Recently I've been thinking something along the lines of "What would Tom Sine say?" Some readers may recall Tom who wrote "The Mustard Seed Conspiracy" in the early 1980s and continued writing books about mission and the projection of trends into the following decades. He wrote about Christian mission in relation to the environment from the early 2000s and is still doing so.
I thought of his approach of Christian missional futuring when I read this article in the Church Times. It reminded me that I'm trying to get my head around what the Churches need to be doing now to prepare for the climate-changed future. I'm thinking in terms of broad headline points and noting the kind of pastoral and missional activity implied and tracing those back to the very near future so that we begin to do now what will be needed later.
So, here I'm trying to 'think out loud' about the kinds of things that we need to pay attention to and the implications. I'm thinking, too, that looking at the kinds of scenarios that emerge as likely with 2C of heating.
Taxonomy of climate changes
It might be good to start with a kind of taxonomy of effects (and if you feel you're well acquainted with them just skip down to the next heading). The first order effects are things like the atmosphere growing warmer on average and the average sea temperatures rising also. Then there are derivative effects from those: more heat in the air means faster movement and greater retention of water vapour. It also means that other things being equal average temperatures at various latitudes will rise.
Third order effects in these cases derive from those knock-on effects. So, habitable zones for different species of plants and animals shift -often faster than plants can grow into new zones. These effects are more chaotic because they interact and create new feedback loops. The kinds of effects that have been concerning people most have been desertification (already evident in the middle east and sahel regions); extension of the range of malaria into what were temperate zones; crop failures and resulting food precarity; areas of the globe that literally cannot support human life; loss of groundwater because aquifers are no longer or inadequately fed having lost their trickle-top-ups from melting snow which may no longer exist on mountains.
Higher sea temperatures means less sea ice which means in turn more liquid water -hence higher sea levels -which have been creeping up already over the last century or so. In turn this means coastlines will change: some are being and others will be inundated; more erosion from higher tides and more powerful weather effects. In addition, like with land-related warming, habitats shift (in some cases faster than species can migrate or adapt). Salination of soils making them unsuitable for previous vegetation and animal life.
So these create a bunch of fourth-order effects among human societies, many of which we are seeing already in more precarious or vulnerable peoples and places. It is these effects that may be civilisation altering. It is these sorts of effects on smaller scales that have played a part in ending previous human civilisations. These effects are migration and/or population loss to disease, inadequate diet and outright starvation, violence and the depredations of stress and diminishing healthcare. These effects interrelate and are complex.
Responding to civilisational crisis
In a quick-and-dirty way I often use the collapse of the Roman empire as a reference point. There/then, as I understand it, some of the kinds of things mentioned just as civilisational challenges came together and resulted in a slow collapse. In Britain the effects were to undermine the infrastructural supports for urban life. These led to population movements with the violence that was engendered or resulting from or by those movements. In turn these changes resulted in new patterns of mission and pastoral care by the churches -giving rise to the Celtic forms of church life more resourced by monastic communities than urban organisational patterns. It's worth noting that the contribution of monastic mission was wide-ranging: from land management through creating, collecting and disseminating knowledge, through works of mercy, healthcare, peacemaking, lawmaking, civil service all the way through to calling and nurturing disciples. In other words, ranging through the five marks of mission and back again.
I think that this is potentially a helpful reference point (and no doubt there are others) for us to consider how to equip churches to be agents of care, hope and even relative flourishing as the slow collapse takes place and as new arrangements for living together develop.
Missional challenges
First of all, right up front, we should be playing an active part -now- in resisting trends, organisations and ways of thinking that make more extreme heating more likely. So it is right that churches are making commitments to zeroing their own carbon footprints and are beginning to divest from climate heating operations in their financial portfolios. We need to make sure that these things happen and don't get kicked into the long grass of day-to-day concerns which have the effect of maintaining a kind of business as usual and distract, in effect, from putting in the work of following through. Let's note also that this will be costly at times (financially, in terms of time and energy too) -but then would that not be a kind of "taking up your cross"? We need to account for such costs in our own heads as a form of mission giving because that's what it is in the bigger picture.
