Faith-based action on climate change urged at Seattle HOPE conference
Episcopal News Service. April 14, 2008 [041408-01]
Jan Nunley
To get to St. Margaret's Episcopal Church in Bellevue from downtown Seattle, you take one of Washington State's three new Green Highways designated to integrate transportation functionality and ecological sustainability.
It's an apt metaphor for the first-ever "Healing Our Planet Earth (HOPE): Singing a New Song of Hope" national conference, which brought nearly 300 Episcopalians and members of other denominations and faith traditions together on April 12 for a full day of worship, speakers, and workshops on global climate change and what churches can do to raise awareness and change behaviors.
Because of a labor dispute in progress the conference moved to St. Margaret's from its original location at the Hilton Seattle Airport and Conference Center. The meeting was co-sponsored by the Episcopal Divinity School (EDS) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Earth Ministry, a Seattle-based nonprofit that works to mobilize and educate faith communities on environmental issues.
"This conference seeks to engage the church in understanding and actively addressing the crisis of climate change," said Bishop Gregory Rickel of Olympia, the sponsoring diocese for the conference.
The entire day was experienced within the context of Holy Eucharist, beginning with the Chinook Litany from the Whidbey Institute's Chinook Psalter and the reading of "A Contemporary Genesis" by Gary Lagerloef.
Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori addressed the conference, her second speech to a Seattle gathering in as many days. On Friday night (April 11), she spoke at the dedication of a new work at the Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park, encouraging the crowd to create "a climate of change" through embracing the Genesis Covenant -- a plan to reduce the carbon footprint of churches, synagogues, and mosques, and their members, by a minimum of 50 percent by 2015.
Saturday morning (April 12) she spoke to the packed St. Margaret's sanctuary from her experience as an oceanographer about the devastating effects of human carelessness with the natural world.
"Creation is groaning in travail," she said, using St. Paul's evocative image from Romans 8:22. "But it is not the travail of childbirth. It's the groaning of mortal illness. We must hear that cry, and respond."
Dr. Sallie McFague offered the morning's second address. McFague is a distinguished theologian in residence at Vancouver School of Theology in Vancouver, British Columbia, and a former professor of theology at Nashville's Vanderbilt University. She has also written extensively on environmental theology, particularly focusing on the metaphor of the world as God's body.
Pleading for an "ecological anthropology" on behalf of theologians, McFague warned, "This crisis demands that we live differently…It is not just another important issue. It appears to be a paradigm shift in who we think we are."
Ecology -- derived from the Greek oikos, or home, and logos, word -- is simply "the house rules" for humanity's home planet, and the most important rule is that "everything is related to everything else," McFague explained. "And we live in a home -- not a hotel, where there's a housekeeping staff to pick up after us."
"Ecological anthropology is not a sentimental plea to love nature," she urged. "It is the truth about who and what we are."
Following the Gospel reading, the group broke up into sessions for the afternoon, with four panels and four workshops offered. The panels included "Advocacy and Entrepreneurship-Implementation in the Community"; "The Genesis Covenant"; "The Environment and Applied Theology"; and "Science, Humans and the Environment," while the workshops featured sessions on the Millennium Development Goals; the "greening" of congregations; and methods and techniques of collaboration.
Choctaw Nation elder Dr. Steven Charleston, president of EDS and former Bishop of Alaska, updated participants on his vision of a "Genesis Covenant," which he first unveiled in Seattle in June 2007.
"If we, people of faith, do not act to save this planet, then who will we be waiting for to do the job for us?" Charleston challenged the audience, asking them to imagine the impact of a unified effort to reverse global warming by every faith community in the United States.
Within a few weeks, podcast videos of the HOPE conference will be posted on the conference website for download for personal or group viewing, and DVDs of the presentations will be available for purchase.