By Robert Campbell*, Pastor of Santa Margarita Community Church

I tend to think of my garden as an ecological anti-depressant. With absolutely no substantiation other than my own anecdotal experience, I find that nearly every day soil and growing things save me from hopelessness. As a pastor, I work with people--often people with long ingrained habitual problems. This feels so tremendously large on some days that counseling requires an immediate retreat to the garden just outside my study. In the garden, I find that vegetables grow among the weeds and realize there can be good fruit in human hearts where I have found only weeds. I also find that a little nurture does wonders for plants and the same is true for people. Basically, my garden helps remind me of why I refuse to be a fatalist--either human or ecological. I refuse to live in that kind of despair.

Both Christians and non-Christians suffer from an undiagnosed melancholy in regards to issues of the earth, our ecological home. Some find themselves despairing over the grand and overwhelming task of reversing the direction of the earth. The destruction has gone so far, how could we ever bring it back? Others remain unmoved, either affectionately or persuasively by the goodness of what our world is, has been or could be in the future. But when we take God's story as a starting point (and finishing point) of our ecological involvement, it gives us hope that always leads to action in both small and great ways for the good of the world.

Creation as an act of God calls me to hope in the reality of the planet’s goodness
Our world is good because God is good and He created it. This simple theological reasoning provides the opening scene of God’s story;The creation is “good” because the Creator is good. In fact, He is the only consistent standard of good. The present badness that we experience is because of human choice to disregard God as that standard of goodness. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? We continue with those choices today and the ecological fruit becomes more apparent every day. Once we exercised dominion on behalf of God for the continuing goodness of the world, now brokenness and weeds dominate us. Be hopeful, because it was good once, it can be again.

The Exodus as an act of God affirms my hope in the possibility of a better future
In the story of the Exodus, God delivers his people from human-caused slavery and He can deliver us again. The way it is today does not have to be the way it will be tomorrow.  As living proof, believing men and women are daily transformed from the inside out. Countless millions over the ages have been renewed and redeemed. God removed their cold heart of stone and gave them a compassionate heart of flesh. He made them live again as His very own children. Obedient children of God act in simple, daily ways consistent with that new self and this brings about a better future.

The new creation as a future act of God makes my hope in a better future certain
The story of God ends with the renewal of all things. Not their destruction, but their renewal. The Bible describes it as a new heaven and a new earth, always mentioned together. This will be a place where all the original goodness will be restored. We will walk with God, each other and our ecological world as God originally intended. We will properly relate and will properly dominate so that more goodness is seen when we leave a place than when we arrived. This hope is as sure as God Himself.

But, what about...
I see two potential obstacles to this hope: A God obstacle and a scientific obstacle.

Perhaps you simply do not want to bow to God’s story as a starting point. Giving that authority away sounds entirely anathema to you. God forbid, so to speak. Fine. But do realize a few things. First, hope is consistent with God’s story and I dare say it is not consistent with any other. This would explain why hope is largely absent in most ecological movements, perhaps even your own. Secondly, see that this refusal to bow and insist rather on starting with yourself instead of with God mirrors the devil’s trick on Adam and Eve in the original garden--which has resulted in the present despair. It hasn’t worked so far and perhaps it is time for a change.

Say you do believe in God, but this is not the way you were taught to think of creation. You don't believe in its necessity or necessarily even care about what happens to it. After all, there is plenty of other good, God-ordained work to do. In that case, I remind you to look again at the end of the biblical story with a new heaven and a new earth. The two are always found together in the Bible. All things will one day be made right and for now all of creation groans for the children of God to become mature. I encourage you to return to the garden and find hope for the despair of your poor theological training.

