It has a 220,000 square-foot facility near Orlando, Fla., up to 7,000 weekly worshippers, and thousands more online. Northland, A Church Distributed is a church with an odd name. And an extraordinary amount of trash. Last April, about a dozen overall-clad members of its "Creation Care Task Force" carefully picked through a week's worth, as part of an environmental audit.
Like several other big, influential evangelical U.S. churches, Northland is going green, after its pastor began preaching about taking better care of God's creation. Convinced that the science of climate change is sound and alarmed by increasing evidence of global warming, millions of U.S. evangelicals are beginning to give the environment the kind of attention usually reserved for issues like abortion and gay marriage. And they've begun to flex some of their considerable political muscle, putting politicians, particularly those in the Republican Party, on notice that they had better begin taking environmental stewardship more seriously.
They're not dropping the pro-family, pro-life stances pushed by powerful para-church groups like Focus on the Family and Christian Coalition. But many have come to the conclusion that there won't be much life left to support if environmental abuses continue. Northland's trash-sorting volunteers divided more than 270 kilograms of garbage into 34 categories -- and inspired a recycling program. An almost 100-page audit also makes recommendations that would significantly cut the church's paper, energy and water use. Raymond Randall, the volunteer head of the Creation Care Task Force and a consultant who has done similar audits for Wal-Mart, says most evangelical churches are just beginning to recognize the environment as a legitimate concern, but "a lot of people see it as political."
The congregation's senior pastor, Joel C. Hunter, acknowledges the move is a deviation from the usual "below the belt" concerns but says, "these are critical issues . . . if we're going to truly love our neighbours as Christ commands, caring as much for the vulnerable outside the womb as inside the womb."
Hunter got much media attention last year when he resigned as the newly minted president of the once-mighty Christian Coalition of America, citing the right-wing organization's refusal to let him address environmental and poverty issues. He was also among a group of 85 high-profile scientists and evangelicals issuing a call to action in Washington early last year, known as the Evangelical Climate Initiative.
In true American fashion, it took a road trip to bring the evangelical movement's growing preoccupation with the environment into the public eye. Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN) executive director Rev. Jim Ball and his wife took a hybrid Toyota Prius on a cross-country tour in 2003. They dubbed the trek, "What Would Jesus Drive?" The tour's cheeky message about cutting automotive pollution -- "Obeying Jesus in our transportation choices is one of the great Christian obligations and opportunities of the 21st century" -- and Ball's light-handed delivery created a huge secular and religious media buzz.
These days, the network's magazine is behind schedule, e-mail in-boxes are jammed, and Ball and his staff travel so often that they're seldomly in EEN's new offices in Suwanee, Ga. The evangelical environmental message is being heard.
But it's not always welcomed. When the 30-million-strong National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) threw its weight behind last year's climate initiative, a group led by Focus on the Family founder and director James Dobson -- arguably the dean of conservative "family ministries" -- tried to silence Richard Cizik, NAE's chief Washington lobbyist.
Dobson and his colleagues, including prison ministry leader Charles Colson, called global warming "a subject of heated controversy" that Cizik should not accept as factual. NAE held its ground, refused to fire Cizik and reaffirmed that climate change, poverty and peace were as important to evangelicals as family, abortion and sexuality.
Rev. Ron Sider grew up near Fort Erie, Ont., and heads Evangelicals for Social Action, the group that backed and nurtured EEN until it became independent less than a year ago. He calls the show of support for Cizik a "breakthrough" that was "immensely significant. . . . It was a major moment, to declare that the religious right does not represent the evangelical centre."
Cizik is not afraid to call in political debts, which may partly explain the movement to oust him. In the Keanu Reeves-narrated documentary film The Great Warming, which evangelicals have embraced as their own An Inconvenient Truth, Cizik laid down the gauntlet: "Evangelicals . . . comprise between 40 to 50 percent of . . . the Republican base, and so if the largest single population group in the Republican coalition were to say . . . `We want you to take, as leaders in the Republican party, leadership on climate change, on clean air, on pure water, on the stewardship of our natural resources' . . . I daresay Republicans will listen. This president, George Bush, will have to listen. The Republicans running for the White House in 2008 will have to listen."
The evangelical environmental movement's current focus may be political, but its roots are theological. As one of EEN's founders, Wisconsin university professor and environmental ethicist Calvin B. DeWitt, points out, the group's 1993 Evangelical Declaration on the Care of Creation reflects theology that makes sense to people like himself who are both scientists and evangelical Christians. It's a confession of humankind's environmental abuse and confirmation "that in Christ there is hope, not only for men, women and children, but also for the rest of creation, which is suffering from the consequences of human sin."
Because industrial-era interpretations of humanity's Genesis-mandated "dominion" over the Earth have been blamed for much environmental destruction, evangelicals needed a reinterpretation of Scripture that recognizes humans' place -- both as God's creatures and stewards. Maintaining a commitment to the authority of the Scriptures, the declaration states that "men, women and children, created in God's image . . . should both sustain creation's fruitfulness and preserve creation's powerful testimony to its Creator." The document sees God revealed both in the "book" of creation and in the authoritative words of the Bible.
Peter Illyn, founder and executive director of Restoring Eden, an evangelical environmental group with a West Coast-activist bent, says the movement marks a generational shift as well as an awakening to real environmental changes. A former Foursquare church pastor, Illyn lives with his family and four llamas in the countryside near Vancouver, Wash., and works with church, college and community groups.
"There is a whole generation of younger folks who are kind of getting that this matters," he says. "And they are some of the new movers and shakers in the evangelical world." They reject the historical "man-versus-nature" approach of conservative Christians that has reduced much U.S. environmental debate to "jobs versus the environment."
Restoring Eden weighed in on Cizik's side this year, supporting him and the climate initiative in an open letter to Dobson's group.
Eventually, says Illyn, the progressive environmental side will win "because this is biblical, this is logical and this is consistent with the rest of the core values of Christianity." Also, he says, the new wave of evangelicals are not just concerned about the environment but "social justice, water in Africa and what it means to be a global Christian."
World Vision, a global relief and development organization with 25,000 staff and a $2-billion budget, recently came up with some new answers to that question. Chris Derksen Hiebert, director of advocacy and education for World Vision Canada, says the organization has long seen the impact of climate change in developing countries. This past October, World Vision -- a longtime supporter of EEN -- adopted an international statement on its commitment to the environment, hired a dedicated staff person and is putting together an "advocacy team" to implement it. The statement and action are a reaction to donors' and partners' concerns, says Derksen Hiebert, but clearly aim to keep the world's poorest people in the environmental picture.
Back in Orlando, environmental auditor Raymond Randall now regrets that construction of a new 160,000 square-foot building at his megachurch's main campus was well under way before the congregation's Creation Care Task Force was formed. Few new environmental features made it into the finished building.
But Randall hopes the facility will pay other environmental dividends. In February, it will host a conference on creation care. The idea is that visiting pastors will return home from the conference with new energy and ideas for environmental stewardship. "For some people, part of this is just giving them permission to . . . include this in their list of things we are called to do."
