Individual "sins" and collective action

Too often when we try to face our environmental impact, we are outfaced as individuals by the things that require collective action and yet our society seems radically untuned to the importance, in practice, of living within our footprint. So it is good to see this: "Already our culture works to atomize us, to make us feel like islands of consumer desire whose sole function is to accumulate as much as possible. It discourages us from thinking of ourselves as involved in communities that impose obligations and responsibilities. But if it is to mean anything substantial, a new ethic of sustainability must be collective. It's going to be about community, about our mutual bonds and mutual care."
One of the things that I used to encourage in collective worship was to bring this before God singly and together. It is important that we don't acquiescce too easily to the individualising tendencies of our culture, especially in worship, precisely because it means 'buying' the myth of atomisation and cuts us off from the possibilities of collective change, renewal and action. The issue then becomes how to recognise the individual and the collective poles of worship adequately and in ways that resonate for post-moderns and integralists.

I want to push this debate further, too. We need to recognise the spiritual personality of the collectives and 'corporations' [in the sense of symbiotic human organisations, not just businesses] and rediscover how to address them, call them to their God-given purposes and make them responsible to God and to human and planetary society. I think that the Pauline language of the 'Powers' is part of this. I crave your prayers that over the next year or so I can actually start to get my thoughts together on this properly.
Individual "sins" and collective action | Gristmill: The environmental news blog | Grist Magazine: