Philippines: teaching children to care for God’s creation

“Our plan last year for school visits did not happen, as the principal (and all other schools too) are under pressure to make more of an effort to improve children’s reading skills,” write Eric and Sandra Read. Eric and Sandra were hoping to have school groups visit their farm as part of their work of teaching children and youth to enjoy, appreciate and care for nature, and encouraging and practising creation care-centred food production. Now that schools have increased focus on other things, pray for wisdom to know how to move forward with teaching local children to look after God’s creation.

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A journey through justice and environment

The morning dew clings to grass stems as I walk through the garden, reminded of how God tends to his creation. There’s something profound in this simple act of care – the way the earth sustains life, the delicate balance of ecosystems, the intricate web of relationships between all living things. It’s a reflection of how God cares for us, and how we’re called to care for his creation.

This spring, we’re inviting you to explore this divine calling through our Justice and Environment module, running from 31 March to 4 April. It’s an exciting journey that will take you from city streets to rural pathways, examining what it means to be image bearers of God in today’s world.

Rediscover our call

The biblical narrative begins with humans placed in a garden, given the profound responsibility to tend and keep it – שמר (shamar). It’s the same word used to describe how God watches over and protects his people. When we read in Psalm 121 that God “neither slumbers nor sleeps” as he keeps Israel, we see the depth of care we’re called to mirror in our relationship with creation.

Yet somewhere along the way, we’ve lost sight of this calling. We’ve separated earth care from theology, as if caring for creation were somehow peripheral to our faith. Nothing could be further from the truth. When God created humans in his image, he called us to reflect his character in every aspect of life, including our relationship with the earth and its inhabitants.

Immersion experience

Our five-day module explores this calling in both urban and rural contexts. The first part immerses you in city life, where we’ll grapple with environmental challenges in concrete jungles and examine how justice issues intersect with earth care. The latter part takes us to rural settings, where we’ll experience firsthand the rhythms of creation and explore sustainable practices that honour our role as image bearers.

This isn’t just another environmental course. It’s a deep exploration into understanding our identity as God’s representatives on earth. We’ll examine how Christ’s redemptive work encompasses all creation and what that means for our mission today. Through practical experiences, theological reflection, and community engagement, you’ll develop a rich understanding of how to embody God’s caring presence in your own context.

Journey with others

You’ll engage with others who share your commitment to justice and earth care, building networks that can support your ministry long after the module ends.

Think of it as a journey of discovery – discovering what it truly means to tend and keep as God tends and keeps, to care as God cares, to protect as God protects. We’ll explore how this calling shapes our approach to contemporary challenges, from urban development to rural sustainability, from social justice to environmental care.

Becoming image bearers

By the end of our time together, you’ll have not only a deeper theological understanding but also practical tools and strategies for implementing earth and people care initiatives in your own context. You’ll see how our calling as image bearers shapes everything from local church ministry to community development.

The earth reminds us daily of God’s faithful care. Each sunrise speaks of his constancy, each raindrop of his provision, each growing seed of his nurturing presence. As his image bearers, we’re called to reflect that same faithful care in our relationship with creation and each other.

Will you join us on this journey of discovery? Come explore what it means to be God’s image bearers in a world crying out for care and justice.

To register or learn more about the Justice and Environment module, contact Helen Harwood on pioneer@churchmissionsociety.org

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Diploma student – and Irish Capuchin Franciscan Friar – Ade Green talks about his journey to joining a religious order, the revelations of study at CMS, and how to live hopefully in eco-crisis.

Ade, can you tell us a bit about your background, your life of faith?

Yes. Well, I grew up in Plymouth where my parents, John and Judith, had settled after my dad’s time in the RAF was finished. At this time my sister and I went to Sunday services at our local Anglican church, St Pancras’.

My dad is Catholic but following the death of his father when my dad was in his early teens, he became, in his words, very “angry with God”. However, he did rediscover faith, and my mum was then received into the Catholic Church, and we all were regular churchgoers from then on. In my teens, not anger but disappointment led me to ‘forget’ about faith.

Looking back, I can see that I never really stopped believing in God and that Jesus was his Son who had made all things new, but I just couldn’t bring myself to be a Christian! I found out later that I already was.

I went on a bit of a spiritual pilgrimage, taking in the sights, sounds, and teachings of Buddhism, Hinduism, Communism, Indigenous spirituality, among others, and ended this seeking and searching at a Catholic church in Bristol called Holy Cross. In all the other places I had visited there seemed to be something missing, at Holy Cross I realised it was somebody not something – it was Jesus.

As I feel like I mature in my faith life, the more I am able to see that none of the experiences I had on this pilgrimage are wasted or to be rejected. They enrich who I am, and the way in which I walk in faith.

In 2015, I became a Capuchin Franciscan, by which I mean I joined a religious order. I am now perpetually professed, and forever more to be known as Brother Ade!

In more recent times I have stumbled my way through a sort of ecological conversion. I was asked by the order to spend some time at our place in Donegal, Ireland, called Ards Friary. (An answer to prayer. Four years before this I had spent a little time there and prayed that I might get to live there at some point.)

It was at that time that an awareness of my own disconnect from creation had begun to sprout. I am now convinced of our ecological nature as being something created. We are natural and native by God’s intention. This has deepened my faith and changed the way I see and act.

I understand that your Capuchin Order, Franciscan base in Ireland is expanding, but not with people, can you tell us more and paint us a picture of this rural idyll and how it related to your faith?

Aye!! In the last while we have welcomed a small herd of Dexter cows to the Friary.

Our place, Ards Friary, is situated in 240 acres of upland coastal land. This land, once under the ownership of Anglo-Irish landlords, has seen substantial landscaping, and is a mixture of woodland, farmland, wild coastal land, and parkland.

County Donegal is rugged and beautiful, with great mountain ranges, deep oak woodlands, and flocks and herds munching away. Ards Friary is flanked on one side by woodlands with a long and ancient oak wood heritage, and on the other by Sheep Haven Bay, an inlet of the North Atlantic, where we often see seals, and (less often) dolphins playing among the surfers. It extends out to Pointe nagCappal, a wilding area that opens out to views of the North Atlantic and leads to the rest of the peninsula managed by the Irish Forestry service (Coillte) which is around 4,000 acres of forest and coast.

In 2021 – I think – I was asked to pack my bags and head over to Donegal. There was no real plan for me there. I was to spend the last year of my formation there, I suppose to make sure I was ready to commit myself for life to the Capuchin way.

After a little while of being there, I was handed the proposed Land Management Plan that had been drawn up as part of a broader regeneration plan for our holistic life in Ards Friary. I was asked if I could learn how to make this plan a reality.

This is where I began a deep dive into Ecology, Regenerative Farming, Agrarianism, Permaculture, Woodland Management (even getting myself certified as a chainsaw operator).

I began to see where my belief that I am a created child of God and my belief that I am a member of the community of beings of Earth connected, and what this meant for us as a community.

It became clear to me that the best reason to respond to the poly-crises facing us at the moment was that we are both natural and native beings, and that this is what God created us to be. Human Beings, part of a great Ecology of Creation. This has led me to believe that a significant part of my vocation is to farm, and that farming is a spiritual life common to all human cultures.

I know from conversations with you that you certainly seem to have a handle on all things green. Can you share some of your environmental and creation care thinking with us?

Well, as I mentioned earlier, I am now convinced that the human person is both a natural being, and a native one. This means that we are meant to be part of nature; not an outsider, but an insider, and that our home is the earth and heaven, and these are not exclusive. So, to care for creation, the first commandment of God to humans in the Bible, is actually the most natural thing for us to do. To discover this reality is to be truly humble (of the earth), and I suppose gives us a deep reason to change the way we see and act.

One question that always emerges when I think about this kind of stuff is: “If we are natural and native, and it is natural for us to look after the place we are native to, why don’t we?”

It’s a good question, and not an easy one to answer if we are looking for a universal answer that is true for the whole history of humanity. For instance, we can suggest that we are currently dealing with the consequences of a post second world war scarcity mentality, but this doesn’t really explain the whole of the development of industrial agricultural practices that have contributed significantly to the mess we find ourselves in.

I do wonder if the Genesis story of Adam and Eve illustrates for us something fundamental. That we humans seem to not trust in the abundance promised and brought into being by God. Adam and Eve took rather than received. This is something we can see in the world right now – a tendency to take what we want rather than receive what we need!

So, for me, it is important to change those actions in our daily lives that contribute to pollution, climate change, poverty. It is also vital for the future generations that we seek our own naturalness and nativeness, so that we inhabit our place in creation in such a way that we pass on health, joy, and possibility. The first without the second will not be sufficient to heal the wounds we have inflicted, and to look forward to an abundant future for all.

For us Franciscans, and I think for all of us, one way to express all this is that we are brothers and sisters in Creation, and with all beings human and non-human, and when we act from this, we will only be a force for the good of all.

