find people who believe in a living God who loves his world working alongside them in re-planting a denuded hillside, restoring a community’s watershed, or growing organic vegetables on abandoned down-town land.
The irony is right there – and the literal cost of it is that Christians don’t believe we can be Christian if we do environmental work, and others suspect we have dark proseletysing motives if we do. All their experience to date has taught them that Christians never care about such things. Or don’t we? Maybe another fifty years of “faithful presence” will show that Jesus Christ does, so his followers do. Even so, A Rocha, and the rapidly growing number of those like us around the wide country of the USA, will never promise to “save the earth”. Just to see the signs of the kingdom of God written in restored landscapes, healed communities, and lives renewed in the Holy Spirit who breathes on the earth.
*Rev. Peter Harris is Founder of A Rocha
Comments