creation care — Clayfire Curator

Discovering the Spirit’s Green Streak

by Guest Blogger | May 20, 2011

This post was written by Craig Goodwin.

I pastor an 85-year-old Presbyterian congregation in Spokane, Washington. Over the last seven years we’ve been experimenting with new expressions of church life in our neighborhood and many of these new practices have landed the church at the intersections of faith and environmentalism. For example, we started a farmers’ market in our church parking lot and this week we will start our fifth season of peddling grass-fed beef and organic vegetables.

At no point did we say, “Let’s go green.” In fact I think if we had framed these new efforts within the cultural narrative of environmentalism, many in the church would have resisted. Instead, we’ve talked about paying attention to God at work in the church and neighborhood. As we do that we’re discovering that the Spirit has a green streak, not just in the church parking lot but also in the sanctuary.

Several years ago we dedicated our stewardship season of worship to reflecting on caring for God’s creation. The series culminated in a Creation Care festival in the Reception Hall and along with soliciting financial pledges we invited people to change light bulbs to CFL’s and make other green-living commitments. This was all well received, but we quickly moved on to the next series of themes for Sunday mornings. It wasn’t until a few months later that these reflections on God’s creation started to shape our worship practices.

It started at a committee meeting with a faithful servant of the church expressing frustration as she anticipated the hectic Advent season of worship. She was most concerned with how we would take care of the annual procession of sixty Poinsettia plants that adorned the front of the sanctuary. We had a long-standing tradition of having members purchase poinsettias in memory of someone. The flowers would decorate the chancel, the names of the loved ones would be featured in the Christmas Eve bulletin, and we would all get goose bumps as the light of hand-held candles flickered off the forest of red and green. But it turns out there were problems with this “sacred” tradition.

December is one of the coldest months of the year in Spokane. It wasn’t uncommon for the tropical plants to shrivel and turn black from the short trip from car to entryway of the church. And once we got them in we had to boost the heat in our cavernous sanctuary for two straight weeks, 24 hours a day, just to keep them alive. And when the last candles were blown out, we ended up throwing away half the plants because they went unclaimed. On top of that, none of us were aware of anyone who was able to keep them alive for more than a couple of weeks at home.

As we discussed all these challenges at our committee meeting we all reached the same conclusion at once, “What a waste.” We also recognized that the thought of doing away with such a tradition was the equivalent of a dad telling his children there would be no Christmas tree this year. At some point in the conversation someone brought up the series on caring for God’s creation. In light of that they proposed an alternative. “What if, instead of asking people to buy poinsettias, we invite people to donate money in memory of someone, and that money would go to plant trees in deforested regions of the world?” We did some homework and found a Christian mission agency called Plant With Purpose that takes a $1 donation and plants a tree in an impoverished village. The committee proposed that people make a $10 donation to plant 10 trees. Of course we called them “Christmas trees.”

That year we started a new tradition in our Advent worship experience and planted over 1,000 trees in Latin America. We had such a positive response we did the same with our ritual of buying dozens of lilies for Easter Sunday. We invited church members to plant trees as a sign of the resurrection. Over the last four years we have planted over 3,000 trees through Plant With Purpose.

I especially appreciate that every Easter and Christmas Eve I get to explain the significance of the names listed in the bulletin and remind the congregation that our practices of responsible stewardship and caring for creation are rooted in the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus. I also can’t help but think that this is a more meaningful witness to all the visitors who join us on those Sundays. Not only do we believe that God is with us and we trust that Jesus is risen, but our faith has landed in the world and has literally taken root.

Image © iStockphoto

Craig Goodwin is the author of Year of Plenty, a story about his family’s year of consuming only items that were local, used, homegrown, or homemade. His story has been featured on NPR, PBS, and in the New York Times. He writes a popular blog that focuses on food, faith, and justice in the rich agricultural region of the Inland Northwest. He is a Presbyterian pastor, a farmers’ market manager, and a master food preserver. He has a Doctorate in Missional Leadership from Fuller Theological Seminary and is a Food and Justice Fellow with the Presbyterian Church (USA). Goodwin speaks regularly at schools, churches, and other community organizations about sustainable food and redemptive consumer practices.

