Sunday, January 13, 2008

Creation Care: Prophetic Vocation of the Church

The last section of the Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future demands a life of “embodied holiness” in the world. Part of that is “to be faithful stewards of the created order.”

Northern Seminary’s Phil Kenyon has planned a one-day seminar that considers creation care “as a prophetic vocation of the church.”

This is something I usually don’t deal with in church. I believe in it, and I practice it. I recycle, conserve, and use compact fluorescent bulbs, but it usually doesn’t impinge on my church life.

The seminar presenter will be Steven Bouma-Prediger, chair of the religion department at Hope College and director of Hope’s environmental studies program.

Steven’s book For the Beauty of the Earth: A Christian Vision for Creation Care won an award of merit for the Theology/Ethics category in the 2002 Christianity Today Book Awards.

Phil sent me this brief description of the seminar:

Deafness, ignorance, denial, indifference. Four reasons Christians today fail to take seriously their calling as caretakers of creation.

How can we regain our prophetic voice against these barriers to living faithfully? What will empower us to be the earthkeepers God calls us to be?

Our sacred text, the Bible, begins and ends with rivers and trees.

Indeed, the biblical story tells us that everything God creates and sustains is very good and that we humans are charged with serving and protecting God's good earth. And in the biblical story God's good future is of the earth redeemed and restored, not destroyed. If we are to regain our prophetic voice, we must get the biblical story right, and we must learn to live into that story with faith and joy. We must learn to be faithful stewards of creation.

View details and information about attending the April 16 conference here.

2 comments:

L.L. Barkat said...

I came over through Christine Scheller's blog, where we were having a conversation about creation care.

Sounds like an intriguing seminar. And I'll have to check out his book.

Perhaps we could add these to his list of four (with one overlap), from Hilary of Arles: "Error has three causes--darkness, loneliness and ignorance."

John said...

As your dad doing job as a editor-in-chief of the Christianity in all blog I can feel fragrance of spiritual life.Well I believe in all religion because all have the same fundamental!
r4i revolution gold