Another obstacle to finding hope in God’s story is science, either an over-belief in the ability of science or an under-belief in the reliability of science. Is your hopelessness supported by the scientific data that shows the problem as insurmountable? Be careful here with making science say more than it could possibly say. Science gives us good and useful data, but it says only what is, not what could be. Hope (and despair) goes far beyond the data. Let the good scientific data motivate you, but do not let it take your hope, it is not that kind of information. That would be an over-belief in science. On the other hand, you may doubt the science that says our environment is in trouble. After all, you may feel, science has led to questioning of the biblical account of life’s origins and other values you hold dear. That may be so; however, whether you trust the science or not, you can certainly see with your own eyes the damage that is growing. You can witness the particular effects of your deliberate choices both in your backyard and around the world. Do not let a an under-belief in science’s ability to reliably explain the way things are steal your energy for hopeful action in the world.

Whichever obstacle may stand in your way, God’s story gives hope in the possibility of change--starting with you and me. Just go out in the garden or sprawl on the lawn and let nature preach to you the story of God who created all things, delivers us from our own rightly deserved consequences and will Himself bring about a new, redeemed creation one day. Allow your new-found hope to change your daily experience. Allow it to motivate your daily action. Allow it to become contagious. Something will happen. Tomorrow will be different, tomorrow will be better than today.

 *Robert Campbell is Pastor of Santa Margarita Community Church, an Evangelical Free Church on the Central Coast of California.

By Robert Campbell*, Pastor of Santa Margarita Community Church

I hope you hear the irony intended in the title. I certainly do care about what is happening to our world. But, climate change is merely a symptom. The cause: a lack of care. To address the symptom, we must address its cause. We must begin again to care.

Gaining a distinctly Christian ecology will enable us to care. It will free us to live more consistently in our world...and it will be good both for us and for our world. And the effects of climate change will be reduced  as you and I are radically transformed in heart, mind and actions.

Beginning with your heart...As you believe that God is distinct from all of creation, bowing to His ownership of all things, you will actually honor the tree as a fellow creature, just for being a tree. As you honor the tree you will honor God whose goodness is reflected in a tree much more than in a cathedral, you will find your place in the world…and you will begin to reduce the effects of climate change (more on this in Part I).

Considering your mind...As you understand your role as a steward of God’s world, your actions will begin to bring good to the Earth…and we will reduce the effects of climate change (more on this in Part II).

Now, considering what kind of actions flow naturally from that heart and mind, the Scriptures teach,

The Lord God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there He placed the man whom He had formed…Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. Gen. 2:8, 15

God, who our story begins with, had a purpose for us in creation. He intended for us to cultivate and keep the garden that He called “good.”  Our role is to take care of it and bring its good fruit on His behalf. God planned for us to act as He would act toward His world. If we believe that God owns all things and we are His stewards then we will use His world toward His ends. What is His end? That His world would reflect His goodness and that you and I would see that reflection and worship Him.

These beliefs enable a new kind of living that is built one brick at a time. But what kind of life is consistent with belief in God and is working towards God's end? Here are a few thoughts on living in God's world with both people and place for God's end.

Live like you are free

The heart that believes in God's ownership and that takes stewardship seriously is free to live in joy. God created the world out of the overflow of His happiness. Therefore our life in this world can be good and joyous because the Earth is good and joyous. You are free to live for the purpose of God within the boundaries of God in a world He created, in part, for your joy. You can now arrange the details positively without fear.

Starting anywhere other than with God will just leave us with the false religion of guilt and fear: "The world will end if you drive another mile!" As A Rocha's Dave Timmer has written so beautifully, "Environmental legalism is still legalism." He goes on to say,

Creation care is so much more than taking the reusable tote to the grocery store, changing light bulbs, or eating organic produce. It is so much more than even giving everything we own to the poor. It is following Jesus. Creation care is reaching to grasp what God is doing in the places where we live.

Beyond the “Green” Commandments

Worship results when we live in light of God's joyous freedom in our world rather than from the fear and despair that comes from the preaching of imminent doom. Believe God, not the doomsday prophets. The first thing we must do is to relax; we have the right starting point.