So, on to CMS, please remind us about the course you have been on at CMS and how you are finding it?

This year I have been taking the first year of the Diploma in Theology, Mission, and Ministry.

There are two aspects of studying at CMS that are really important to me. The first is the actual study itself, the content and methodology of teaching are new ways of doing theology for me. The emphasis on theology and praxis as partners has really opened up for me a different way of approaching the intellectual foundations of my own work.

Second, the community at CMS, admin, tutors, and students, are, in my experience, authentic in their desire to connect, support, and educate. There is not a sense that this is just a place to learn, it is also a place to build friendships and community.

What has been especially significant for you in your studies here at CMS? I understand you are now going to be studying the MA with us, so there must have been some lightbulb moments?

Most definitely. I think the most significant is the Practical Theological approach. Exploring practical theology has really opened my mind, and heart, to theology in a new way. I suppose, in some sense I was reluctant to take on theological study, as it didn’t seem too relevant to the kinds of work that have emerged in recent years. I am also a stubborn believer that knowledge does not need validation: if something is true it doesn’t matter to me who says it. (I think St Augustine says something similar in the Confessions!)

Discovering an approach to thinking theologically that also takes seriously experience and practice has been almost revelatory for me. Studying the MA is the next step in this process.

Finally, Ade, how can we pray for you?

Maybe we can pray together to discover our natural and native truth, and to be humble enough to accept our place in creation, and to act as brothers and sisters to each other – human and non-human.

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Growing faith: Ethiopian Church Forests and how they might inspire the theology, mission and praxis of churches in East London

by Rachel Summers

Introduction

As a forest school practitioner, living and working among trees is something I really value. This is in part due to the feeling of wellbeing that being in a green space engenders, partly because being in nature is a crucial part of my spirituality, and partly because of the hope it gives me to be surrounded by wild green growing space at this time of climate emergency. Knowing this, a friend sent me a link to an article in The Guardian showcasing Kieran Dodds’s book about Church Forests in Ethiopia,¹ which set me wondering about the links between these and the wild churchyard I was beginning to minister in in East London.

Reading more about the concept of Church Forests, I found the idea inspiring. I loved the way in which the worshipping community was deeply rooted within the land, intrinsically linked with their faith and spirituality. The way in which they cared for the land, and it for them, and this reminded me of a UK folk song: “I’ll be good to the land and the land will be good to me.”² Could listening to the wisdom from Ethiopia help me to uncover some things of God that were happening in our churchyards, even in urban East London?

To this end, I identified three worshipping communities in Church of England churches in East London, my own context. All were interested in rewilding their churchyard and green spaces, albeit with differing amounts of resources. I would visit each site to sit, wander and make observations. I would gather individuals and small groups for conversations, listening to their experience of the churchyard, and the relationship between the rewilding of it and their faith. I wanted to celebrate what was happening on the ground in East London, and to tie that in with something that appeared to be similar on another continent. I was keen to discover what things of faith might be growing among the wildflowers and ivy.

I was clear that I did not want to look in on an African phenomenon purely through Western eyes. To this end, I sought out Ethiopian voices speaking about Church Forests, ecology and eco-theology, and reflected what they might have to contribute to eco-theological discourse in the UK. My interviews would focus on the communities inhabiting churches in East London, listening to their experiences around the work they already do within their church grounds, and spending time in those spaces myself to listen to the silent voices of place.

Eco-theology

It is increasingly clear that for the continuation of life on Earth and our more authentic discipleship, we must develop a theology that embraces and helps us make sense of ecological issues. The risk is that we may be tempted into a hierarchical view of creation, placing us, as humans, at its head.

Although the concept of humans as stewards of God’s good creation can be used in a positive way, the concept is only one short step away from the notion of a transactional relationship. For too long, Western attitudes towards ecology have grown out of a colonial mindset, where engaging with creation means stepping into a position of control and ownership, focussing on us as “exercising dominion”.³ This may take benign, or even positive forms, such as the current slew of overactive bug hotel-making and tree-planting, but it still is planted in the soil of wanting to make our mark on the world.

Walter Brueggemann, an Old Testament scholar, unpacks the relationships between God, God’s people and the land itself, arguing that they demonstrate a “triangular interdependence of creator, human creatures, and other non-human creatures. This mode of thought moves toward an equitable justice among the creatures…”⁴ There is a relationship between human life and the natural world, between God and humans, and between God and the natural world. All three of these exist interdependently of each other, with equal validity, and each affects the others.

A traditional understanding of ecology, within many Majority World contexts, is deeply rooted in a sense of connection with and of being part of the land. Daniel K. Lagat, writing from Kenya, explains that “People who appreciate the role of God in nature, and who respond by giving offerings of thanksgiving after the harvest, are easily drawn towards environmental management.”⁵ He believes that in such a context, it is only a short step for the church to play a major role in unlocking the potential for environmental solutions from the people.

In this article (based on my dissertation), I am taking a deeper look through one particular eco-theological lens from the Majority World: that of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church (EOTC), specifically considering their relationship with the land around their church buildings and monasteries. David Goodin, an American theologian with an ecology background, Ethiopian ecologist Alemayehu Wassie and Margaret Lowman, a forest canopy ecology researcher, explain that “Remnant eastern Afromontane forests survive in the northern highlands of Ethiopia, which are currently protected by the EOTC. These ‘church forests’ (as they are known) are biodiversity preserves of critical importance for the future of Ethiopia, and also spiritual enclaves that are home to churches, monasteries, and other ecclesial lands actively managed by the EOTC clergy.”⁶ These Church Forests exist due to the theology of the EOTC, but it seems they also influence the spirituality of the members of the EOTC as those members interact with them, use them, protect them and build a relationship with them.

Tsehai Berhane-Selassie, an Ethiopian theologian, writes: “It is clear that Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity understands nature in a holistic manner. Nature includes human and invisible beings, trees, waters, forests and other land features, even air and invisible space and political structures such as a country… What is more, all aspects of nature and human experience can be derived from Orthodox theology.”⁷ This theological understanding of ecology has worked out in practice into a situation where “the surroundings of many churches are home to wild animals which have almost disappeared elsewhere”.⁸

A spirituality shaped by the green spaces held as holy impacts upon those very green spaces. Goodin, Wassie and Lowman quote a study from the tropical ecologist Frans Bongers that illustrates this well:

“Church followers are very committed to develop the forests, improve their quality and help in extension of the forests. In contrast, the same people are hardly motivated to help governmental institutions in reforestation programs” (Bongers et al.: 41). This is a most significant finding. There is something with respect to their status as holy sites that motivates the people in ways that economic self-interest simply cannot.⁹

This feels like an extremely pertinent point to explore for those of us wrestling with a church community and a country who appear to be content sleepwalking into environmental disaster. Perhaps supporting our Christian community to explore their theology from the ecological grounding modelled by our siblings in Ethiopia might precipitate committed action.

Despite the many differences, there are also similarities between the churches of East London and those of Ethiopia. Both are facing a climate catastrophe of human making. The churches of Ethiopia may be oases of green in a deforested desertifying landscape; the churches of East London could also be oases of biodiversity in the desert of urban sprawl. I wondered to what extent the concrete and asphalt might already be influencing our theology. Certainly, it implies a world where humans are put in a position of control over the natural environment, where creation is valued only for what it is financially worth.

Results and analysis/discussion

Within East London, I visited three different church settings, given pseudonyms here. St John’s, the old village church in the centre of the historic village at the heart of what is now a major urban conurbation in this borough, is in many ways the civic church of the area. It has a large congregation and an even larger fringe congregation. It is set within the wealthiest part of this area, although still with significant pockets of deprivation. St Paul’s was built as a chapel of ease to St John’s in the early Victorian era, as the residential project spread further afield right up to the forest margins. Epping Forest itself was set within specific bounds and given to the people of London in perpetuity by Queen Victoria, and this shaped the limits of the borough as residential expansion could continue no farther. St Monica’s is a large, red-brick built church from the later Victorian era, surrounded by dense Victorian terrace and on the verge of being overshadowed by newer multistorey housing blocks. A few streets away there is a park, but apart from this there is little greenery to disrupt an otherwise entirely human-built landscape. It has a small- to mid-sized vibrant congregation with a large number of first and second-generation Filipinos making up the majority of those who worship there.

Wassie, researching the Church Forests in his home context of Ethiopia, outlined a variety of ways in which the green spaces around the churches and monasteries were able to act as a blessing to the community and those worshipping as part of it. I was interested to discover in which ways similar blessings might exist in the East London churches I was studying, as well as how much, and in what ways, being invested in their hyperlocal ecology had affected the theology of those in these churches.

