Christians add green crusade

More churches are viewing creation as something to care for

By Anne Marie DiStefano

Pamplin Media Group, Dec 11, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009

L.E. BASKOW / PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP

Sister Patricia Nagle will be in Bali this week for a U.N. climate change conference as a representative of the World Council of Churches.

It’s Christmas, the time of year when the Christian tradition’s impact on world culture is at its glittering peak of visibility.

But a new movement within the Christian community is gearing up to make a impact in a very different, and perhaps surprising, realm: global climate change. Across denominations, Christians are increasingly embracing green values and – also, perhaps, surprisingly – from the most liberal to the most conservative, they’re finding much to agree on.

Locally, a number of religious leaders are preaching ecological issues and urging their followers to live more sustainable lives. For some of these, the climate crisis, in turn, is giving new meaning and urgency to such fundamental biblical precepts as “God created the Heavens and the Earth” and “Love thy neighbor.”

“We must address this issue,” Sister Patricia Nagle, of Portland, says of climate change. “We are bound – morally bound.”

Nagle, whose full title is Sister, Servant of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, is currently a delegate to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in Bali, Indonesia.

The main purpose of the convention is to begin work on climate change goals for the period after 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol expires. Nagle is participating as a member of the World Council of Churches, an organization that represents 560 million Christians.

The Catholic Church historically has been involved in justice work – that is, aid programs in impoverished and disease-stricken areas. But addressing the accompanying ecological damage hasn’t been part of the equation, according to Nagle.

“For some reason, questions of the environment have not really been integrated into the justice issues,” Nagle says. “I think that culturally that can be traced to the fact that for a long time, many of us have been raised seeing ourselves separate from the natural world.”

She describes a traditional Catholic worldview in which “the goal was to get out of the world, up there, over there, where God was.”

Now, she says, there’s more of a sense that God is everywhere. “That whole cosmology has changed,” she says. “We are not separate. We are one sacred Earth community.”

Nagle serves in Portland as part of the Catholic environmental awareness organization Earth Home Ministries. She is a parishioner at St. Philip Neri Catholic Church in Southeast Portland.

Members of St. Philip Neri have become involved in sustainability in the past few years, building a bioswale to handle rainwater runoff from the church parking lot and organizing the nondenominational Muddy Boot Organic Festival, which was held for the second year this September. The church also is in the process of obtaining solar panels for one of its buildings.

This kind of involvement fits into the teachings of the church, Nagle believes. “It’s a very natural evolution,” she says – but it is an evolution.

“It’s very clear that we are at a new point of consciousness and change,” she says. “We are an interdependent global community and our faith – my faith, and the faith of many of the world’s religious and spiritual traditions – tells us that Creation is important, is of God, and that we have a responsibility to ensure that this Creation is as healthy as possible.”

Love leads to LEED

“When you think about what religion is all about, every religious tradition through time – basically it boils down to love,” says Marilyn Sewell, senior minister of the First Unitarian Church in downtown Portland.

“Right now, because the world has become so small,” Sewell says, “religion is calling us – love is calling us – to pass on a world that is viable to the next generation, and the next, and the next.”

For the past decade, a plan has been in the works to build a new community center adjoining Sewell’s church. And when the process began to build steam, about two years ago, building manager Gardner Grice says, they decided to aim for a high green standard.

The new Buchan Building, completed in June, is on track to obtain LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) gold certification. The energy-efficient building makes use of recycled materials and locally sourced products.

It’s insulated with blue jeans, equipped with water-saving fixtures, and uses Forest Stewardship Alliance-certified wood. A solar power system is on the horizon.

The center also is the new home of Unitarian Universalist Ministry for Earth, a national organization within the Unitarian Church dedicated to the seventh of the church’s seven principles: “Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”

“Christians typically have not done so well with environmental issues,” Sewell says, “because we have this thing that Earth is made for man.” However, she says, concern for the environment now has become an issue of peace and justice: Scarce resources lead to conflict.

“As a religious people,” she says, “we have to be prophets. We have to step out there and say, Wake up! Wake up! That’s what prophets do.”

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