Earth Day

Last fall, I was lucky enough to participate in a training class run by Global Ministries Earthkeepers. Earthkeepers is a U.S.-based training class that helps Methodists design and run environmental projects. Participants were church members, lay leaders, and clergy members from the East Coast to the Midwest. My class was held in downtown Hartford, while similar courses were in Denver and Birmingham, AL. We spent the entire weekend working together, sharing ideas, working on our environmental projects, and worshipping. 

We spent a lot of time talking about creation care, how God created this wonderful world, and how we, as humans, do not care for it as we should.  There are so many ways we can do better. We waste resources, pollute the soil, air, and water, and destroy forests when we should be conserving these vital resources because they belong to God. Being a Methodist means we want to have a relationship with God’s Creation and work toward a ministry of caring for and healing the earth. I was truly amazed and happy to see the number of documents published by the Methodist church that pertain to creation care and the need to take care not just of God’s people but of the earth. 

So how do we do that? Much of our classroom time was spent working on and planning a project that we had chosen. We received coaching on ways to focus our efforts so that we could return to our homes and get started.  Some of the projects brought forward were to use church land to plant vegetables and share with the community, to start a food pantry, to work on clean energy, to start wild churches, to clean plastic from rivers and land – or the ocean, and many others. It was truly inspiring to see the many different ideas that people came up with and to follow along via the internet to see the updates as these projects come to fruition.

You don’t have to plan and manage a large project to make a difference in this world; smaller things can be just as helpful. If all of us do something, it will make a difference. Some examples: 

·       We can do a plastic-free day (week or month).
·       We can stop spraying pesticides – you get all the good and bad bugs when you spray.
·       We can participate in a clean-up.
·       Donate to a food bank.
·       Fix something rather than throw it away & get a new one.
·       Eat less meat.
·       Plant a (native) tree. 

We don’t need a hundred perfect activists;
we need a million imperfect ones.

-        Debbie Dunn