Live like this is home

Our community has an annual clean-up day every May. Just after the storms end, we head out to serve our older neighbors, paint the downtown benches and pull weeds in the Santa Margarita Demonstration Forest. As my family I and freed the magnificent native plants from the encroachment of invading grasses, I remembered something true and important. Since the fall of mankind in the original garden, the natural tendency of all things earthly is toward weeds and thorns. If we just let it go, the world would end up covered in Star Thistle and Kudzu. No, we have a part in these things! Humans are not unnatural. You belong here. The word "ecology" simply means the study of home. God's world is our home. Worship results when we live like we belong here, like this is home. First, relax because you have started with God and then commit to the place where you actually live.

Live like you have hope

I am not suggesting that the current state of the environment is not dire and in need of our attention. It is! I am suggesting that the pagan religious action of much of the secular environmental movement is not needed and probably not adequate for solving the problem. All environmental action is religious action. Every action happens within a story, defines a problem, banks its hope on some form of redemption and then establishes a set of actions consistent with that religious belief. A distinctly Christian ecology does so most adequately because it is true to the way things actually are.

When God created all things good, He also put into it a created purpose to bring about good and He intends that it will one day achieve that end in spite of the brokenness that we inflict on our world everyday. Right now, our world is not as it should be!

The manner of that redemption is what Christians call the “good news.” God Himself has entered into His created world in order to take the brokenness and wrong seriously and to put the pieces back together. I am suggesting that Jesus is the only true ecologist. He lived in light of God's story and assessed the problem rightly as being rooted in the heart of mankind. He sacrificed Himself in order to set things right by forgiving our true guilt, carrying away our real shame and removing the need for blame. In calling us to “follow Him,” we not only enable our people to find forgiveness, but live all of life under the Lordship of King Jesus, doing His will in our place.

Worship results when (1) we enjoy the freedom that comes from starting with God, (2) commit to the place we call home and (3) live in the hope that God's redemption in Jesus has restored us and then join Him in restoring the world, its people and its places. I call that a redemptive dominion, ruling as God would rule if He were here doing it Himself.

A call to act as distinctly Christian ecologists

These truths force us to act. We cannot wash our hands of it. We must act in light of God's redemption in Jesus. That is the role of the local church and A Rocha serves as a support in the Church's call to action.

As a local church Pastor, I believe that the local church should care about conservation because it (the church) is God's way of getting his people in the right place for the job of redemptive dominion. The church is a local gathering of believers. It's a gathering of people defined by their faith in Jesus and the dirt they walk on. We are a people that always have a place. We are concerned with the real people and places that we are sent to. Local is always personal. When we act locally, we put ourselves in a position to suffer from our decisions. When we act locally, we act freely and with hope in the place we call home. When we act locally, we love our neighbors.

My local church lives in a place called Santa Margarita, California. Our ecology works out there, with the people that live there with us. 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, Chris and Brandon, 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. (I have developed these thoughts further on another A Rocha USA blog post) My main point here is that, for the average person, to act as a distinctly Christian ecologist involves simply making our daily decisions in a way that results in worship.

A Rocha serves the local church in a unique way by guiding us to remember that people are always placed and to bring those called to the vocation of science, agriculture etc. to serve the rest of us in the local church for the purpose of worship. And just like the local church, the work of A Rocha is placed.

•  A Rocha is working to restore and protect a watershed in northwest Washington.
  
•  A Rocha is working with food distribution programs in Santa Barbara, CA to give food grown at the Five Loaves Farm to low-income families.
•  A Rocha is restoring and protecting headwaters of the Frio river in the hill country of Texas.
•  A Rocha is partnering with the local church and Land Conservancy in San Luis Obispo, California to educate children about the place where they live.

In all of these places, A Rocha is just a gathering of believers like you, who belong to local churches. Those believers have developed a distinctly Christian ecology and are living in the light of God's story in a particular place with a particular people...and that daily, immediate action is limiting the symptoms of climate change.

 *Robert Campbell is Pastor of Santa Margarita Community Church, an Evangelical Free Church on the Central Coast of California. Part I, II and III of this series of essays comes from remarks delivered in the SLO A Rocha "Christian Ecology Series", March, April and May 2011 (TBA).

