EMQ » January–March 2020 » Volume 56 Issue 1
By Ed Brown
The network now known as the Lausanne/WEA Creation Care Network (LWCCN) was born the evening of November 1, 2012 in St. Ann, Jamaica at the Lausanne Global Consultation on Creation Care and the Gospel. Today we have 1,500 members in one hundred fifty countries around the world. We have held ten regional conferences and have engaged with all of the major players in the world in the area of creation care.
It’s a remarkable story. There are few organizations that make creation care their primary ministry activity, and only a handful of missions or relief and development organizations consider this a strategic goal. In spite of all of this, God has brought a viable, global network into existence in a surprisingly short time.
How did this happen?
Cape Town
The spark was a single sentence in this key paragraph in Lausanne’s Cape Town Commitment:
If Jesus is Lord of all the earth, we cannot separate our relationship to Christ from how we act in relation to the earth. For to proclaim the gospel that says “Jesus is Lord” is to proclaim the gospel that includes the earth, since Christ’s Lordship is over all creation. Creation care is thus a gospel issue within the Lordship of Christ.[1]
This paragraph is historic. For the first time, the global church is saying “we believe creation care is central to our faith and our identity as God’s people.” This phrase fanned the flames of what would become a vital, energetic movement.
Though, let’s be clear: Creation care was not invented at the Cape Town 2010 Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization. The idea goes back to St. Francis, and in recent years, increasing numbers of evangelicals have been working in this area. This has included those specializing in creation care, such as Au Sable Institute (ausable.org) in the United States and A Rocha International (arocha.org). Missions and development organizations such as Tearfund UK (tearfund.org) and the Evangelical Fellowship of India Commission on Relief (EFICOR, eficor.org) had already been adding environmental concerns to their project portfolios as well.
What happened after Cape Town was providential; it certainly was not planned. We stumbled on what turned out to be an ideal recipe for building a movement by combining passionate people, an organizing document, and a creative and effective strategy.
Passionate People
You can’t have a movement without people who care. In our case, finding people turned out to be easy. Even though creation care remains controversial, God was ahead of us. Among the participants at Cape Town were a number of people already working on creation care. Cape Town allowed us to find each other. People in senior leadership roles in Lausanne, such as Las Newman (Regional Director for the Caribbean) and Chris Wright (author of the Cape Town Commitment) for whom creation care was a priority. We continue to find people everywhere to whom God has spoken. They often feel isolated and are surprised that they aren’t alone – that there are people all over the world moving in the same direction.
It helped to gather those people together. Two years after Cape Town, Lausanne leadership planned for a series of consultations on topics from the Cape Town Commitment. The first of these consultations would be on Creation Care and the Gospel.
About sixty leaders gathered for this purpose in St. Ann, Jamaica, November 2012, the very day Superstorm Sandy was coming ashore in New York. This five-day gathering launched most of what followed.
A Guiding Document
It was clear from the first day that the participants wanted a conference statement to be shared with the larger church community. However, there was no conference statement draft for delegates to approve. We had to start from scratch.
A designated writing team shared a draft with the group – all sixty of us discussing together in one large room. After suggestions were put on a white board, the writing team went to work in the evening. The next day we repeated the exercise. Thus was born the Jamaica Call to Action.[2]
This is a unique document. In structure, it is both simple and detailed, beginning with two fundamental and easily communicated convictions:
- Creation Care is indeed a “gospel issue within the lordship of Christ.”
- We are faced with a[n environmental] crisis that is pressing, urgent, and that must be resolved in our generation.
These two convictions summarize everything that needs to be said about the environmental crisis: caring for God’s creation is central to our faith and to our identity as followers of Jesus (consistent with the Cape Town Commitment), and the crisis in the world today is in fact an emergency.
There follows a comprehensive list of ten specific “calls,” from a call to a simple lifestyle (itself echoing a position paper from Lausanne from the 1980s), to a call for environmental missions, to a call for a complete revamp of the global economy. The group did not shy away from controversy; climate change is discussed prominently (Call No. 6).It is worth noting that even though climate change continues to be a contentious issue in many parts of the Christian community, the Jamaica Call to Action has never been publicly challenged; rather, it has “given cover” to other institutions and organizations wanting to take a stand on this vital issue.