Fifth mark missionaries
It also means, I think, that we recognise that there are those among us whom God is calling to take action for the common good and to support them as "fifth-mark missionaries". There is a cluster of callings in this respect that we need to recognise and support. There are those whose regular and (often) paid work is wrapped up in environmental care. That is relatively uncontroversial, although we might visibly support them more and demonstrate that we value their work. There are those who are called to activism in relation to creation-care: to protest; be arrested; support and care for protesters; to help organise protest. This is possibly more controversial, though it shouldn't be in principle. We are heirs to the activism of anti-slavery activists, chartists, suffagists, health and welfare activists of many kinds. Many of the struggles involved uncomfortable and controversial tactics. We laud people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King jr forgetting that they made many people profoundly uncomfortable -that the discomfort was part of the point because things needed to change. We sometimes blithely talk of the Holy Spirit being sent to "afflict the comfortable". Well, this is precisely the sort of comfort-afflicting that is meant, surely? So at the very least we should recognise they have just cause and pray for them. We might also encourage fellow Christians to support them practically, pastorally (visiting those in prison is mentioned in the gospels, after all) and theologically. This would include public statements of support particularly reinforcing and underlining the imminent dangers of climate crises and reminding us of obligations under international law and how these relate back to core Christian values relating to neighbour love, creation care and solidarity with the poor.
We might also note the concomitant effects of the involvement of Christians and indeed churches in these movements. There is a positive apologetic effect. In the coming decades as the effects of climate change become even more evident and distressing, the church's witness to the truth of what was happening and its involvement in trying to help mitigate and head-off the worst effects will be an important and demonstrable apologetic asset.
Prayer, liturgy: lex orandi, lex credendi
We can help to solidify these things by building into our regular liturgies, prayers relating to the fifth mark of mission and in support of the activities of fifth-mark missionaries. We can help preachers to connect lectionary readings with climate crisis and creation care matters more securely and frequently. We can make the Season of Creation pretty much mandatory. We can strongly encourage eco-church processes to be ordinary in the way that safeguarding processes are now fairly well embedded into ordinary parish life. Supporting climate mitigation projects or climate activism should be as normal as having mission partners that a church supports or encouraging people to be active in a food bank. All the while we keep on saying why it is important to be doing this stuff: keep repeating until we feel like we are cracked records saying it over and over: because only then will it get to seem like it's simply the right thing and that the only real question is 'how?' not 'whether'.
In respect of the longer arc of missionary mitigation, I suggest that we could do with the following sorts of things.
Ministries and vocations
Help people to learn diy food production skills -gardening, window boxes, allotments, mobilising the skills and knowledge of gardeners to help with this. Involve children, open out to the wider community as partners in learning and teaching. In times of food precarity the more people know about growing our own food, the greater our collective food security. In theological and missional terms this sits with a practical theology centred on "Give us today our daily bread" (more in another post, on that one, but it's there in embryo in the relevant Ionesco of my book 'Praying the Pattern'). I would also suggest, relatedly, that there's a need to help people who are beginning to move away from fast food. Bring together people with teaching skills with people with skills around cooking and preparing local food to convene learning communities -use suitably equipped church hall kitchens or offer a house-call method. Have cooking parties.... These become community building events in themselves with all the good missional effects that can come from that.
Learning practical skills to recycle, reuse and repair. In an age of fast fashion and goods which are more expensive to repair than to buy again new, we've got out of the habit of repair and so also of passing on repair skills. However helping people to understand some basics is likely to become increasingly important as price-structures and markets change. There is often stuff on the internet to help but it's also valuable to many people to work in three dimensions and with a friendly coach. We should introduce our congregations to the various recycling networks -free to collect ones like freegle and money-exchange ones as well as donating to or buying from charity shops.