A space for practical use

Wassie writes that “Forests serve as classrooms for the traditional church school and provide a quiet shady environment.”¹⁰ Creating and nurturing the green spaces around these East London churches has filled something of a similar role. At St Monica’s, I had a conversation with a mixed group of Filipino, Jamaican and Irish adults after a midweek mass. I was told that “We actually been using some of the space to have the kids involved… all the children with the wheelbarrow” [sic].¹¹ This church community were keen to utilise the space around their church to teach traditional skills around gardening and growing plants. At St John’s, the space was also used for education, as an interviewee explained: “Part of my remit is to engage volunteers and to teach gardening.”¹² In my observation at St Paul’s, I noted that there is a log circle round a fire pit, which is “used once a month for an outdoor Sunday school focussed on creation theology, and every Friday for a forest school group that meets in the church grounds”.¹³ There is a growing sense in East London that land-based skills are important for the future, yet are in danger of being forgotten. For urban churches to provide the land in which these skills can be taught and passed on is a real gift.

A space for spiritual connection

Wassie states also that “Forests create privacy and tranquillity for hermits and monks who are praying day and night”.¹⁴ How might this be true in East London? As one interviewee at St Paul’s says:

It doesn’t have to be a beautiful day to make you love the place where the church is. When I had regular organ practice slots at the church I would stand in the tower porch on a wet Wednesday afternoon, watch and hear the rain pouring, and have the feeling that I never want to leave the place, that I could be an anchorite and live here because it felt held by a strong power that could sustain you in the same way a good home does, but better.¹⁵

I love the sense this quote gives of the possibility of being held in a holy place, and that holy place giving them what they need to “pray without ceasing”.¹⁶ This theme comes through also from St Monica’s: “It’s the brightness and the care you see as you’re coming into church, and you see it in church, and when you go out of church. You’re being greeted with it each time.”¹⁷ The “hermits and monks” of East London may fit it in around their day jobs and caring responsibilities, but their heart of prayer, held within creation, is clear to see.

Wassie observes that in Ethiopia, “Forests give grace and esteem to churches and play a protective role… The majestic creation of church forests prompts the followers to fantasize about how more beautiful and graceful their creator, i.e. God, could be.”¹⁸ One of the interviewees at St Monica’s explained how, since they had been involved with the work the church had done outside, “we can say like the psalmist say, how wonderful are the fingers of your hand, and you can think about that while you walk around and see what people done and what the Lord has done [sic]”.¹⁹ In St John’s, too, “being part of a place of worship also carries a much greater seriousness than a similarly sized park would… I think of the churchyards as a way to reflect God’s love, his creation and his care for us.”²⁰ The “church” element to this green space is particularly valued as a link to the spiritual, not just for those Christians involved in its upkeep, but also for those of many faiths and none, who find it a place where they connect with something of “greater seriousness” than their daily life. A respondent from St Paul’s highlights this special nature of the churchyard:

When I go spend time in green spaces, I am seeking out the peaceful feeling of being surrounded by nature, but whereas in those other spaces I might feel like a visitor to the natural world, in the churchyard there’s a sense that people are a PART of that landscape (literally and figuratively!) rather than just passing through.²¹

She values the green space of the churchyard specifically because of the prompt it gives her to ponder those things spiritual and to make some kind of connection between her life and the wider Life of God’s kingdom.

In Ethiopia, Wassie notes, “[Church Forests] indicate the presence of churches in the area from a distance, reminding Christians passing by to bow, which signifies the deep respect they have for the church of the Almighty.”²² In East London, it feels less like these nurtured green spaces are reminding Christians passing by to bow, but more that the creation of them encourages passers-by of all faiths and none to nod an acknowledgement of something bigger than themselves, to find themselves caught up in wonder, struck by beauty.

At St Monica’s, one of the congregation had noticed that “As we’re walking down people will be stopping and looking at the garden and that by the hall and appreciating”²³ [sic]. At St Paul’s, it was noticed that “The number of people who pass and pause in the churchyard (many regularly) find it a place of contemplation and perhaps prayer where they do not participate in formal prayer and worship”.²⁴

A space for mission

I wondered at the ways in which nurturing these green spaces around churchyards might be seen as missional activity for the churches concerned. At St John’s, a respondent explained that “Many of the volunteers who work with me are not church people. Yet their work has drawn them closer to the church and to church events… So, although I started out most interested in growing plants, I would now say that growing people is at least as important to me.”²⁵ Growing plants and growing people; this feels like a clear indication of how environmental care supports two directions at once. At St Monica’s they noticed how once they started nurturing their green space around the church building, this led to greater community contact: “… as we’ve gone by we’ve had other people stop and talk to it with us, and I think that’s part of the growing as well, you’re growing as you’re coming in, and I think that’s the best part.”²⁶

Due to the setting of St Paul’s within the forest, the link with nature has been clearer, even before the church brought some theological intentionality into that relationship. Allowing a community to be held within nature provides an opportunity for groups to grow together, to feel part of each other’s lives and the life of the world around them, and this sets up echoes with being part of a wider Life, the life of God. The green oasis of St Paul’s acts in a missional way even without any words or explicit human agency.

A space for biodiversity

Wassie believes that the Church Forests in Ethiopia are of great importance as “They protect the church building from strong wind, storms and soil erosion”.²⁷ The Church Forests have a pivotal role to play ecologically within their area and within Ethiopia itself, acting against the adverse conditions becoming more and more prevalent in a world on the brink of a climate emergency. Are these UK green space churchyards able to provide a similar kind of protection to the communities that surround them?

Each green space I visited seemed to be a biodiverse oasis within the urban streets surrounding it, set to play a small but significant role in mitigating the worst of the climate catastrophe heading towards the communities who live there. These churchyard biodiversity hotspots protect species from localised extinction, and allow them to support other interlinked species who rely on them for their existence. They act as rainfall sinks, soaking up excess rainwater from flash floods, which have become more commonplace in recent years. They also provide essential cooling from extremes of heat, through tree canopies as well as the plants that grow densely enough to protect the soil and therefore their own and their neighbours’ roots.

At St Monica’s, they see this as an act of service towards God’s creation: “Jesus calls us to love and to serve, and we doing this action of caring for the ground, caring for our gardens, caring for our church, caring for each other, I think that’s an extension… it’s a true embodiment of what we are called to do as Christians”[sic].²⁸ They are making a link between caring for each other as a Christian community, and caring for the wider “each other” of the whole created order, the More-than-Human world. Just as in Ethiopia, where the Church Forests have survived because of the theological beliefs of the church community, so too in East London green spaces are coming into existence, being nurtured and protected, because of the theological beliefs of the people who make up the churches there.

A space to shape theology

In Ethiopia, Wassie notes that “The theology of Ethiopian Orthodox church in conserving forest and biodiversity is not available as such as an independent and logically structured document or scripture. Rather embodied in the miracles, lives of Christians, symbols of the teachings.”²⁹ It is the things that the Christians in Ethiopia do, the way that they live, that contain their theology. Anglican theology is also held not within a formal document of beliefs but gathered up within Anglican practices. If caring for their church grounds in an ecologically wise and sensitive way is a “spiritual practice” for the congregations I am engaging with in this research, their theology will be held within this.

At St Monica’s they seem to have a strong sense that their work on the grounds is an outworking of their faith. They believe that it is part of their call as Christians to care for God’s creation, and to show gratitude and appreciation for it. In Ethiopia, Berhane-Selassie explains, “Ethiopian Orthodox Christians interpret and practise Christianity from the perspective of how they see their environment, their lives and their relationship to God and the Bible. Their relationship with their environment stretches the tenets of Christianity to include their experiences of the physical world around them in a particularly African manner.”³⁰ The congregation of St Monica’s perhaps does similar in a “particularly Filipino manner”– I was very aware when talking to them that as first or second generation immigrants in the UK, from the Philippines, Jamaica or Ireland, their childhood experiences, or those of their parents, would have featured far more nature, and less concrete, than there was around their church at the moment. Perhaps this is a particular gifting of the church in East London – the ability to consider a particular UK context through a different cultural and experiential lens.

St Paul’s has a very different congregation, despite being just a mile down the road, and yet there is also a strong sense here that the natural world just outside the church door shapes the faith they inhabit: “There’s such a strong sense of being in nature here, perhaps because most churches aren’t actually in a forest, so the trees around the churchyard and the creatures there, and the wood between the churchyard and Forest Rise feel like they are God’s things and you feel like a co-creature with all that is living here.”³¹ Being caught up in this wonder, in this sense of community as one part of God’s created whole, comes directly out of this experience of worshipping within a church within a protected and cherished green space.

