Climate Intercessors is a global network “of people whose prayers are as real and urgent as the climate crisis.” Across six continents, we began gathering online since November 2020 during the week that the important COP26 climate summit was postponed due to the pandemic. It genuinely felt like we were “standing in the gap,” a metaphor long applied to the work of intercessory prayer in the world. At that time, Dave Bookless (A Rocha International) called our efforts part of “the missing puzzle piece” in climate action.
We meet over Zoom on the second Tuesday of each month, and offer four one-hour options to try to accommodate as many time zones as possible. Our next scheduled date is April 9.
Our meetings typically have four parts: a brief liturgy, praying about current news gathered from the headlines, praying about a more developed theme, and then using breakout rooms to pray for local requests.
[To give you a taste of specifics, April’s headline prayers will include the heartbreaking drought in Western Afghanistan, and the theme prayers will focus on Carbon Capture and Sequestration; that God might enable engineers to bring CCS to scale quickly and that the public might not be swayed by false claims made about CCS by the fossil fuel companies.]
Another feature of Climate Intercessors is our monthly newsletters which features a brief reflection from Scripture about the climate crisis and prayer. Writer Lowell Bliss calls these “injective Bible studies”: what happens when you inject the topic of climate change into old familiar stories from the Gospels and the Old Testament? The titles might be tongue-in-check—such as April 2023’s “Lazarus’s Sisters Emote over the IPCC Report (John 11)—but our careful handling of God’s Word is a serious call to go beyond the standard “creation care verses” and to explore how all of Scripture can instruct us in the climate crisis.
Read old newsletters, subscribe to new ones, and find the timings for meetings at www.climateintercessors.org. No registration is required for the meetings. Just show up. All are welcome.
