Evangelicals embrace 'creation care'

Scott Freeman is not your typical tree-hugger.

For years, he said, he believed that concern for the environment was "all a bunch of liberal politics."

But, added the senior pastor of Northside Church of Christ in Waco, Texas, "the more I began to pray and pay attention to the change in climate and the way we pollute, I began to see how deep the need is."

Now Freeman, a father of three, is trying to be better about recycling. He's talked to his wife about composting. And in early September, he became one of 86 church leaders to sign the Evangelical Declaration on the Care of Creation, a call to conservation from religious conservatives.

"Because we have sinned, we have failed in our stewardship of creation," the statement says. "Therefore we repent of the way we have polluted, distorted or destroyed so much of the Creator's work."

It adds, "Because we await the time when even the groaning creation will be restored to wholeness, we commit ourselves to work vigorously to protect and heal that creation for the honor and glory of the Creator."

Jim Ball, executive director of the Evangelical Environmental Network, called the ministers' manifesto "groundbreaking." His group, based in Wynnewood, Pa., orchestrated the release of last year's statement.

The ecological goals of the "creation care movement" sound like the Sierra Club's agenda: Protect the water, the air, the land, and the creatures that inhabit them. But biblical imperatives are fundamental to the evangelists' movement.

Pollution, for example, is regarded as "the earthly result of human sin" which has led to "a perverted stewardship, a patchwork of garden and wasteland in which the waste is increasing." And helping the developing world economically is important because "godly, just, and sustainable economies . . . reflect God's sovereign economy and enable men, women and children to flourish along with all the diversity of creation."

Such a religious focus means the evangelical ministers "are going to start redefining these issues," Ball said. "People understand global warming as an environmental issue. With our statement, we are helping people to understand that climate change is much more than an environmental issue." It's a sign that, by chemically altering the Earth's atmosphere, "we are pressing against the finite limits God has set for creation," the statement said.

Ball said the real thrust of the "green Christians" movement is "people care. . . . All of the Bible's teachings about caring for others . . . love others as yourself, that applies to concerns about pollution."