Conclusion

Theology

The Peruvian liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez holds that a function of theology is “as a critical reflection on Christian praxis in the light of the Word”.³² This is very much the angle Wassie believes the Ethiopian Orthodox church is approaching theology from: “The eco-theology of EOTC is contemplative and focus on life rather than knowledge and thus teaches the church forests of Ethiopia have survived and exist today as a testimony of God’s promises, faithfulness, full redemption and symbol of true reconciliation with God.”³³

From the conversations I had within these three urban East London churches, the theology around their nature spaces was somewhat light in character. There was some explicit theological reflection around their praxis, but mostly it was implicit, rather than articulated. These people, as part of a worshipping community that nurtured their green space around the church, knew that this nurture was linked to their faith, and that their faith was being shaped by their practice. However, they knew it in their bones; it hadn’t been verbalised together, preached about from the pulpit, or discussed within a Bible study or small group. Perhaps churches of East London might do well to take the Ethiopian Orthodox church as a model here, scaffolding conversations and providing opportunities to reflect on their praxis in the light of the Bible.

Mission

The three churches I studied seemed to have a clearer understanding of how their green spaces formed and nourished their mission. Clearest of all was how they highlighted the ways in which the work they had done, and the very existence of their green spaces, affected those who passed by and used them. They valued the conversations with those outside of their church community that grew out of a mutual appreciation for the nature around them, and how the work they were doing was expanding the nebulous edges of their church community. There was a depth of appreciation for the created world, which sometimes stopped short of an understanding of stepping into the missio Dei as that might apply outside of the purely human sphere. There is maybe some more work that these church communities could do to better notice this companionship with the More-than-Human that they are already enjoying.

Praxis

In Ethiopia, Berhane-Selassie notes, “More to the point of ecological preservation, the grounds around churches are considered holy… Monasteries have huge grounds which are kept holy; small churches often have only a small fenced-in compound immediately around them.”³⁴ Their praxis is clear in the strong link between the understanding of what they do (regarding their church grounds and keeping them wild and protected) and the reasoning that propels this. The churches in East London are similar; they have a strong sense of the importance of the ways in which they cherish, protect and nurture their wild spaces, and it is obvious that this comes out of a strongly held faith and belief.

Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educational and philosophical theorist, believed that at the heart of praxis was “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it”.³⁵[35] This transformational action on the world comes, for these communities, in a direct relationship with the transformational action of the Holy Spirit, of a belief that they are being the hands of Jesus in their area, that they are working in partnership with their Creator God as they nurture their small green wild spaces.

Ethiopia and East London

The differences between these two contexts are many in number and huge in scale. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church has a deep and far-reaching relationship with the communities living in the area. This is not the case in East London now, if indeed it ever was. Therefore, the missional possibilities inherent in a Church Forest or rewilded churchyard will be different. The praxis will be different, too: a more focused group effort from the tinier worshipping communities in East London, versus a wider, more instinctive care from what may be a small group but supported by the entire wider community in Ethiopia. Unlike these churches in East London, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is clearer and more confident in the theology underpinning and growing out of their Church Forest praxis.

The Future Forest

Within the limitation of this study, I was surprised to find how similar the experiences and shared thoughts were among those I had conversations with. Despite the Ethiopian Church Forests being a continent away and growing out of a very different cultural context, the movement of the Spirit was taking a very similar shape, dancing a similar dance.

I would be interested to explore the ways in which the East London churches might be more intentional about delving more deeply into the theology around their churchyards, what they are doing with them and how that is shaping them. Many of the respondents valued and enjoyed the part they play in the churchyard as a practical contribution to the life of the church. I would be loath to create an impression that this is somehow worth less unless it is couched in theological language, as God surely values the work of their hands. Yet I think there is also a value in curating a space where the voices of all can be heard together, to uncover the truths about what they believe that are thus far hidden or glimpsed only in part. Perhaps taking Ethiopian Church Forests as our model might allow and support such theological questing, as we are challenged by their praxis-based theology and supported by the wider discipline of eco-theology, to develop our own indigenous one, grown from the soil of East London.

About the author

Rachel Summers is a pioneer curate based in the urban wild spaces of East London who loves playing with mud, fire and new ideas.

More from this issue

Notes

1. Kieran Dodds, “Gardens of Eden: the church forests of Ethiopia – a photo essay,” The Guardian, 8 November 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/08/gardens-of-eden-the-church-forests-of-ethiopia-aoe, accessed 6 September 2023. ︎
2. “(2015) The Ballad of Hawkwood by Robin Grey,” Three Acres and a Cow, https://threeacresandacow.co.uk/category/music-2/, accessed 6 September 2023. ︎
3. Guy M. Richard, “The Doctrine of Creation,” The Gospel Coalition, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/essay/the-doctrine-of-creation/, accessed 8 February 2024. ︎
4. Walter Brueggeman, “Theologies of the Land,” in K. K. Yeo and Gene L. Green, Theologies of Land: Contested Land, Spatial Justice, and Identity (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers: 2020), https://www.perlego.com/book/2067773/theologies-of-land-contested-land-spatial-justice-and-identity-pdf, ch. 1, para. 8, accessed 17 August 2023. ︎
5. Daniel K. Lagat, Christian Faith and Environmental Stewardship: Theological Foundations for Creation Care (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers: 2019), https://www.perlego.com/book/1482989/christian-faith-and-environmental-stewardship-theological-foundations-for-creation-care-pdf, ch. 6, para. 3, accessed 20 July 2023. ︎
6. David K. Goodin, Alemayehu Wassie and Margaret Lowman, “The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church Forests and Economic Development: The Case of Traditional Ecological Management,” Journal of Religion and Society 21 (2019): 1. ︎
7. Tsehai Berhane-Selassie, “Ecology and Ethiopian Orthodox Theology,” in David G. Hallman, Ecotheology: Voices from South and North (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1994), 169. ︎
8. Ibid., 167. ︎
9. Goodin, Wassie and Lowman, 4. ︎
10. Alemayehu Wassie, “Unfolding the Mystery of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church: Forest Conservation and Management Experience,” research report submitted to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church development and Inter Church Aid Commission (Addis Ababa: December 2020), 24. ︎
11. “Bernice”, Spring 2023. ︎
12. “Paul”, Spring 2023. ︎
13. My observations, Spring 2023. ︎
14. Wassie, “Unfolding the Mystery of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church,” 24. ︎
15. “Elizabeth”, Spring 2023. ︎
16. 1 Thess. 5:17 (ESV). ︎
17. “Beryl”, Spring 2023. ︎
18. Wassie, “Unfolding the Mystery of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church,” 25. ︎
19. “Velma”, Spring 2023. ︎
20. “Margaret”, Spring 2023. ︎
21. “Phoebe”, Spring 2023. ︎
22. Wassie, “Unfolding the Mystery of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church,” 25. ︎
23. “Bernice”, Spring 2023. ︎
24. “John”, Spring 2023. ︎
25. “Paul”, Spring 2023. ︎
26. “Maeve”, Spring 2023. ︎
27. Wassie, “Unfolding the Mystery of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church,” 24. ︎
28. “Bernice”, Spring 2023. ︎
29. Wassie, “Unfolding the Mystery of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church,” 2. ︎
30. Berhane-Selassie, “Ecology and Ethiopian Orthodox Theology,” 155. ︎
31. “Susan”, Spring 2023. ︎
32. Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation (London: SCM Press, 1988), 11. ︎
33. Wassie, “Unfolding the Mystery of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church,” 2. ︎
34. Berhane-Selassie, “Ecology and Ethiopian Orthodox Theology,” 167. ︎
35. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Penguin: 1972), 52. ︎

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How does the Advent season speak to a climate emergency and COP28? What does it mean for Jesus to be born into a world of ecological collapse?

By Dave Bookless, mission partner and director of theology for A Rocha International.

During Advent and Christmas, we celebrate God entering our messed-up world in Jesus, announcing God’s Kingdom of freedom, forgiveness and justice.

This Advent also sees COP28, the latest global climate conference, hosted by the United Arab Emirates.

So, what does it mean for Jesus to be born into a world of ecological collapse, with climate disasters causing immense suffering and deepening existing injustices, with desperate migrants and with politicians dragging their feet or lining their pockets?

I suggest we focus on who Jesus is, what he’s done and who he calls us to be.

Jesus is Creator: “Through him all things were made” (John 1:3). He knows the suffering of creation. Every melting glacier, dying coral reef, migrant boatload is intensely experienced by Jesus.

Secondly, Jesus is God incarnate: “the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14). That word “flesh” (sarx in Greek) deliberately includes not only people but animal flesh. It tells us that, in Jesus, the Creator became a creature. At Christmas, God identifies with a wounded creation, entering it to transform it.

Thirdly, Jesus came to rescue not only people but his beautiful yet damaged creation: “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him” (John 3:17).

The Christmas story is truly “Joy to the World” because the Creator entered our broken world so it might be “liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:21).

As Jesus-followers, we are the children of God, adopted and called to participate in creation’s liberation.

Amid suffering and violence, we are called to shine through simpler lifestyles and compassionate action, serving and pointing to the Light of the World.

