MCCN’s Creation Care Council held their annual face-to-face meeting March 13 to 14 in Goshen, Ind. Some of our work involved thinking about how to communicate about creation care. Here are exercises the group did together that might be helpful for a creation care team or congregational leadership:
1. Have each person share about a time and place where he or she witnessed both natural beauty and injustice. In our group, stories told included biking past areas infested with invasive species; visiting a Guatemalan cloud forest and learning about corporate injustices that affected this ecosystem; coal mining in an area related to one’s family heritage. This is a question that could be used in settings across the church to spark discussion about creation care.
2. Have a group list compelling words that describe the kind of future they hope for; then craft these words into a short paragraph. One interesting phrase that emerged when we did this was, “bright green environmentalism.” In contrast to the more commonly used phrases, dark green and light green, bright green means joyful and hopeful.
3. Hold a contest with small prizes at the beginning of a teaching session as a way to reveal what people know and don’t know. This makes it easier to know how to proceed. The suggestion arose when one person described a mismatch between her assumptions about an audience and what they actually thought.
See the complete council minutes.