A Rocha USA Blog

by Robert Campbell

The other day I realized that I have never discovered a new species and felt kind of bad about that. Of course, I knew that already. You usually know when you have discovered a new species. That is not one of those things that you just stumble on. “Oops, I think I discovered a new species. Perhaps I should tell someone. Perhaps I should be more careful where I am stepping.” I have never identified a spider, frog or plant and probably never will. Being a part of the work of A Rocha can make you feel like an inadequate environmentalist, don't you know. I mean, while our brothers and sisters are tromping unexplored forests in Papua New Guinea, I am planting a fall garden in my California backyard.

My fall garden is so very different than my spring and summer garden. In summer she runneth over with green, overcoming her raised-bed boundaries like an adolescent whose arms are bigger than she realizes. Fall is much simpler, much tidier. The beds have been cleaned of the frost-killed summer veg, packed down with compost mixed together from yard and kitchen scraps, chicken droppings and the left overs from my neighbor's horse corral. My nine beautiful boxes shine with fresh yellow straw and just a few, very precisely placed fall plantings: cabbage, broccoli, red spotted heirloom romaine, beets, and some amazing torpedo onion sprouts that my neighbor swears will grow better in our micro-climate than any bulbs I could buy at the store.

 Years ago I planted standard red onion bulbs purchased in bulk at a locally owned hardware store. They started out as these gorgeous little baby onions, so tender and in need of my fatherly care. I put them to bed at a good time and nurtured them kindly as they rested for the winter, giving them a drink whenever they cried about being thirsty. And in the spring I harvested...flowers, not onions. They were not even an undiscovered flower, just onion flowers. Having provided the neighborhood with a good laugh at my expense, I was let in on the secret: torpedo onion starts, rather than bulbs for planting.

 Just a few days ago I got an early phone call. Hoping it might be from an A Rocha colleague in need of my species-discovering help, I answered in my most scientific voice. The call wasn’t from Papua New Guinea. It was, however, a neighbor informing me of the time and place I could acquire THE onions. I headed out to the store and returned home with my little package of wet, newspaper-wrapped sprouts. Now in the ground, my starts look pretty good so far. My parenting routine begins again. We'll have to wait until spring before we know if this is the species that will flourish in my neighborhood. But I have it on the best local authority (aka town gossip) that they will.

Why do I care so about such things? My friend and A Rocha founder Peter Harris says this about the work of discovering new species: "We are motivated by our conviction that every species matters because it is part of God’s good creation, whether or not it has obvious value for humans…When a species is wiped out...we are removing a member of the choir."

Peter’s words apply to all of us as we seek to live faithfully in God's world. I am not a biologist, geologist, ornithologist, or zoologist, and I have never discovered a new species. I am an ordinary local church pastor who is discovering ways in which I can live day to day under the Lordship of Christ for whom, by whom and through whom all things were created and all things hold together—whether frogs and spiders in Papua New Guinea or onions in my backyard.

*Campbell is Pastor of the Santa Margarita Community Church in Santa Margarita, CA

by Peter Harris*

Well...dream on I suppose, but I’ve been packing boxes and it’s making me think. Miranda and I are moving on from this French village we’ve called home for the last thirteen years and with us will go two reasonably heavy cartons (ok I know it will cost carbon to haul them) of north American books on the environment and Christianity--nearly all of them published since we arrived here. That seems like progress.

We first started visiting the USA in 1996 and at the end of that trip came home with the first three of these books – by Cal DeWitt et al, Ginny Vroblesky, and Loren Wilkinson. In conversations with these authors, each told us that their environmental convictions were regarded by many of their Christian friends as dangerously political and probably a wanton distraction from true discipleship. Now, as I pack all these books by a far bigger cloud of witnesses to the idea that caring for creation is normal biblical Christianity, I am thinking a lot must have changed.

After many other trips to the States, we watched exactly ten years ago as A Rocha USA finally saw the light of day.  I am sure that some people viewed its birth as millennial madness even then. Growing the organisation has certainly taken persistence from its first enthusiasts. They found each other with some relief while continuing in office jobs, church work, farming, quiet desperation at suburban consumerism, butterfly gardening, environmental careers, community building and a whole host of other occupations. At the time, it seemed that most of them were largely misunderstood and their work disregarded by their fellow Christians – while their Christian faith was seen as just another toxin by their environmental friends. Ten years on, A Rocha USA now has a presence in quite a few places with creative initiatives blessing the people and places around them.

