{"id":262,"date":"2010-06-09T08:36:32","date_gmt":"2010-06-09T08:36:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/thinplaces\/2010\/06\/our-church-versus-the-environmentalists.html"},"modified":"2010-06-09T08:36:32","modified_gmt":"2010-06-09T08:36:32","slug":"our-church-versus-the-environmentalists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/2010\/06\/our-church-versus-the-environmentalists.html","title":{"rendered":"Our Church versus the Environmentalists"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n\"Churches003.gif\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

We are members of Westerly Road Church<\/a>, a non-denominational
\nchurch in Princeton, New Jersey. The church is trying to construct a new
\nbuilding a few miles away from our current location because zoning laws
\nprohibit us from expanding our facility to accommodate the hundreds of members
\nof our community who gather daily and weekly on church property. We’ve been
\nthrough three rounds of town meetings, with a fourth on its way. Although the
\nnew plans comply with the laws of the township, environmental groups have
\nraised strenuous objections to the plans to build. <\/p>\n

I’m sympathetic to environmental causes. I was the President
\nof my high school “environmental awareness movement” and editor-in-chief of the
\n“Lorax,” the school newspaper devoted to environmental causes. We recycle and
\nuse energy efficient light bulbs. We installed geothermal heat in our new
\nhouse. We drive a Prius.<\/p>\n

But this dispute between our church and the environmental
\ngroups has highlighted a basic, and perhaps irreconcilable, difference in how Christians
\nand environmentalists approach the natural world. Christians see the natural
\nworld as God’s good creation, and we understand ourselves as “stewards” of that
\ncreation, entrusted with the responsibility of caring for the environment in
\nwhich we live. And yet, Christians also understand human beings as the most
\nsignificant part of the creation, created “in God’s image” (see Genesis 1:26-27<\/a>). <\/p>\n

Many Christians believe in evolution, and yet a Christian
\nunderstanding of evolution diverges from the biology textbooks once human beings
\ncome on the stage. An element of faith comes in, faith that God intervened in
\nthe creation of humans in such a way that we are distinct from the rest of the
\ncreation, the only ones “in the image of God.” The mainstream of contemporary
\nenvironmentalism sees no distinction. In fact, it often seems to forget about
\nhuman beings altogether. <\/p>\n

In Eugene Peterson’s book Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places<\/a><\/i>, he writes of a visit he took
\nwith his family to a Yellowstone National Park. In keeping with the rules: “leave
\nnothing but footprints, take nothing but pictures,” when Peterson saw a little
\ngirl picking flowers, he yelled, “Don’t pick the flowers!” In his description,
\n“the poor little girl, terrorized by my bark, dropped the flowers and looked at
\nme with total bewilderment and dismay, her face clouding over and then spilling
\nout tears.” He goes on, “How could I be so selective in my sense of kinship
\nwith creation? How did it happen that I felt so sensitive to the fringed
\ngentian that had been formed out of the same dust as me, and so insensitive to
\nthe little girl also formed out of that same dust…?”<\/p>\n

I’m glad that there are environmental groups out there to
\nhighlight the ways that humans manipulate and exploit the natural world. And
\nyet I wish that these same groups would acknowledge the place of the human in
\nthe environment. Just as there is value for our community in preserving forests
\nand wetlands and clean water, there is value in preserving and creating human
\ncommunity, in honoring the needs of human beings to gather together, to learn,
\nto laugh, to mourn, to worship.  <\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are members of Westerly Road Church, a non-denominational church in Princeton, New Jersey. The church is trying to construct a new building a few miles away from our current location because zoning laws prohibit us from expanding our facility to accommodate the hundreds of members of our community who gather daily and weekly on…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":88,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faith"],"yoast_head":"\nOur Church versus the Environmentalists - Thin Places<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/2010\/06\/our-church-versus-the-environmentalists.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Our Church versus the Environmentalists - Thin Places\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"We are members of Westerly Road Church, a non-denominational church in Princeton, New Jersey. 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Her essays have appeared in First Things, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Christian Century, ChristianityToday.com, and Bloom, among other online venues.","sameAs":["http:\/\/amyjuliabecker.com"],"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/author\/amyjuliabecker"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/88"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}