Categories: Leadership

Someone Said

by Eric Herron | May 20, 2011

This is my Father’s world, and to my listening ears
All nature sings, and round me rings the music of the spheres.

This is my Father’s world: I rest me in the thought
Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas;
His hand the wonders wrought.

This is my Father’s world, the birds their carols raise,
The morning light, the lily white, declare their Maker’s praise.

This is my Father’s world: He shines in all that’s fair;
In the rustling grass I hear Him pass;
He speaks to me everywhere.

Words by Maltbie D. Babcock, 1901. Music: Terra Beata, traditional English melody.

Categories: Someone Said

A Double-Rainbow! I Wonder. What It Means.

by Eric Herron | May 19, 2011

Perhaps you are one of the nearly 28 million people who saw this video shortly after it was posted last year. I am. But, I watched it again. You should too:

“Oh my God! A complete double-rainbow. Right in my front yard. What does it mean?!”

Paul Vasquez (a.k.a. Hungrybear9562) surely wasn’t trying to shoot a video that would go viral. In fact, he likely wasn’t planning on shooting any video that day when he walked out of his home and saw the Giant Double Rainbow. His reaction seems so sincere, if not over-the-top extreme.

I remember the first time I watched this, I said to my friends, He’s got to be smoking weed. I mean, who, in this day and age, gets so worked up – to the point of crying (laughing?) – at some meteorological phenomenon? Hungrybear9562 was ecstatic, like a medieval saint beholding a vision of God. If it wasn’t drugs, there was certainly another powerful force working on his heart and mind. And, he was open to this force.

I do not know the flavor of Paul Vasquez’s spirituality, but I would bet he’s not an atheist. Maybe he has a Native American perspective on spirituality as his YouTube handle might suggest. To put it more crassly, perhaps Hungrybear9562 is a New Age believer. Why do I find myself jumping to these possibilities before assuming he is a Christian? I think there is a good (not good, but reasonable) explanation for my assumptions.

We – followers of Jesus – are generally not excited about Creation. Tony Campolo has pointed out that though the health of our natural environment should be a truly Christian concern, we “have let New Agers hijack the environmentalist movement and make it their own domain.”* Our failure to take up this godly cause has also diminished our worship. And, it has diminished our wonder.

Whether New Age, Christian, or neither, there is something in Hungrybear9562’s ecstacy that draws me in. There is something about his shaky camera work, his surprise that turns to tears and then to laughter, his rambling awe, that causes me to examine my own responses to God’s creation… and find that I fall far short of true wonder. Many of us, coming upon the same scene as this man, would raise our voice an imperceptible shade, and mumble, “Hmm. A double-rainbow. Pretty cool. Hey, wanna get some ice-cream?” As curators, how can infuse the worship we design with more wonder?

Two possible solutions come to mind, both of which have to do with harnessing the wonder-making power of nature.

We can take worship outside. Both Christine Sine and Wendell Berry suggest something along these lines in two separate posts this week. Sine calls gardening a “worshipful act” rich with “wonderful and worshipful lessons.” Berry claims that the bible “is best read and understood outdoors.” What would happen if we lead our congregations out where there are no walls? How would this affect the response of wonder in your community?

There are numerous reasons to object to this suggestion, first of which probably has to do with logistics. How do we move our large congregation outside? How do we you navigate our less-than-favorable climate? How are we supposed to sing without projection! It doesn’t have to be this difficult. After reading Christine Sine’s post yesterday, one Curator reader claims his congregation has already contacted a community garden and is literally “weeding for worship” this Sunday.

The bottom line is, if we truly believe nature to be the wonder inspiring, worship prompting place that it is, we will find a way. Otherwise, we will maintain less than ecstatic worship gatherings (Pentecostals excluded).

We can bring nature inside. Mandy Smith, who has written an excellent book on curating worship, recently provided us with two ideas toward this. In April, her submission for the Project of the month was a photo depicting a prayer labyrinth made of dried vines that she and her friend gathered from a local nature center that was “plagued” by them. Not only did they create a “natural” labyrinth, but they gave those dead vines one more opportunity at life.

This week, on the Clayfire Facebook page, Mandy shared a link to the Earth From Above website and some incredible, aerial photos by photographer and environmentalist Yann Arthus-Bertrand. She is thinking of a way to curate these images. If you were challenged to use these particular photos in a worship gathering, what would you do with them?