To be sure, there are still hot-button topics to argue about if arguing is your thing (it isn’t mine). But controversy and polemic have never been of great interest to people who at heart simply want to serve their communities and the living landscape around them. And when I went from east to west coasts of this great country earlier this year, I discovered that no one is in any doubt that Christians should care about God’s wonderful creation in practical ways. More than that, there was a real awareness that the USA environment, and the people who live in and from it, can only benefit if Christians really did care for the Earth as second nature and as part of their worship of their Creator Lord. For instance, so many farmers are believers and it would surely change the way they farmed. The same goes for town planners, financial decision-makers, homebuilders, gardeners, job seekers, politicians, preachers and pastors. Those who are Christians can either take their vision of how to live with God’s world off the corporate shelf, or they can be inspired by the Holy Spirit and scripture to become a shining reflection of how they understand God to be. He is, after all, the creative loving author of what John Stott reminded us is a wonderful “book of creation” that we need to read well if we are to love it at all.

It must be said that the road from being a mystery to becoming a Christ-like movement hasn’t been an easy one for the first ten years of A Rocha USA’s life. Forgive me talking about such an unBritish subject as money (these days that’s because we don’t have any – before, it was because we got embarrassed - either way, we tend to avoid the topic.) But A Rocha USA discovered that people give to what they care about; and so, with some astonishing and wonderful exceptions, few people gave much support to this emerging movement. Consequently, work began and had to end as funds ran out. There were very few people and so everyone who did get involved soon ended up turning their hand sometimes to work they didn’t feel much good at. Opportunities for field projects had to be shelved as people had to take other work to keep bread on the table or the family housed. It could be seen as frustrating. But I don’t believe it was, because the relationships in the young organisation were forged in a kind of stubborn fire. Furthermore the vision honed itself quite finely because the priorities were set firmly in a time of scarcity. Most of all, a deep conviction took hold of all those who stayed the course that this was good work, and a way of living that God cared about, and so we would see how He would provide for it in His ways and in His time.

All this matters not just in the USA.  American Christianity is a global export and I have much firsthand experience of how environmentally indifferent American Christianity can have devastating effects in the global south with its fragile tropical biotopes. But the opposite can also be true – if a new, creation-friendly believing takes hold in the USA and begins to spread around the world, it will be a true sign of hope for the Earth. So forgive me the carbon of putting those books in a van and taking them with me – they’ll remind me to pray and lift my head again as I unpack them.

*Founder and President of A Rocha International

This October marks A Rocha’s 10^th official anniversary in the USA. I say “official” because many a seed was sown long before that first board meeting October 16, 2000 in our living room in Arlington, Virginia. In his book, Kingfisher’s Fire, which I’ve been rereading of late, A Rocha Founder Peter Harris recalls some of that jet-lagged sowing—from meetings with kindred spirits like Au Sable Institute’s Cal Dewitt and A Rocha USA’s own future founder Ginny Vroblesky to debates with snarling critics like the man who declared, “The Reformation happened to stop people like you!”

Whether warm welcome or cold, however, Peter and his lovely wife Miranda kept coming back to the States, spurred on by the quixotic desire to tilt against American Christendom’s unholy exports of prosperity gospel and rampant consumerism that wreak havoc on people and planet alike by blessing and fueling “aspirations to the kind of wealth which can only be achieved by over-exploiting creation.” And with each return, they watered and weeded and waited, until at last those seeds began to sprout--A Rocha USA poked out.

To continue with the gardening metaphor, the 10 years since have seen yet more watering and weeding and waiting; a (budgetary) drought or two; and now, at last, the first fruits of harvest—projects in 8 communities across the nation with more on the way; education and training programs; and, most encouragingly, growing acceptance by the Church of the biblical mandate to care for the Earth.

In celebration of this milestone, A Rocha USA is having a party—a big party. In fact, we’re inviting 10,000 people to join in the celebration by becoming a fan of A Rocha. It’s simple. It’s quick. It’s free (though if you want to throw a couple of bucks in the hat by the door, who are we to object!) And it’s oh so clever: 10^th year, 10^th month, 10,000 fans. All you have to do is click here and “like” us on Facebook and then ask your friends, family and colleagues to do the same. And make sure to ask your crazy aunt that forwards every chain email to everyone in her address book.

Okay, I admit that it sounds a lot like high school; but just think what 10,000 people could do to help spread the word and build the movement to care for this amazing, yet increasingly damaged Earth! Community gardens planted. Streams cleaned. Forests protected. And more--much, much more. Here in the United States and around the world.

Just think.

And then act—please.

The Earth is hurting. Creation is groaning. We need all hands on deck.

So, please take a half a minute and help spread the word; help heal the planet.

As Peter Harris puts it, “No other context for A Rocha is changing faster than the USA one and maybe no other change is destined to have a greater impact on environmental conditions worldwide.”

Let’s do this.

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