By Robert Campbell*, Pastor of Santa Margarita Community Church

My children both got sick on the same night. One after the other, in about a 15 minute window. I really don’t like seeing my little one’s feeling bad. It breaks my heart. I sit there, trying to be of some comfort, when there is very little I can actually do to make it better. That is, except when they are both sick. When they both got sick, I got mad. They should have known that I was already tired that night after a long day of pastoral work. The world was a better place at 9 pm than it was at 9 am and those sick kids should have been more compassionate to their old Dad in honor of my good works. How dare they!

Of course I don’t get mad at them for their sickness, that would be ridiculous, bordering on the evil. But I don’t care about the sickness either. I care about my son and my daughter who picked up a virus and are now suffering the effects of it.

Obviously, I don’t mean that I don’t care about climate change. I most certainly do. And yet, climate change is simply the effects of the virus we are suffering. To cure a virus we must address the cause and not just the symptoms. You and I are the cause. So, rather than addressing symptoms, I am addressing you, the person whose actions are contributing to the effects of climate change and all manner of destructive impacts on our beautiful world. I care about your thinking that leads to those actions and, most importantly, I care about what you believe that enables your thinking that justifies your actions and has effects such as climate change.

Believing rightly about our world

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth.” The Bible teaches that the entire universe is created by God. God alone is the uncreated creator of all things. He is distinct and independent from all of His creation. He was never created and depends upon no one for His beginning. Likewise, there is no one and nothing upon which He depends for His ongoing existence. If God had need, He would cease to be God. Do you see the implications of this for creation? If God is truly self-sufficient, the He created all things out of pure pleasure, not out of some lack in Himself. He is distinct, but certainly not disinterested. He is independent, but not uninvolved. God is distinct from both creation in general and from mankind in particular. So, while trees and oceans, snowy plovers and kangaroo rats are not equal to God, neither are men and women, boys and girls. All of us that make up this world are fellow creatures of God and under God.

Take the grove of coastal live oaks that populate the hillside near my home. How should I feel about them as one who believes in God who created all things? Maintaining a proper distinction between creator and creatures helps avoid two extremes. First, I can avoid the need to raise the tree to a semi-divine status in order to give it sufficient value to deserve respect. On the other hand, I am bound to that ancient forest as a fellow creature. God made those trees, just as God made me. The tree is good because it is a tree, not because it has use to me as a natural resource. In first honoring God as the creator of all things I also learn to honor His creation. Likewise, as I honor the oaks, I honor God.

“The Earth is the Lord’s and all it contains.” As the independent creator of all things God also owns all things. When He made it, He declared it to be VERY good, just like Himself. He also put into it a created purpose to bring about good and He intends that it will one day achieve that end in spite of the brokenness that we inflict on our world everyday. (The manner of that redemption is what Christians call the “good news.” God Himself enters in to His created world in order to take the brokenness and wrong seriously and to put the pieces back together, but that is a story for another day.) The point here is that God owns the world and retains the rights to it. All of our use, enjoyment and abuse are accountable to Him and the ends for which He created the world.

If that God owns all things, then I must bow before His ownership and seek to use the world towards His ends. Without this belief, I would be free to use the world for my own ends. I could see everything simply as a “natural resource.” But it is not a resource, it’s a tree and God owns it. It’s not “biomass,” its the flesh of a cow and God owns it. We may not take our identity from it as an “environmentalist” and we may not exploit it for our own ends. God owns the food we eat, the fuel we use to drive, and the water we bathe in. God owns it and intends that His goodness be communicated to the people around us by the way that we use it.

As you believe that God is distinct from all of creation, bowing to His ownership of all things, you will actually honor the tree as a fellow creature, just for being a tree. As you honor the tree you will honor God whose goodness is reflected in a tree much more than in a cathedral, you will find your place in the world…and you will immediately minimize the effects of climate change.

Click here to listen to the Part I- God is Owner podcast.

