Go West To Go Green
August 25, 2008
If you want to see what can happen when a church gets serious about creation care, you should check out the Re:Form conference hosted by Tri Robinson, pastor of the Vineyard Boise. I first met Tri Robinson at his church in Idaho. He didn’t look like a megachurch pastor. He certainly didn’t look like an environmentalist. He looked more like a cowboy. He was hosting a conference for church leaders on environmental stewardship, and there was an unlikely mix of conservative pastors, business people, environmental activists, and ordinary folks in attendance.
I first heard about Tri from Jason Chatraw, a friend from Atlanta, who had just moved to Boise to be part of Tri’s church. He had collaborated on a book that told Tri’s story—how a conservative Republican hunter realized God wanted him to preach about our responsibility to tend the garden. After Tri finally worked up the nerve to preach about it, his church gave his sermon a standing ovation. Over the next years they saw their numbers increase, as people who hadn’t darkened a church door in years began to come back to see a congregation making a priority of the common good.
Jason took me on a tour of the church facilities, and explained to me how the organic garden in back of the church was tended by folks in the church’s various recovery programs, and how it produced food for their homeless ministry and community food pantry. He talked to me about the work done by church members restoring trails and planting trees on public lands, caring for the earth in ways that drew people into places that gave them a sense of wonder and awe. I saw a church and it’s ministries that weren’t just “green”—they were about creation care in its fullest forms, caring for people and the earth they inhabit, respecting and restoring the goodness of the natural world for the sake of its Creator, and also being a channel of healing for the broken people that depend on that natural world.
The conference is happening again this year, September 24-26. You should think about going. I know it’s a long way to Boise for some people. But you need to be inspired for this work of creation care, and to see how it connects to other issues, especially if you’re a church leader. This year Tri is connecting the dots global issues like creation care and social justice by including a forum on human trafficking, and explaining the chain of causality which often links environmental degradation with the degradations of the sex trade.
Rusty Pritchard is a resource economist and the National Director of Outreach for the Evangelical Environmental Network.
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