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Sustainability, African identity and climate justice: reframing the climate conversation

by Israel Oluwole Olofinjana

Introduction

As an African missionary pastor resident in the UK, the area of my scholarly research has been examining the reverse mission of African Christians in Britain. Reverse mission in this context is understood as a divine strategy to establish or usher in God’s kingdom in the West. This is not to say that God’s kingdom is not already present, but that the migration of Majority World Christians brings a missiological significance in terms of God’s multi-ethnic kingdom. But a further question I have been wrestling with is: what crucial role does African identity play in the mission of African Christians in Britain? How does African identity impact their mission? Does it enhance or hinder it? Part of answering these questions has been to develop what I refer to as African British theology, which posits that confidence in African identity is essential for the success of the African missionary enterprise in a contested multicultural British society, but that this is not a substitute for a contextual approach to mission.^[1] African British theology is essentially developing African theology in Britain as an intercultural missiology and public theology.

As a postcolonial theology, one of the major preoccupations of this theological thought is interrogating western public theology as it relates to racial justice and climate justice concerns. This paper therefore examines western notions of sustainability and offers new insights on how we can define and measure sustainability. It shifts the conversation on sustainability from an economic perspective to an anthropological perspective. The paper further proposes that we need a new understanding on how we tackle climate justice that incorporates racial justice thinking. This is in developing a brown theology that resonates with the brown agenda. This is different from a western green theology, which situates conversations on the environment in the green agenda. Too often our conversations on climate justice are rooted in ecology, but if we are going to tackle the intersection of climate and racial injustice, we clearly need an approach to climate justice that is rooted in anthropology: a theological anthropology that seeks the redemption of the collective notion of humanity through a reconciled community.

A working definition of racial justice in this essay is the strategic thinking and action to combat institutional, structural and personal racism that dehumanises people of colour created in God’s image. Climate justice as used in this paper refers to our shared responsibility to speak up and take action to safeguard the rights and dignity of those disproportionately affected by climate change. Climate change in this context is understood as the results from the impact of our actions and inactions on our world.^[2]

Western notions of sustainability

The climate crises affect us all and we are increasingly seeing the impact on every continent, biodiversity and ecosystems. Coral reefs are declining, floods have increased in different parts of the world, bushfires are becoming rampant, famines are impacting people’s livelihood, storms are accelerating, erratic weather conditions are becoming normal, and the levels of our CO2 have skyrocketed due to greenhouse emissions and other factors. As a result of the climate crisis, we now have climate refugees who are fleeing their countries because they have lost their homes, businesses and livelihoods to the devastating effects of environmental crisis. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned us just before COP 26 (the global climate summit in Glasgow in 2021) in a report on the current state of the climate:

It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred.^[3]

In essence, humans have caused unprecedented and irreversible change to the climate. The recent report in April 2022 gave a starker and final warning that we need a radical step if greenhouse emissions must peak by 2025.^[4] In the light of these warnings, what is the prophetic role of the church? Due to the climate and environmental crisis that faces humanity, one of the buzzwords that has gained ascendancy in our vocabulary is sustainability. In an attempt to survive by seeking alternative, reliable and efficient energy to power our planet, there are lots of conversations on sustainable development, sustainable products, sustainable energy, sustainable energy engineering, sustainable future, sustainable planet and so on. Western notions of sustainability embody three concepts that always seem crucial, namely the environmental, economic and social aspects. The United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted in 2015 give us a better and holistic way of understanding how we can sustain our planet because they give a framework that balances social, economic, political and environmental sustainability. For example, Sustainable Development Goal 7 focuses on affordable and clean energy, therefore aiming to provide affordable, reliable and sustainable energy for all. Sustainable Development Goal 13 talks about climate action, highlighting the need to take urgent steps to tackle the impact of the climate crisis.^[5] However, Sustainable Development Goal 8 focuses on decent work and economic growth with the aim to foster inclusive and sustainable economic growth. But economic growth sometimes has echoes of colonialism, with big western corporations extracting wealth from developing countries while leaving waste, environmental damage and health crises in their wake. The ongoing funding of fossil fuel extraction is manifestly unjust because the emissions from continued fossil fuel use are having the greatest adverse impact on Black and brown people in deprived communities across the globe who have least contributed to and benefitted from the cumulative emissions that have brought us to this state of emergency.

The problem as I see it is that our idea of sustainability is still rooted in economic growth, so that even when we talk about sustainable development or sustainable economic growth, we are still preoccupied by how we address economic growth through efficient extraction, transportation and consumption of resources. It is ultimately ingrained. The other problem is that our idea of sustainability is still largely driven by the West with its history of economic dominance and exploitation, and it therefore begs the question: why should the world at large follow western notions of sustainability if at the end of the day it is communities from the Majority World that continue to suffer disproportionately from the impact of the climate and environmental crisis?

If western ways of measuring sustainability are so intricately bound to economic growth, are there other ways of measuring sustainability? An example of a different way of measuring sustainability that is not rooted in economic growth but in well-being can be found in the South Asian country of Bhutan, which measures sustainability through well-being and human flourishing. Their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is measured by the Gross National Happiness (GNH) index on well-being and happiness of its citizens. This was first introduced in 1972 by King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, the fourth king of Bhutan. Is there something we can learn here on a different set of parameters of measuring sustainability?

African identity, enslavement and colonisation

To advance a different model of measuring sustainability, it is important to consider the complex history that fragmented African identity as well as the intersection of racial and climate injustice to better understand western economic exploitation and dominance. African traditional identity before enslavement was diverse with different tribes, kingdoms and languages. This traditional African identity, while not homogenous, has a shared root on the geopolitical continent of Africa. The transatlantic slave trade with its brutality fragmented African identity and dislocated it so that today we speak of an African tripartite identity:^[6] African diaspora in the Americas as African Americans, in the Caribbean islands as African Caribbeans, and those who remained on the mother land as Continental Africans. This dislocation of the African family has done almost a permanent damage in the sense that while this tripartite identity is now fully accepted, nevertheless there are ongoing differences and tensions between Africans, African Caribbeans and African Americans. A further fragmentation of African identity took place with the colonisation and partitioning of Africa by seven uninvited European powers, namely Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal, Italy, Spain and Germany. The continent was carved out during the scramble for Africa in 1884–85 on new lines of European powers and languages, thus displacing traditional boundaries, ethnic languages and customs of the people of Africa. The consequences are that firstly, the African mind was colonised, but the land and its resources were also taken; however, far more insidious is that African identity was fragmented along European identity and languages so that today Africans are multilingual, speaking their indigenous languages but also the languages of their colonisers. While this makes us international and helps us navigate the global and transnational processes, the negative is a constant reliance on the West for its deliverance. This is part of the reason why the West has a large percentage of so-called economic migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, thus leading to a large diaspora community in the West.

Theological reflection on Hebraic identity

A biblical precedence of diaspora community is the Jewish community, who, in similar fashion, has experienced and continues to experience fragmentation and dislocation of Jewish identities. A quick theological reflection on diasporic identity by looking at Hebraic identity in the Scriptures is therefore crucial to this conversation. This is in the true fashion of African theology, which takes its point of departure from Scripture. Hebraic identity in the Old Testament, while not homogenous, has a shared commonality in the centrality and worship of Yahweh (see Deut. 6:4). Kingdom politics and tribal loyalties among other things led to a divided kingdom around 900 BC with Judah in the south and what emerged to be Israel in the north. These two kingdoms had their distinctive identities in terms of government administration, religion and culture. Two centuries later, a powerful nation – the Assyrian empire – conquered and exiled the people of the north, repopulating it with people from other cultures; thus Samaria, the capital city in the north, was perceived by the southerners as corrupt and confused (see 2 Kings 17). Around 586 BC, the people of the south were also conquered and exiled by the Babylonian, later Persian, kingdom. This created a sort of tripartite Hebraic identity with Samaritans (people of the north), Judah or Jews (people of the south) and those in diaspora, who were exiled into Babylonia and later Persia. This tripartite Hebraic identity is seen at play throughout the inter-testamental period otherwise also known as Second Temple Judaism and the New Testament. For example, when the exiles from Judah returned to rebuild the Temple, city and city walls, they were opposed by the Samaritans, who did not share their loyalty (see Ezra 4–5; Neh. 4–5). We also see similar tensions in the early church in Acts 6 when the Grecian Jews (Jews born in the diaspora) complained of being marginalised by the Hebraic Jews (Jews born in the land of Israel).

In summary, in similar fashion to Hebraic identity, African traditional identity – while not homogenous – has a shared root on the continent of Africa. But like the Jews due to conquest, enslavement, colonialism, migration and neocolonialism, this heterogeneous identity on one continent was displaced so that the African diaspora was created in the West Indies as African Caribbeans and the Americas as African Americans. The transatlantic slave trade that fragmented African identity cannot be dichotomised from its link to racial and climate injustice.