*Robert Campbell is Pastor of Santa Margarita Community Church, an Evangelical Free Church on the Central Coast of California. Part I, II and III of this series of essays comes from remarks delivered in the SLO A Rocha "Christian Ecology Series", March, April and May 2011 (TBA).

by Robert Campbell*

Did you know know there was a Green Bible? I don’t mean green in color, but green in perspective. That is, an environmentally friendly, ecologically responsible Bible. It is printed on recycled material and all the biblical passages which emphasize creation care are printed in GREEN, kinda like the old King James printed the words of Jesus in red. The Bible’s website says, “With over 1,000 references to the earth in the Bible, compared to 490 references to heaven and 530 references to love, the Bible carries a powerful message for the earth.” Sure that is nearly mock-able right there, but that is not my beef with The Green Bible. The great value of this printing of the Bible lies in the introduction packed with fantastic essays on creation stewardship by internationally leading thinkers and authors. People such as Bishop Desmond Tutu, Bishop NT Wright and Matthew Sleeth, formerly with A Rocha USA, an organization to which I am heartily dedicated.

Now, by these descriptions, I am a “green” Christian. I believe that when God created men and women in His image, He instilled in us the responsibility to act as He would act towards His creation. It is His creation; we are stewards. I believe that Christians CANNOT be responsible to the biblical great commission to evangelize and disciple people if we ignore the place where they live. In fact, I believe that a Christian cannot love people without loving the place those people live. I live a life that seeks to exercise personal stewardship for both the people and the place God has placed me among. My neighbor eats and drinks; my care for his food and his water is love for him. So, know that my beef with The Green Bible has nothing to do with environmental responsibility.

On the other side of things, my beef with The Green Bible is not that it could possibly imply that there is a neutrality between Christian creation care and secular environmental activists. Non-Christians approach the subject with their own religious presuppositions, such as the Sierra Club who endorses The Green Bible. The Green Bible demonstrates common ground, but that must not be misconstrued as neutrality.

My real beef is with the cows in the Green Bible. Here is what I mean. One of the most beautiful passages of holy scripture that addresses God’s sovereign care of creation is Psalm 104. In Psalm chapter 104 God causes the rain to fall on the mountains, God carves the beds of streams that lead the waters from the mountains to the plains where it waters the grasses for cows to eat…and people eat the cows. It is a beautiful divinely ordered picture of creation in which we are reminded of something forgotten in our day, cows eat grass, which we cannot eat, and produce from that grass milk and meat, which we can eat.

So, the problem? It lies in where the green letters turn black. Nearly the entire Psalm is printed in green letters, as it should be. But the there is this one black verse in the midst of sea of green. The black verse, 23, reads this way,

“People go out to their work, and to their labor until the evening.”

Really? Do people and their work not fit into “passages that speak to God’s care for creation?” Cows, water and grass are part of God’s care for creation, but people  and work are not. This is the presentation of The Green Bible.

The Bible itself, regardless of color, tells a very different story. Genesis chapters 1 and 2 tells the story of God, who eternally exists as 3 persons, creating all things that culminates on the 6th day. On the 6th day God creates living creatures that move on the earth and differentiates between their kinds and He is differentiated as a Trinity. God then creates mankind, male and female, equally bearing God’s image, again differentiated in gender as God is differentiated. And then culminates in the assigning of male and female to rule under Him for the good of the whole creation. Genesis chapter 2 elaborates on day 6 by making it very clear that God created the garden first, then put people there to work it! The man and the women were to cultivate the garden so that God’s goodness and glory built into it would be more clearly seen when the people leave than when they arrived.

This is a biblical view of creation care. Mankind, living under the rule of God, working hard so that both people and place are better, more clearly reflect God, after our use. We are stewards, not owners. Psalm 104:23 should be in a darker green! A biblical ecology hinges on the way that people work the land they actually live on.

So, simply stated, my beef is that The Green Bible, at least in Psalm 104 presents a highly unbiblical view of ecology.

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

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*

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.