Finally, and critically, the Jamaica Call to Action ends with a beautifully written call to prayer:
Each of our calls to action rests on an even more urgent call to prayer, intentional and fervent, soberly aware that this is a spiritual struggle. Many of us must begin our praying with lamentation and repentance for our failure to care for creation, and for our failure to lead in transformation at a personal and corporate level. And then, having tasted of the grace and mercies of God in Christ Jesus and through the Holy Spirit, and with hope in the fullness of our redemption, we pray with confidence that the Triune God can and will heal our land and all who dwell in it, for the glory of his matchless name.
The Jamaica Call to Action is still a living document. It has become the manifesto for the movement and the foundation for a plan to bring the creation care message to the church.
An Effective Strategy
Those who attended the Jamaica consultation were not professional conference-goers. They were activists, and they agreed that the consultation would have failed if it did not produce a strategic action plan to bring creation care to the global Christian community.
But how do you reach a global church with a topic that is controversial yet urgent? Our answer was “The Global Campaign for Creation Care and the Gospel.”[3] We wanted a global movement, and we believe that the church is God’s ordained instrument. But we recognize that the global church only exists through its manifestation in the nations of the world. To build a global movement, we would have to focus on national church communities. Thus, our goal became jump-starting national creation care movements where there were none and strengthening movements where they already existed.
Through the “Global Campaign” we planned to hold a series of regional conferences modeled on the one held in Jamaica. Each conference would serve nine to fifteen countries, would last five days, and would have identical themes: God’s Word (theology), God’s world (science), and God’s work (our response). We would seek theologians, scientists, creation care practitioners, and church influencers. And we would do all this in three years (!).
We didn’t meet our deadline, but the strategy has proved to be remarkably successful. To date our ten regional conferences have covered one hundred thirty countries. Everyone we know in the evangelical community working in creation care has been part of the campaign. This sense of unity alone makes the entire exercise worthwhile.
And we’ve seen results! One of our guiding principles was that the Global Campaign would support but not own the results. This empowered people and organizations alike. Creation care Sunday School curriculum has been developed in the Philippines; a spontaneous country-to-country outreach (Kenya to Madagascar) was initiated in Africa with no outside support or direction; and national conferences have been held in Pakistan, the United States, Singapore, and most recently in Hong Kong.
We published a book, Creation Care and the Gospel: Reconsidering the Mission of the Church (Hendrickson, 2016) and a module in Lausanne’s Global Classroom video series was released in October 2019.
Keeping the Network Alive
An important decision was to merge the creation care efforts of Lausanne and the World Evangelical Alliance, giving us the Lausanne/WEA Creation Care network. As the Global Campaign winds down, the network is nurtured through a monthly newsletter, The Pollinator, and with personal email contact among network members and Lausanne Catalysts, Dave Bookless and me.
We have challenges: Few Christian organizations specialize in this work, so most network members are individuals; thus, long-term sustainability is a challenge. Few institutions are willing to support the administration a network requires. Also, the topic remains controversial, affecting fundraising and future growth.
In the end, though, we believe that God brought this movement into being, and he will continue to bless it and all those working to heal his beautiful creation.
To learn more about LWCCN visit lwccn.com.
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Rev. Edward R. Brown, MDiv, DD (hon) is the Director and CEO of Care of Creation (careofcreation.net) and serves as Catalyst for Creation Care for the Lausanne Movement. He directs the work of Care of Creation in the US and as Creation Care Catalyst he has led the development of a global creation care network under the Lausanne Movement in partnership with the World Evangelical Alliance.
Notes
[1] Cape Town Commitment, (I)(7)(A): http://www.weacreationcare.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/WEA-Cape-Town-Committment-Creation-Care.pdf,accessed 10/14/2019.
[2] Jamaica Call to Action:https://www.lausanne.org/content/statement/creation-care-call-to-action.
[3] The Global Campaign for Creation Care and the Gospel:https://www.lausanne.org/gatherings/related/global-campaign.