Demolishing strongholds and taking every thought captive to Christ. In climate emergency I would suggest that this includes -as a matter of missional urgency- helping people to become aware of our own collective cognitive biases and how they are weaponised against us and to sow division by propagandists and advertisers. Given that various forms of climate-change denial and delaying action on climate emergency are propagated via media exploiting our cognitive biases, such 'mental fight' is a vital part of equipping the saints and those of good will in the short and longer terms. This actually has very strong links to meditation, confession of sin and the final petition of the Lord's prayer. We should examine afresh our liturgies to enable them to help us to turn cognitive swords into attitudinal ploughshares and not to learn war anymore. We might consider how we use Lent, for example, to connect spiritual disciplines with creation-attentive justice and peace-making and take the mental hygiene dimension as an important strand in it all.
Equip and train peacemaking, non-violence and de-escalation. We have already begun to see rising anger fed by increased stresses and fanned by commercial and political interests exploiting our cognitive environment. Add to that the presence of refugees both local and from further afield and food precarity and infrastructural strains, and we have the makings of interpersonal and inter-communal tensions which become increasingly likely to have flashpoints for violence embedded in them. Jesus's blessing on peacemakers is to be taken fairly literally in such circumstances whatever else you make of it. Wouldn't it be great if the churches had in regular deployment a host of people who were good at listening and enabling others to hear one another, who were able to draw people together to get past differences and construct new futures together, who were skilled in calming tense situations and building relationships and alliances which made for safe, more secure and more prosperous futures? May such peacemakers be raised up and blessed with the fruits of their labours.
Create pastoral structures to support people working through climate grief, anxiety, anger etc. Recent research has been clear that it is likely that many people -probably a significant proportion of those who have become aware of the scientific discoveries and projections regarding climate change- are becoming concerned, anxious and/or fearful of the impacts. One evidence of that is XR and the school climate strikes on Fridays. Alongside these have begun to grow up a variety of mental-health support structures. These range from climate cafes, to circle-group methodologies and climate-attuned therapists. Christians have been involved in these. However, churches, as such, have not been prominent. I suggest that this may need to change. I suggest however, that rather than setting up parallel structures and ministries, churches first identify, support and empower their members who are being called into this and learn from them. Churches more corporately would do well to adopt a servant attitude by making resources available and finding appropriate ways to encourage Christian vocations in climate change pastoral care and to resource those who become involved. In the meantime we should be encouraging ourselves to explore the ways that our traditional insights, spirituality and approaches to care connect with creation-attentive spiritualities so that we can model and offer from a secure base, robust Christian spiritual pathways which support people in their pastoral needs and spiritual growth.
I note, in passing, that the previous paragraphs set an agenda for Christian discipleship and ministerial training. I note too that it is an agenda that needs to be initiated and rolled out as a matter of urgency as the changes to be addressed and responded to are already underway. We don't have decades to get started, we have a small handful of years. One of my own reference points to considering this is Ron Sider's Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. In some ways, I think we need a Rich Christians in Climate Emergency.
Build capacity for community organising. It is likely that many things will become of necessity more local: food, leisure, work and to live well locally will mean actually making good on the nostalgia for good old days when supposedly people knew their neighbours and everyone rallied round to help. Whether or not those days really existed in the way they are not-quite-remembered, it will be important for us to discover together how to pull together and organise to do things together. This kind of activity and offering servant leadership in it is part of the Christian vocation. We would be demonstrating values about the sacredness of life, the importance of power-with rather than power-over because we are all loved by God and share God's image and the importance of working for the common good. These values would be rooted for us in the teaching of Christ but not exclusive to Christian faith; we would be working alongside others of good will. And we need to step up because -be sure- there will be some who would offer less benign and more exploitative leadership.
As I look back on that, I think that there's more to be said, but it gives an outline to be elucidated. More later, perhaps. Each of those paragraphs a chapter ...