By taking our worship outside and by looking for creative ways to bring the outside in, we can multiply the wonder-factor in our worship. I have a feeling these suggestions are only the tip of the (melting) iceberg. Can you think of (and share in the comments below) more ideas toward using Creation to increase the wonder in our worship?

Image © Mandy Smith

*Tony Campolo from “Missing the Point: Environmentalism” in Adventures in Missing the Point: How the Culture-Controlled Church Neutered the Gospel, 170.

Categories: Formation

Someone Said

by Linda Parriott | May 18, 2011

I don’t think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a “hypaethral book,” such as Thoreau talked about—a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better. Or that has been my experience of it. Passages that within walls seem improbable or incredible, outdoors seem merely natural. This is because outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine-which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes.

Wendell Berry, ”Christianity and the Art of Survival” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, p 311

Categories: Someone Said

Why We Need a Bigger Creation Narrative

by Jodi-Renee Adams | May 17, 2011

I’ve always been a sucker for the poetic metaphors of Wendell Berry. He is the master at inviting his audience into a visceral spirituality. Every poem smells like fresh earth. I’ll admit to you, it wasn’t his subject matter that drew me to him; in fact, I’m just not what you would call an out-doorsy kind of girl. In a post-apocalyptic landscape, you’re likely to find me catatonic, curled up in the fetal position, and surrounded by the ravaged corpses of my toilet, espresso machine, iPod and Black Box wine. And dozens of pairs of achingly fabulous high heels. No, my appreciation of his themes developed over time and even then, in layers.

It became a love affair with Wendell after I read “A Timbered Choir” for the first time. It was well into my exile from Christianity and I read it through with a slight disinterest at first, but a growing exhilaration at all that seemed to be singing from this piece of writing. Not only did he miraculously capture the narrative of a broken and raped creation, but he also seemed to be speaking subversively about the throngs of people numbly moving out of a stifling spiritual existence. People like me…. Every place had been displaced, every love unloved, every vow unsworn, every word unmeant to make way for the passage of the crowd of the individuated, the autonomous, the self-actuated, the homeless… The more I immersed myself in his prophetic writing, I started to understand that for Wendell, these two narratives were not separate but deeply and purposefully connected.

For many of us, our traditions taught us – whether on purpose or not – that the physical world was a vastly inferior part of the created universe: soul-less, functional. We limited the narrative of creation to the first seven days, then it seemed to have lost its stream of story. And its soul.

And that is why Wendell grabbed me and dragged me back to the liturgy. Suddenly creation had a voice, a narrative thread, a redemptive story of her own. In the midst of all this, she served as a holy priestess for the rest of us, telling stories of GOD’s character and imagination, revealing glimpses of restorative glory, groaning for a fuller reality, weeping under the burden of our arrogance and blindness. These were such powerful spiritual themes on their own, but when I stumbled into the cosmic truth that the resurrection had breathed a new life into the physical creation, it overwhelmed me.

Where was this soul in our worship? The only “creation care” I was aware of had an overt hippy vibe, a Julia Butterfly Hill kind of extremism that didn’t seem to connect with the overall arch of our worship gatherings or the every-day congregant. I sat with Wendell for longer and longer. And it became clearer to me, though I still stumble through it with hope and humility:

Creation must have a voice in our collective liturgy.

She must be represented in our words and images. Not necessarily with painfully cliche landscapes or wild life shots or with the weary prose we so often associate with “nature.” No, that’s our small imposition on creation. We need to give the universe back her soul and let it participate in worship. The psalmists did this in a way that powerfully resonated with the nomadic (and sometimes superstitious) Hebrew ancients. Tolkein and Lewis did this in their epic stories. Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver do this with their prose and prophetic imagery.

How do you resonate with the on-going narrative of creation? What are your assumptions about creation? Do you keep it locked up in the generic category of “nature” or do you see the redemptive story working it’s way out in urban landscapes, wilderness, small still-lifes and grand horizons? What does the voice of creation say to you about yourself? About GOD? About spirituality? I encourage you, I urge you, to give her a voice in the liturgy, to acknowledge her and honor her story in your liturgy. And see how your eyes are opened in the collaboration.

Categories: Formation