“The mission of the Christ Church Greening Parish Ministry” we’ve said…
“…is to become better stewards of God’s creation—its plants and animals (including human animals) and the ecosystems that sustain them. We educate ourselves, our fellow parishioners, and others about the natural world, the challenges human actions pose to nature and to vulnerable human communities, and how those actions may be amended and natural equilibrium restored.”
The question is, with so much in play and so much at stake, how do we get our heads around our planet’s future? Author Sallie McFague says we start from the basics, as she has: How we think and what we believe.
“What I have learned about who God is, who we are, and where we fit into the scheme of things tells me that the one thing needful in a theology for twenty-first-century North American middle-class Christians is an alternative view of the abundant life from that of our consumer culture. Life Abundant is about this reconstruction. [McFague’s 2000 book Life Abundant: Rethinking Theology and Economy for a Planet in Peril.] We will take as our context for revisioning theology the well-being of our planet and all its creatures, seeing that project against the deterioration of nature and the injustice to poor people that the religion of our time—consumerism—is bringing about. If one believes that ‘the glory of God is all creatures fully alive,’ then our current worldview and its lifestyle are wrong. It is more than that; it is sinful and evil, for it is contrary to God’s will for creation.” (Ed: Emphasis added)
—Sallie McFague, “A Religious Autobiography,” Sallie McFague: Collected Readings, Augsburg, 2013, xvi.