Racial injustice: climate crisis

The transatlantic slave trade as a global economic system and institution prospered because of racial ideology that conceived Africans as objects and properties that needed to be dominated because they were inferior and not intelligent. Sometimes Christian mission, with its understanding that Africans were heathens and pagans that needed saving, colluded with colonial authorities to propagate the gospel. The transatlantic slave trade was also an integral part of the Industrial Revolution from the 1750s onwards. One of the first scholars to identify the links between racism and capitalism was Eric Williams (1911–81), the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago. Williams uncovered slavery’s role at the heart of the Industrial Revolution. He states in his book Capitalism and Slavery, which was his published doctoral thesis:

The triangular trade thereby gave a triple stimulus to British industry. The Negroes were purchased with British manufactures; transported to the plantations, they produced sugar, cotton, indigo, molasses and other tropical products, the processing of which created new industries in England; while the maintenance of the Negroes and their owners on the plantations provided another market for British industry, New England agriculture and the Newfoundland fisheries. By 1750 there was hardly a trading or a manufacturing town in England which was not in some way connected with the triangular or direct colonial trade. The profits obtained provided one of the main streams of that accumulation of capital in England which financed the Industrial Revolution.^[7]

While many western historians would separate the history of the Industrial Revolution from that of slavery and colonialism, Williams’ ground-breaking work was one of the first to integrate our thinking on this. A further step I am identifying in this essay is the link between racial injustice and climate injustice that is historically rooted in slavery, colonialism and the Industrial Revolution and which continues to shape current injustices around climate conversations.

Firstly, the Industrial Revolution prospered on the back of slave labour (the Atlantic economy). This was because cotton, which was the major product replacing wool during the industrial age, was imported from slave plantations. Industrialisation being powered by steam and water has led to what we now refer to as the climate crisis. Secondly, this historic connection of the fragmentation of African identity, racial injustice and climate crisis continues to today because poverty and economic instability in the Majority World means that Africa, Asia and Latin America suffer disproportionately the effects of the climate crisis.

It is interesting to know that slavery was later labelled an illegitimate trade only to be replaced by so-called legitimate trade through colonialism and partitioning of Africa, which further fragmented African identity as discussed above. Legitimate trade – that is, trading with Africa through colonisation – has also been replaced with what I refer to as controlled trade in neocolonialism, sometimes through aid, globalisation and international development. This sometimes leads to a dependency factor on the West by African countries.

Thirdly, western solutions to the climate crisis are not holistic and focus too much on the green agenda. Before describing what the green agenda is, it is worth summarising with clarity the intersectionality of racial injustice and climate injustice.

Enslavement: Slavery provided the slave labour and raw material for industrial change
Colonialism: Colonies were the early seeds of a capitalist economic system that finances and enhances industrialisation
Industrial Revolution: Steam power accelerated and increased our pollution and climate crisis

Climate justice and reparative justice^[8]

I am going to digress briefly to share my own experience and journey into climate justice to illustrate some crucial points. My experience of climate change started with the fact that I grew up in an area of Nigeria where flooding was a constant occurrence. We played in it as we walked back home from school. Along the way I saw bridges collapse, roads torn apart, shops destroyed and businesses disappear as a result of these floods. The question of why we had so much flooding in my area lingered in my mind as I grew up and was not fully answered. Later, as a committed member of an African Pentecostal church in my area, our church, including myself, was so preoccupied with our spiritual and economic survival that issues that caused the flooding did not really surface in our conversations. While I continued to wrestle with why we had so much flooding, there were certain practices that my family and I engaged in that, on reflection, I did not realise were environmentally friendly or green. We planted our own tomatoes, and we had our own poultry. I remember my first job was working for my mother with our poultry looking after chickens and collecting and selling eggs.

It was while studying Religious Studies at the University of Ibadan that I was introduced to African theology and African religious traditions and culture. The implication of this exposure was that I began to realise that God cares for his creation and that humanity has a part to play. The introduction to African theology and the African religious world view educated me about the different West African names of God. What is striking about these names is that several African names for God demonstrate God as the creator of heaven and the earth, but more importantly they evidenced that he is involved in such a way that God cares for his creation. A Biblical theology of creation affirms this because Scripture says, “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it.”^[9] Some of the names go further to assert that God cares and sustains his creation. Take, for example, the Edo name for God: Osanobuwa. This means “the Source Being who carries and sustains the universe”. Other African names for God, such as Olodumare (Yoruba), Ngewo (Mende), Nyame (Akan) and Odomankoma (Akan), reveal that God really cares and is interested in maintaining the universe.^[10] While African cosmology is rich in an understanding that sees God as the creator and carer of his creation, some African Pentecostals are somewhat disconnected from this narrative because of the colonial residue that sees everything in African religions and spirituality as evil. One of the consequences is a lack of engagement with climate justice issues.

It is therefore exciting for me as an African Pentecostal after being on this journey to be a part of the Christian Aid working group on climate justice with some Black Majority Church leaders, activists and theologians. My brief story serves as an example of an African that has experienced the effects of the climate crisis but did not have the resources or enough understanding to deal with the issue. In a recent survey poll done by Christian Aid into the views and attitudes of Black British Christians on climate change, 66 per cent of those polled are more aware that the impacts of climate change disproportionately affect people from the Majority World (Africa, Caribbean, Asia and Latin America) compared to the British public at 49 per cent. This is because being born in a climate vulnerable country, or through family connections, boosts awareness of the climate crisis.^[11] This data confirms my own experience but also raises the issue of why we are not visible when it comes to government policies and conversations on climate change. It is the poorer countries in the world that suffer more the effects of climate disasters; therefore, while animal conservation, protection of endangered species and our environment are all important in their own right, my approach to climate justice is the brown agenda and not the green agenda.

The brown agenda in this instance is understood as the impact of ecological degradation on people,^[12] particularly people from the Majority World, who have suffered from systemic and structural injustices such as colonialism and imperialism.^[13] In this respect, there is a connection between racial and climate injustice because people who suffer more from the effects of the climate crisis are usually communities that had been impoverished due to legacies of enslavement, colonialism and imperialism. The green agenda in this respect is associated with “nature conservation and addresses specific issues such as the preservation of wilderness areas, endangered species, animal poaching, cruelty to animals, invader species, and in general, the impact of mining and industry, industrialised agriculture and urban trends on the habitats of plants and animals”.^[14] My observation is that it is easier for people who live in the West, particularly in the countryside or rural areas, to be green, whereas those who live in crowded urban centres will naturally gravitate towards the brown agenda. This is because of urban factors such as homelessness, deprivation, overpopulation, poverty and so on, which are often linked to the impact of climate on poorer communities. To be green sometimes could also be expensive because you either have to drive a hybrid or electric car if you choose to drive. There is the option of cycling, which a lot of people now do. Maintaining healthy eating habits and lifestyle does not come cheap, and neither does living in an area that has poorer air quality due to pollution. Across the world being brown often means to live below the poverty line, lack resources and options, and lack education. This is not always the case because not all people classified as brown are poor or uneducated. I am also aware that we need both agendas and that they are not always mutually exclusive. I am clarifying here my own position and approach to the subject based on my journey and experience.

If the brown agenda offers us a holistic way of addressing the link between climate and racial injustice, what does it offer us in terms of reframing the debate on sustainability? Here I propose reparative justice as a way of repairing the damage of slavery, colonialism and Industrial Revolution in order to have a reconciled humanity who can then build a future together in hope.

Reparative justice: the brown theology on sustainability

Returning to the conversation of how best to measure sustainability, especially in the light of the intersection between racial injustice and climate injustice, requires a new theological framing. This is where insights from an African theological perspective can be fresh and innovative. Often conversations on sustainability, such as talks around a sustainable future, focus on the future. But what about a conversation on sustainability that looks backwards into the past? This will mean understanding sustainability as the necessity of repairing the past so that we can correct the present and repair the future together. This will mean employing an African philosophy and Bantu world view of the principle of unity of life, which views the dynamic union of past, present and future. In essence, time is integrated in this principle. As articulated by the late African Catholic theologian Bishop Tharcisse Tshibangu (1933–2021), the African philosophy of the principle of unity of life affects the life of a single human, of a community, and of nature and the world. It was commonly known as a holistic vision of life. Tshibangu emphasised the principle of unity of life as an epistemological principle marking African cultures in their internal coherence.^[15] Another African theologian who gives us an innovative epistemological framing on time is the late John Mbiti (1931–2019) in African Religions and Philosophy:

The most significant consequence of this is that, according to traditional concepts, time is a two-dimensional phenomenon, with a long past, a present and virtually no future. The linear concept of time in western thought, with an indefinite past, present and infinite future, is practically foreign to African thinking.^[16]

