This is an annual Christian celebration to pray, hear, and respond as a community to the cry of Creation. This year’s Season begins on 1^st September and draws to a close on 4^th October.

The theme this year is ‘To Hope and Act with Creation’, with the symbol of ‘The Firstfruits of Hope’, inspired by Romans 8: 19-25. Here is the celebration guide, a means by which you can follow along, equipped with prayers, reflections and ideas for celebration.

Learn more about the events lined up, and the links for you to join in, here.

Lausanne 4 will run from 22^nd to 28^th September while GCCF is slated to take place from 28^th September to 2^nd October. Please pray for the safety of all our delegates, especially those from many countries who will be representing creation care, in addition to the necessary finance and visa matters.

Pray for Katharine Hayhoe and Ruth Padilla De Borst who will be speaking at a plenary session on the first night of the Lausanne Congress, that the state of God’s world and our calling to care for it might be at the heart of Lausanne’s deliberations.

Pray too for the afternoon sessions on ‘Creation Care & the Vulnerable’ where Jasmine Kwong and Dave Bookless will be ‘Content Specialists’, and for many good informal interactions throughout.

As for our GCCF, please pray for Jasmine, Dave and Ryoung Kim who are the main organisers, working with others to sort out visas, finances, programme, stories to be shared, online access and much more.

LWCCN is excited to be a part of the Christian Climate Observers Program (CCOP) at the UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP 29) in Baku, Azerbaijan, November 10-23rd.

CCOP is training the next generation of UN climate observers from a Christian and missional perspective before and during the conference. Participants will share CCOP credentials and gain access to the COP 29 conference grounds where you will be able to attend meetings, briefings, workshops and any events open to those with official observer status. 

Learn more and apply by 23 July 2024

Dates: Choose one; same program:

    Nov. 10-17 (or)                                  

    Nov. 15-23   

Location: Baku, Azerbaijan

Application deadline: July 23, 2024

Room & Board: lodging and breakfast provided at CCOP Base Camp, site to be announced.

Cost: $850 USD; participants are responsible for their own roundtrip travel. We have some scholarships available for those who require financial assistance to attend, particularly students and those from the Global South. We are still working to make the fee lower than the above-mentioned figure as much as possible, through our ongoing efforts of lodging selection and fundraising. We will announce the actual amount of the fee at the final stage of the application process when you confirm your participation at CCOP-2024, sometime in mid to late September.

Do these questions pique your curiosity?

The A Rocha community in Singapore is delighted to host ‘Missional Discipleship and Sustainability’, a day conference in Singapore, alongside the support of Biblical Graduate School of Theology, Fellowship of Evangelical Students and Creation Care Singapore.

There, they hope to explore these questions and much more alongside A Rocha International leaders and local experts, speaking from the fields of theology, finance, science, and conservation.

If you happen to be in Singapore on the 11^th of May, you know what to do – join us for the conversation, happening at Katong Presbyterian Church! Find out more details here. 

On that note, do check out a prior work by the A Rocha community in Singapore—God’s Gardeners: Creation Care Stories from Singapore and Malaysia.

Time: 13.00 UTC (14.00 BST) | Date: 9 July 2024

Mark your calendars! The next LWCCN Webinar will be on 9^th July, on Creation Care in Cities. This is a vital subject, considering that more than 50% of the world’s population live in urban areas.

Dr Chris Elisara from WEA and others will be facilitating our conversation. Keep an eye for the Zoom link in next month’s Pollinator—we will also share the recording of our recent webinar on Churches and Creation Care, which had excellent contributions from India, Peru, Philippines, Singapore, and the UK.

More details coming soon!

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.

Click here for Zoom links.

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.

This quarterly webinar is part of a series exploring theological and practical aspects of creation care.

Time: 13.00 UTC (14.00 BST) | Date: 23 April 2024

Sign up here!

Maria Ale Andrade V and Clark Buys began by presenting Tearfund’s Abundant Community Theology (ACT). They talked about cultivating an abundant community mindset over that of a scarcity mindset: this prioritizes relationship over individual identity, a shared home over competitive market, generosity over greed, and better distribution over more production solutions.

Prof. Must Dube followed this presentation with a critical reflection on ACT. She highlighted the importance of contextual theology with concern for the communities included and excluded within our conversation. She raised the need for decolonized theology and mentioned that ‘…a spirit of inclusion does not mean a spirit of equality’. She also emphasised the importance of lament with God and God’s creation for ‘…naming oppression, calling for change and justice for earth’. She ended by reminding us that the good news extends to all creation and underscored the transformative nature of salvation.

Dave Bookless offered an overview of creation care theology trends. He first began by highlighting how early creation care theology existed among Desert Fathers, Coptic Christians, Celtic Christians, and even early evangelicals. He discussed how a great reversal took place when a fear of science, liberal theology and ‘social gospel’ concerns emerged. Integral Mission was rediscovered through the aid of theologians such as René Padilla, Samuel Escobar, and John Stott. Currently, we are witnessing a rise of eco-theologies, including liberation theologies, interfaith theologies and post-colonial and indigenous theologies. Finally, he named a few future trends including:

a) rethinking ‘stewardship’
b) questioning ‘anthropocentrism’
c) cultivating theologies of lament, loss and hope
d) exploring intersectionality of ecotheology among other issues like gender, decolonization, and so on.

A link to the recording of this webinar will be shared in the next Pollinator.

Paper: Abundant Community Theology – Buys & Andrade V. (2023). Abundant Community Theology: A Case Study in Decolonial Theological Research. Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer2023.

Video: Tearfund – Enough for All

• Learn from the past, sharing how LWCCN has grown from the Jamaica Consultation & Call to Action in 2012, through 12 regional conferences until today
• Assess where we are, sharing experiences, stories and progress from around the world
• Plan for the future: seeking God’s guidance as we seek to integrate Creation Care into the life and mission of God’s Church worldwide

If you’re interested in attending please fill in the form here before 30^th April (this doesn’t commit you to attending or paying, but helps us plan).

The GCCF will cost c.$500 (to be confirmed, including all board, accommodation, and conference costs). The forum will be held at Nine Tree Premier Hotel, Myeongdong II. Seoul, South Korea

You are welcome to the launch of Tearfund’s Abundant Community Theology! Celebrate the culmination of an extensive global theology research project on environmental and economic sustainability, explore transformative ideas proposed in Abundant Community Theology, and hear from global thought leaders about the future of creation care theology in this 90-minute Zoom webinar. You might well spot a familiar face in the speaker line-up!

Date: Wednesday, 27 March 2024

Time: 12:30 – 2:00pm UTC

Are you interested and available? Don’t forget to sign up here.