A Rocha USA Blog

by Tom Rowley, Executive Director of A Rocha USA

In cities and towns across the United States, Christian faith is hard at work—well beyond the stained glass and steeples. It may not be obvious. But it’s there. It’s there in healthcare, housing and education. It’s present in programs for the hungry, the addict and the abused. It’s even in the gym. And I’m not simply referring to the faith of the many Christians who work in these arenas, but to the institutional identities themselves. Indeed, faith has long been a driving force in the founding of organizations and services that enhance our communities--from Jesuit schools to Methodist hospitals, from pregnancy centers and food pantries to Habitat for Humanity and the YMCA.

Now imagine those services weren’t there, that faith was missing in action. Picture your community with gaping holes in this fabric of faith-driven works that fosters health and wholeness in society, blessing those who serve as much as those who are served.

Sadly, just such a gap exists in most communities today—one left by Christians ignoring and in some cases actively opposing the biblical mandate to care for the Earth, which God created and called "very good."

Both the excuses for and the results of our abdication are many. Political divisions, economic tradeoffs and differences over the cause and severity of challenges and the choice of solutions make environmental stewardship controversial for many believers. Bad theology that twists humanity’s dominion into a license to exploit and despoil only complicates matters. Excuses notwithstanding, anything but the most jaded reading of the Bible reveals that throughout Old Testament and New God’s people are instructed to lovingly steward ALL that God created.

And when we haven’t, care of creation has fallen to those whose motivations and methods are often at odds with what the Bible teaches. Earth care can become Earth worship. Humans can be seen as just another species at best, pests at worst. And in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges, despair becomes the order of the day.

Fortunately, things are changing.

Christians are starting to add the non-human portion of creation to our care list. We are going green--at least green-ish. We’re recycling and putting up clotheslines. We’re taking shorter showers, eating more locally grown food and putting fewer miles on the car and more on the bicycle (or Birkenstocks, for the really crunchy). We’ve even swapped Styrofoam for ceramic to hold our organic, shade-grown, fair-trade, fellowship-hall coffee. All to the good and to God’s glory. But is that enough? Is there anything more we as God’s stewards ought to be doing?

For some, the answers to those questions may well be “Yes, that’s enough. And no, I don’t need to do anything more.” Fair enough.

Others, in growing numbers, are carrying their care for creation out into their communities. Following the lead of those who earlier sought the “peace and prosperity of the city” by building hospitals and high schools, these followers of Jesus are now planting organic gardens that help both people and pollinators; cleaning and protecting streams, lakes and entire watersheds; planting trees; removing invasive species; running creation-care workshops; building nature trails and more. All to the good and to God’s glory.

Many of these efforts—I’m tempted to say the best of them—work with and help secular groups who also care for the creation albeit without knowing, much less worshipping, the Creator. And while that help is at times met with skepticism if not hostility, humility and hard work go a long way toward overcoming even the most strident objections.

What the creation groans for, and the unbelieving world needs to see from those who claim to love the Creator, is a little less talk and a lot more action. When we do that, when we go and preach the Gospel to all creation using, as St. Francis puts it, "words if necessary", we will begin at last to fill that gaping hole in our communities and in God’s wondrous yet beleaguered creation. And just as with healthcare and housing, feeding and teaching, and every other act of giving, those who serve will be blessed as much as those who are served.

By John Humphreys

I subscribe to the BRILLIANT “Parasite of the Day” web page.

As the organizers put it – “The United Nations declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity. In celebration of the enormous diversity of parasites and to highlight their importance, we created this blog, which showcased a species of parasite every day. Now that 2010 is over, we will continue to add more parasites from time to time.”

All the way through 2010, all of us subscribers were entertained, educated and disgusted in equal measure by the extraordinary variety of organisms which make their living off other creatures.
Some are more-or-less tolerable for the host: the mistletoe, which all of us love to kiss under, is not often lethal to the tree it grows on and the ubiquitous head louse is merely an irritation to us, although has school districts and parents up in arms when they see it.

Some are genuinely spectacular – like the largest flower in the world, sported by the rainforest parasite Rafflesia arnoldii. Others are actually parasitoids rather than parasites because, simply, they always kill their host – the newly discovered and very worrying “white nose syndrome”, a fungus that chokes hibernating bats, is a case in point.

Then there are the plutocrats of the parasite world – the hyperparasites, who parasitize parasites themselves. An example is the tiny wasp Caenacis inflexa, which attacks other wasps like Eurytoma rosae and Glyphomerus stigma…which themselves are parasitic on  the “gall wasp” Diplolepis rosae…the ecology of plant galls is endlessly fascinating.

Of course, there are some genuinely terrifying creatures like the nightmare-inducing tongue-eating louse and the ghastly crab-controlling barnacle.

Now, many of these beasts…and plants…and fungi…have exquisitely exacting tastes. They may only target one single organism to live off. While this type of deal must have some advantages for the parasite, there is one enormous downside: your host dies out, you die out.

Which leads me to the tick, Ixodes neuquensis. It is only found on a gorgeous little opossum-like creature, the (confusingly named) ‘mountain monkey’ Dromiciops gliroides. This charming little thing lives in South America and its forest home is being torn down.
When it goes, when it is gone forever, and two things will happen.

Firstly, we will never see it alive again. Films don’t do the same for me, sorry. It will be gone, and nothing this side of the Second Coming can bring it back.

Secondly, a variety of living creatures dependent on it will join it in oblivion. Not just the tick and other parasites; this marsupial mammal is the only known way that a unique plant –Tristerix corymbosus, a type of mistletoe - can spread its seeds (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dromiciops_gliroides and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristerix).

Ironically this mistletoe only parasitizes two cacti. So the whole ecosystem is teetering on the edge of oblivion. As I say ad nauseam, the only way for you and I to do anything about this is to help preserve the forest. And spread the word. Thanks for reading.

Cute, almost gone.

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).