In another place Mbiti talks about “history moving backwards from the Sasa period (now/period of tenses, that is the immediate) to the Zamani (a form of English past with its own past, present and future), from the moment of intense experience to the period beyond which nothing can go”.^[17] In essence, African philosophy describes the integral nature of past, present and future and the concept of time as moving backwards rather than forwards, and therefore people set their minds not on future things, but chiefly on what has taken place. Another African world view that helps us in this conversation is the Twi word Sankofa, which literally means San (return), Ko (go), Fa (look, seek and take).^[18] Sankofa therefore means going back for something you might have left or going back to our roots. On the one hand, it offers us a lens into digging deep into African history and tradition, and on the other it enables us to look back to repair the damage in the past so as to achieve restorative or reparative justice. Adopting such a world view will mean addressing the intersection of racial and climate injustice resulting from the past connection of enslavement, colonialism and Industrial Revolution. One way of addressing this is known as reparative justice, or in climate language, loss and damage. Climate loss and damage is, however, different from climate finance, where rich nations offer financial support to help climate-vulnerable countries meet their carbon reduction targets and adapt to climate change impacts. Reparative justice is a controversial term as it is usually associated with monetary compensation. It is often understood in terms of redistribution of wealth, so that those who are descendants of the enslaved who continue to suffer the legacies of slavery and colonialism are compensated financially. But another way of understanding reparative justice is repairing justice;^[19] that is, repairing and addressing the past so that reconciliation, healing and peace can take place. This approach will be holistic, looking at reparation not only in financial terms but also through holistic healing that embraces spiritual, psychological, social and environmental restoration from a traumatic past. This understanding of repairing justice is similar to restorative justice, which seeks to rehabilitate the offender so that the victim and the offender can both experience healing. After all, society is not truly healed until the oppressed and the oppressor are healed. This notion of repairing justice will be akin to the New Testament understanding of reconciliation, which has repentance, forgiveness and restitution at its core. The story of Zacchaeus in Luke 19:1–10 illustrates this so beautifully because as Zacchaeus encounters Jesus and forgiveness, he, in return, out of conviction decides to go on a journey of restitution. Three key elements of repairing justice are therefore repentance (forgiveness), lament (which incorporates resistance, justice and hope) and restitution.

So where do I see a current example of a model of practice that is beginning to address racial and climate injustice? This is where the significance of the Christian Aid working group with Black Majority Church leaders, activists and theologians becomes important. To understand the context of this, Melanie Nazareth, a member of the group, has written a reflective piece.^[20] The objective of the group can be summarised into two. One is to find creative ways to educate and therefore engage Black Majority Churches on the subject of climate justice and racial justice. The other is to be able to engage in some ambassadorial work that ensures that the brown community and agenda is well represented in conversations with climate activist groups and governmental policies that shape this agenda. The importance of this work is that in bringing together theologians to work on some of the discipleship resources to engage churches in the UK as well as in the Global South, it has required the collective thinking of Black theologians and African theologians, whose voices are usually marginal in climate conversations and environmental theology. It has been a joy to participate in meetings where we hear the voices of African theologians advancing African religious world views as essential thinking in tackling climate concerns and in the same space hear the voices of Black theologians framing climate justice in liberative praxis terms. Another significance of this work is that this group is helping Christian Aid to develop their campaign on climate loss and damage through the lens of reparative justice. This aspect of its work is in its early stages and the work of the group is still in progress, but I offer this as an example of what a brown theology on climate and racial justice could look like in practice.

Concluding reflection

This essay has examined the interconnection of the fragmentation of African identity, racial injustice and climate injustice. This has been investigated through considering the impacts of the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism and the Industrial Revolution on people of African descent. The paper therefore proposes a new approach to climate justice that addresses the racial injustice element in this history. This is the brown agenda, which adequately situates the conversation in addressing the ecological impact and exploitative economies on people of colour. This is different from the green agenda, which focuses on tackling conservation and the preservation of green spaces, wilderness areas and endangered species.

This approach to climate justice also gives us a new way of measuring sustainability. While western notions of sustainability are rightly often rooted in finding alternative, renewable energy for our future, a different approach considered in this article is measuring sustainability by addressing the past through climate loss and damage. This is through a reparative justice lens, which seeks to advocate for the acknowledgement of and compensation for the descendants of the enslaved who continue to suffer the legacies of slavery and colonialism and the climate crisis. I have adequately termed this repairing justice as a way of repairing the past so that reconciled, restored humanity can address the future together. One example of a group that is employing a brown agenda in their approach to climate justice is the Christian Aid working group, which centres racial justice as an important element in climate justice conversations.

About the author

Revd Dr Israel Oluwole Olofinjana is the founding director of the Centre for Missionaries from the Majority World (CMMW) and the director of the One People Commission of the Evangelical Alliance. He has written extensively and is well published in the areas of mission, African Christianity and African theology.

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Notes

[1] Israel Oluwole Olofinjana, ed., African Voices: Towards African British Theologies (Carlisle, Cumbria:Langham Monographs, 2017). Also see Israel Oluwole Olofinjana, “Reverse Mission: Towards an African British Theology,” Transformation: An International Journal of Holistic Mission Studies 37, no. 1 (2019): 52–65.

[2] My definitions of climate justice and climate change have followed that offered by the Christian Aid Working Group, comprising Black Majority Church leaders, theologians and activists.

[3] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Summary for Policymakers,” in Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. V. Masson-Delmotte, P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S. L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M. I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J. B. R. Matthews, T. K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu, and B. Zhou (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021, in press): 4.

[4] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change: Working Group III Contribution to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report,” IPCC, 2022, https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGIII_SPM.pdf; Fiona Harvey, “IPCC report: ‘now or never’ if world is to stave off climate disaster,” The Guardian, 4 April 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/apr/04/ipcc-report-now-or-never-if-world-stave-off-climate-disaster, accessed 8 April 2022.

[5] “Take Action for the Sustainable Development Goals,” Sustainable Development Goals, United Nations, https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/, accessed 8 April 2022.

[6] I ought to say something about the word tripartite here and how I am applying it. The word tripartite in theological circles is usually associated and used in conjunction with the doctrine of the trinity as it pertains to the nature and identity of the Godhead being one in essence, purpose and unity, but three distinct persons. It is also used in Christian anthropology to describe the composite nature of human beings in three distinct components but one: spirit, soul and body (see 1 Thess. 5:23). There are those who view and argue that human beings have two distinct natures: body and soul. I am using the word tripartite here to describe diasporic identities, firstly applying it to Hebraic/Jewish identity and then to African identity.

[7] Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Milton Keynes: Penguin Classics, 2022), 48. This book was first published in the United States in 1944 but was not published in the UK until 1964 (and was then out of print again until now) due to some of the controversial themes the book addressed around slavery, the abolition of slavery and the Industrial Revolution.

[8] Disclaimer: The reflections on reparative justice in this section are in no way the views or position of the Evangelical Alliance on reparations. They are that of the author, who is also on a journey exploring this subject.

[9] Ps. 24:1 (NRSV).

[10] John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, 1969). Omosade Awolalu and Adelumo Dopamu, West African Traditional Religion (Ibadan, Nigeria: Onibonoje Press and Book Industries Limited, 1979).

[11] Report on Views and Attitudes of Black British Christians on Climate Change, Christian Aid Survey Poll, 2020, https://mediacentre.christianaid.org.uk/black-history-month-poll-shows-british-public-think-white-people-around-the-world-are-most-impacted-by-climate-change/.

[12] Ernst Conradie, “The Environment” in African Public Theology, ed. Sunday Bobai Agang, Dion A. Forster and H. Jurgens Hendriks (Plateau State, Nigeria: Hippo Books, 2020), 159.

[13] Israel Oluwole Olofinjana, Discipleship, Suffering and Racial Justice: Mission in a Pandemic World (Oxford: Regnum Books International, 2021), 113.

[14] Conradie, “The Environment,” 159.

[15] Francis Anekwe Oborji, “Tribute to Msgr. Tharcisse Tshibangu (1933–2021): Promoter of Theology with an ‘African Color,’” Journal of African Christian Biography 1, no. 7 (2022): 12–17, https://open.bu.edu/ds2/stream/?#/documents/425563/page/16, accessed 11 April 2022.

[16] Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, 17.

[17] Ibid., 23.

[18] “Sankofa,” The Sankofa Collective, https://sankofacollective.org/about, accessed 28 May 2022.

[19] Karen Campbell, Secretary for Global and Intercultural Ministries for the United Reformed Church (URC), talks about repairing justice in the context of reparative justice in a webinar titled “Reparation and Economics: What Do I Get?” This webinar is part of a series of webinars organised by the Racial Justice Advocacy Forum (RJAF) in partnership with the Movement for Justice and Reconciliation and the National Church Leaders Forum (NCLF). The other two webinars are titled “I Will Repay: The Church and Reparations” and “Setting Us Free: How to Repair the Damage of Four Hundred Years of Slavery to Black Christians”. Details of these webinars are available at: “Resources,” Baptists Together, https://www.baptist.org.uk/Groups/365942/Resources.aspx, accessed 11 April 2022.

