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.

We’re planning a LWCCN Global Creation Care Forum for 29^th Sept – 2^nd Oct 2024.

It will be in Seoul, South Korea, immediately following the Lausanne 4 Congress.

Plans and costs are still being finalised, but we’re aiming for less than $100 a day for full board and conference costs.

Who is it for? About 5,000 global Christian leaders will already be in South Korea for Lausanne 4, so we want to take the opportunity to gather, consult, pray and plan together. Even if you’re not attending L4, do consider coming and we aim to enable virtual participation as much as possible.

What are the aims? Having completed a global series of regional consultations on Creation Care (2012-2022) following the Jamaica Consultation and Call to Action, we now want to plan for the next ten years of Creation Care work globally. We aim to collaborate between different organisations, encourage younger, indigenous and women’s voices in creation care, listen to each other and to God, and seek to discern ways forward. If we believe ‘creation is waiting for the children of God to be revealed’ (Romans 8:19) then we, the Church, need to show prophetic leadership in an era of climate breakdown and biodiversity collapse.

Save the date … and express your interest: we’ll share booking details as soon as possible. For now, please simply email creationcare@lausanne.org giving your name, email address and country of residence if you are seriously interested in attending. We will let you know when booking is available.

We bring you the latest happenings from the Faith for Cities initiative, launched by WEA Sustainability Center’s co-director, Dr. Chris Elisara. Here is an invitation to join their convenings—specialised gatherings for collaboration and innovation.

• Data Convening │ March 5th, 2024
  We are inviting leaders and organizations working in the overlapping areas of data, cities, and religion to a new initiative promoting intentional collaboration. With practitioners who are willing, we are building a collaborative community that supports a global commons at the intersection of faith, cities, and data that will benefit all the stakeholders working in this space.

• Urban Design Convening │ March 26th, 2024
  We are inviting leaders and organizations working in the overlapping areas of religion and urban design, planning, architecture, landscape architecture, placemaking, public engagement, etc. to a new initiative promoting intentional collaboration. With practitioners who are willing, we are building a collaborative community that supports a global commons at the intersection of faith and urban design that will benefit all the stakeholders working in this space.

• Finance/Developers Convening │ April 9th, 2024
  We are inviting leaders and organizations working in the overlapping areas of religion and faith-consistent finance, project developers that develop and/or finance urban projects to a new initiative promoting intentional collaboration. With practitioners who are willing, we are building a collaborative community that supports a global commons at the intersection of faith and finance/project developers that will benefit all the stakeholders working in this space.

To find out more, click here.

• A Rocha International
• Micah Global
• Renew Our World
• OIKOS
• Lausanne / MACC
• WEA
• Tearfund
• Anglican Alliance / ACEN
• EFICOR

Join us as we prayerfully learn from and look at the year ahead from a Christian ecological perspective.

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

Josephine Kijabe is a missionary serving amongst communities who rely on livestock and small-scale agriculture as their livelihood. She shares with us about Community Health Evangelism—integrating disciple and evangelism with community based development.

She writes,

“Most of their livelihoods have recently been threatened due to climate change and other factors caused by it. Many have suffered hunger, diseases like malnutrition, poverty, and the like. To share Christ’s compassion effectively and bring hope, I asked God what I could do to be the light in these communities. The Lord laid in my heart heavily to do gardening, conservation, land management, and agriculture in general and be a good steward of what God has given us, including land.”

Josephine began gardening—despite semi-arid land conditions, and by God’s grace, witnessed land restoration. She shared her practices with the community, aiding them to do so in their own homes, beginning with women and youth, but joined also now by the men.

She reflects that, “…agriculture is an excellent tool for effective evangelism in all aspects of life. It meets the people’s very core needs. I am very passionate about being used by God to make disciples of Christ by speaking about climate change and taking action by following the best farmer in the world, God himself, through nature.”

We thank God for Josephine’s story, and for her life (as well as so many others like her!) in tending the ground and bearing good news!

‘How our land looked before we started following the example of the best farmer in the world, God himself’

‘How the land now looks’

Hakuhia is hiring an Executive Director and an Operation Manager for its operations. To apply, please visit the FPC’s job openings page.