Welcome to the Table: The Green Evangelical Movement
More and more people each day are joining the sustainable table. I am not referring to the wonderful website about healthy and ethical food choices, but heck it’s worth a mention anyway. By “the sustainable table,” I mean the conversation about how to bring the vision of a greener world into reality. So when I read “Evangelical leaders host ‘creation care’ summit in Orlando-area church” in the Orlando Sentinel, I got this funny picture in my head of church folk sitting down for brunch with a bunch of barefoot tree-huggers.
“‘We are the ones who are late to the table,’ [Rev. Joel] Hunter said. An emerging national evangelical leader on environmental issues, Hunter said the goal of the conference was to ‘get mutually stirred up’ and to ‘assume stewardship’ of this issue.”
Evangelical leaders gathered at Northland, a Church Distributed to hammer out “creation care.” If these green evangelicals are beginning to embrace terms like “sustainable,” “green,” and even “carbon neutral,” but still shudder at the sound of “environmentalism,” are we really all sitting at the same table? Or are we sitting at completely different tables, looking at the same evidence, but pretending to ignore each other’s solutions?