[20] Melanie Nazareth, “Climate Justice. A Monochrome Movement?” Christians on the Left, 31 March 2021, https://www.christiansontheleft.org.uk/latest/climate-justice-a-monochrome-movement, accessed 8 April 2022.

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Editorial: Sustainability and mission | ANVIL volume 38 issue 2

by James Butler

The articles for this edition of ANVIL all come from our Pioneer Conversations Day hosted in hybrid fashion, at CMS in Oxford, at the Northern Pioneer Centre in Penrith and online. Through a mixture of talks and workshops, we engaged with questions of thriving in sustainable ways. In the planning of the Conversations Day, the team of Cathy Ross, James Butler, Richard Passmore and Lori Passmore had in their sights some of the assumptions around growth that are embedded in some approaches to mission and church. Growth is often assumed to be a good to which we must aim, and yet the climate crisis is one of many clear examples of where an assumption of continual and uncontrolled growth has led somewhere hugely problematic. We wanted to ask how we could thrive in pioneering and mission in ways that were sustainable without having to automatically assume that things need to grow and expand. What do healthy and sustainable approaches to growth look like? What are the theologies and practices that might help us as we seek to thrive in sustainable ways?

In planning the Conversations Day, the problem we faced was how to promote it. Such is the societal and cultural commitment to growth that giving an event a title of “sustainability” does not really capture people’s attention. In fact, in terms of word association it is more likely to be related to words such as stagnation. We live in a society that expects things to be dynamic and fast moving rather than sustainable and stable. We landed on the title of “thriving” trying to maintain a sense of the dynamic without it immediately having to relate to growth.

The idea of growth as a response to decline is almost ubiquitous across the denominations. Everyone is looking for the means to turn decline into growth; churches that are declining are seen as the problem, and churches that are growing are assumed to hold the answers according to much of the literature. For example, quite a lot of writing around church growth warns church leaders about the period of stability because it is only one step away from decline, and all effort needs to be put in at this stage to moving it back to growth. But as Christians, we need to have a much more complex and theological engagement with these commitments to growth. Our hope is that the Conversations Day and this edition of ANVIL will do just that.

In his book Church Planting in the Secular West, Stefan Paas explores in depth the assumption of growth behind church growth theory and makes an important observation.

If indeed the purpose of mission is the numerical growth of the church, the logical consequence is that the world must become church. After all, as long as there is world outside the church, the church can grow. And as long as the church can grow, mission has not reached its purpose. So, we must conclude that the purpose of mission is to erase the world, namely to turn it into church.¹

For Paas this understanding is deeply problematic. Two assumptions in this understanding are worth highlighting. First, it assumes that numerical growth is the normal and right mode of the church and secondly, it assumes that the world has nothing of value for the church. The articles in this edition of ANVIL challenge these assumptions. The article from Israel Olofinjana demonstrates how African indigenous perspectives have much to offer western Christianity in the conversation about sustainability, and Alison Webster shows how community organising, and particularly the work of Citizens UK, offers means for faithful Christian action in a multicultural society. While Jesus talks a lot about the growth of the kingdom in the Gospels, it is interesting to see how our own cultural assumptions have shaped the interpretation of the parables. While models of church growth see growth as natural, it is interesting to compare it with fourth-century bishop Basil the Great’s critique of usury – charging interest on loans – describing how “Everything that increases, when it reaches its proper size, stops increasing; but the money of avaricious men always increases progressively with time”.² For Basil, growth in nature is about reaching the proper size, whereas interest has no limits and is therefore against nature. While we don’t need to get into the details of the argument here, the point is that our reading of growth risks being determined by our neoliberal society’s assumption without more complex engagement and reflection.

Throughout the Conversations Day our contributors drew on their practice, thinking and reading to help us to reflect on thriving in sustainable ways. There were three themes that we particularly want to highlight from the day that are also present in these articles. The first is relationships; the reflections were about the primacy of relationship and community as the basis for sustainable practices. The articles challenge individualism and offer communal ways of thinking, such as the African concept of ubuntu – I am because we are. Another key theme was justice; sustainability is deeply interwoven with justice. This is clearly seen in the climate crisis, where the effects will be most keenly experienced by the poor. The third theme was eschatology. How do we have a longer view that does not just hope for better but seeks a Christian vision of the world renewed through the coming of the kingdom?

This ANVIL edition is made up three longer articles based on the keynote talks from the Conversations Day, and some shorter, more practice-focused articles based on the workshops. The first of our longer articles comes from Israel Olofinjana, who critiques western notions of sustainability and offers a different model for climate justice. The second, from Alison Webster, offers community organising as a model of challenging and changing our neoliberal society. In the third, Janet Williams has a conversation with Richard Passmore about her book Seeking the God Beyond and how the apophatic tradition may hold resources that can help us to thrive in sustainable ways.

The shorter articles turn more clearly to practice and the specific concerns of mission practice, pioneer communities and churches. Tina Hodgett explains why she resists the impulse to measure outcomes in pioneering in the innovator space. Tina presented a session with Paul Bradbury, who explores the proper context of the idea of measurement and claims that measurement should act as a servant and not our master. Alison Boulton reflects on her own practice and experience of seeking to develop spiritual sustainability within a local community on a new housing estate over the past 14 years. Caroline Kennedy offers practices that help her to sustain her own personal spirituality and reflects on how to “find the gold” and helps others to find it too. Finally, Rosie Hopley recounts her own experience of entrepreneurship in social business, seeing how all can thrive: entrepreneurs, employees, trainees and wider community.

We believe that sustainability needs to be a word that we are much happier and able to engage with in mission, and one that needs clearer theological articulation and practices that help us to live sustainably day in, day out. We hope this edition of ANVIL might contribute some important insights and practices to that ongoing conversation.

About the author

James Butler is pioneer MA lecturer and assistant coordinator for Pioneer Mission Training at Church Mission Society. He teaches in the areas of mission, ecclesiology and practical theology. His PhD explored how small missional communities sustain their social action. He also works as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Roehampton, researching themes of learning, discipleship and social action.

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Notes

1 Stefan Paas, Church Planting in the Secular West (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2016), 115.

2 Basil the Great, quoted in B. L. Ihssen, “Basil and Gregory’s Sermons on Usury: Credit Where Credit Is Due,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 16, no. 3 (2008): 419.

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East London pioneer Rachel Summers is on a mission to get people to notice trees in their neighbourhood and her efforts are now inspiring more and more people thanks to blossoming media coverage.

Taking time to notice what matters – not least the beauty of nature – has been an emerging theme of lockdown for many people.

Wild about trees: Rachel Summers

Now Rachel, a Forest School practitioner and Forest Church leader in east London, has caught the attention of the media for taking her chalk to the streets to help her neighbourhood see the wood for the trees.

On her daily exercise walks around Walthamstow, Rachel has been chalking the names and characteristics of local trees on the pavement under or beside them.

In the last month she has been featured on the local ITV television news, in Time Out and on the BBC website.

When her activity first got mentioned on Twitter (follow Rachel @curiouswilds) it was the local MP Stella Creasy who was instantly able to identify Rachel’s work. Rachel is known locally for running the forest school Curious Wilds.

Rachel is also a graduate of the St Cedd Centre for Pioneer Mission, CMS’s pioneer hub in partnership with Chelmsford diocese, and is planning to study with CMS in Oxford from September. She has also written three books on discovering God through creation (Wild Lent, Wild Advent and Wild Worship).

So it is no surprise that she is reflecting theologically on her new lockdown practice.

“Mission is about getting people to look up and look out,” says Rachel.

“‘Noticing’ is often prayer. When I’ve been doing this, it has felt so much like I’ve been ‘doing theology’, but with trees as my sacred text.

“I’ve been seeing what they, as part of God’s creation, have to speak to us in our particular situation right now. And this is what really seems to be resonating with people:

“‘Turkish hazel tolerates difficult conditions.’

“‘London Plane creates beauty out of pollution.’

“‘Silver Birch looks fragile but is actually extremely tough.’”

Rachel believes her activity can help to change the way people see their immediate environment during the restrictions of lockdown.

“I have a strong sense that in this way I can present the prison of our streets as a gift, to be loved and cherished.”

As another of her chalkings declares, “In France, the Lime is a symbol of liberty.”

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Video: Dave Bookless – The Earth is the Lord’s

Dave Bookless is a CMS mission partner and director of theology for A Rocha International.

“My passion, my dream would be that in every local church, in every home group, Bible study group, discipleship group, we are not just learning scriptures and talking to each other about what’s happened in our lives but we’re also encouraging each other to care for God’s creation more effectively.”

More resources

The post Video: Dave Bookless – The Earth is the Lord’s appeared first on Church Mission Society (CMS).