Greening Our Faith
In this month’s Vital Practices Digest, we highlight 5 ways for congregations to practice their commitment to caring for our earth home and all who inhabit it. Our 5 resource is a suggestion for congregations interested in the practice of year round stewardship and gratitude.
It’s easy and free to access these resources for your congregation. Subscribe to ECF Vital Practices and receive Vestry Papers and this Vital Practices Digest in your inbox each month.
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Do you feel too small or too shy to get out there?
Let me tell you a story.
I am a fairly shy person. In my early 20s, I was certainly not given to drawing attention to myself in public. But my first job after college was as a union organizer. It involved a lot of talking to people and an occasional trip out into the world to make some noise.
That’s how I ended up in a Home Depot outside Houston, Texas, in the door and window department, with a bullhorn and three workers from a Dallas door and window factory. Our job was to make a little noise, and draw attention to the poor working conditions in the factories that sourced Home Depot’s products at the time.
Everything went pretty much according to plan. We found the doors and windows. We started to chant. We used the bullhorn. We were asked to leave the store. We did. We stood outside the store chanting. When the police arrived, we expected to be told to leave the property and to move on to the next store. We had been doing this all day. There are a lot of Home Depots in greater Houston.
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In her Easter message, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori reminds us we can find Jesus still rising, “if we will go stand with the grieving Marys of this world, if we will draw out the terrified who have retreated to their holes, if we will walk the Emmaus road with the lost and confused, if we will search out the hungry in the neighborhood called Galilee. We will find him already there before us, bringing new and verdant life. The only place we will not find him in is in his tomb.”
This month, we continue to share stories of individuals, congregations, and organizations who have chosen to stand with the grieving Mary’s of this world. What all of them have discovered is the strength that comes from seeking out others responding to the same, or similar, call; the wisdom gained by sharing their stories, experiences, and resources.
Here are our April offerings:
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A few years ago, I went to the monthly meeting of a local environmental group. It was long and tedious, and at the end I wasn’t sure what I should do next to get involved. I never went back.
I eventually got involved in other ways, but I think this is a common experience that people have when they care about a cause but can’t quite figure out how to contribute meaningfully.
Some people, of course, enjoy going to meetings, attending rallies, and writing letters to their senators, but for the rest of us advocacy or activism can be a chore. Engaging people in making change requires a little more than just convincing them our cause is just.
The other day I went to a panel discussion on climate change, and one of the hosts, Curt Collier from the New York Society for Ethical Culture, said, “The stronger the community, the better it is able to tackle environmental issues.”
Now I know the church is not simply an advocacy or environmental organization, but a church cannot follow Jesus without also creating community and trying to change the world for the better. Fortunately, as Collier points out, those things go hand in hand. To create change you don’t just need to make people care, you have to get them connected to each other.
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What is it that inspires us to move from intent to action? It’s often a very personal decision, one that may be difficult to put into words. In this Vestry Papers we share stories from four Episcopalians who understand, as shared in the Parable of the Yeast (Matthew 13:33; Luke 13:20-21), God’s kingdom begins in small way. Like yeast, these small actions become the catalyst for change, transforming all they encounter into something larger, something that nourishes and sustains….
Here are stories – of individuals, congregations, dioceses, and organizations – all making a real difference in their communities:
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I walk to church from my home, about a mile and a half away, a couple of times a week. Lately I've started using a new route, which led to the discovery of a small mystery.
Every morning, hundreds of people line up on the sidewalk of a side street just south of the main thoroughfare of Wilshire Boulevard. Literally hundreds, stretching all the way down the block. The line leads toward a nondescript large office building.
I first noticed the people around Christmas. I imagined a food or toy giveaway, of which there are quite a few at that time of year. But this morning, deep into January, there they all were.
I usually walk on the other side of the street. It's shadier, and there are too many people in the line to pass easily.
Today, something made me cross the street. I waded awkwardly, upstream through the crowd. Up close, I could see that most of them were clutching folders or envelopes full of paperwork. I made my way toward the back of the line, gathering my courage. I'm an introvert, after all, shy with strangers and crowds. Finally, I asked a group of women what one waited for in this place.
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On November 8, 2013, the strongest tropical cyclone ever recorded hit the central islands of the Philippines. The islands of Leyte and Samar were hit the hardest, with more than 6,000 dead and 1,000 missing. Southern cities like Tacloban and Surigao were devastated, with infrastructure damaged so severely that rescue and recovery seemed next to impossible.
After military responders opened a path into the impacted area, Church staff arrived to see what infrastructure remained and how its buildings, people and resources could be mobilized to help. Episcopal Relief & Development’s partner E-CARE (Episcopal Community Action for Renewal and Empowerment), the development organization of the Episcopal Church in the Philippines, worked with the National Council of Churches to quickly establish food distribution centers at churches in the most devastated areas.
But one thing was different about this response. Rather than preservative-heavy canned and processed foods, the distribution centers handed out healthy, organic biscuits and noodles, along with a high-energy powdered nutritional supplement that could be used to feed infants as well as kids and adults.
How did they do this? Where did these supplies come from?
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Wait for the Lord. Patiently wait. Wait for the Lord.
It’s the congregational response for the sung psalm we are using in my parish for the season of Advent.
How do we wait in times like these? In an Advent where #blacklivesmatter and #handsupdontshoot are the trending hashtags, when the non-verdicts roll in and our young people explode in rage and despair, is waiting enough?
I am waiting. I still believe that there is more yet to be revealed, that God’s power is greater than the forces of evil, that our salvation is closer now than on the day we first believed.
But I am more conscious than usual about how I wait, where I wait.
This Advent (probably any Advent), waiting with the doors closed and soft music playing and lovely candles lit is not enough. Waiting that is passive is not enough. Waiting in places that muffle the voice of Jesus, crying, “I can’t breathe!,” is not enough.
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In the area where I live in Sri Lanka, we are currently experiencing an extended water cut, a result of inadequate maintenance of public infrastructure. The last water-cut we experienced in early-August (for similar reasons) lasted four days. Household potable water is a comfort my neighbours and I have grown so accustomed to that it leaves us scrambling to find alternatives. And of course plenty of grumblings and complaints.
In between these two water cuts, I visited one of Episcopal Relief & Development’s programmes in India, where piped household water is a luxury. In fact, having a water source within walking distance has been a luxury for as long as the eldest resident can remember.
Episcopal Relief & Development began a partnership with the Diocese of Durgapur to accompany a group of 36 isolated villages, mainly populated by the Santali tribe, in community development activities. One of these activities was the provision of rain-water reservoirs.
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I first met the people of the Diocese of
El Salvador in 2001 when I visited there in response to a series of earthquakes that had flattened the country. I traveled with a dedicated slate of church leaders who carried water and food to isolated mountain villages, stood in the rain assessing the structural integrity of school and church buildings and reached out their hands to hold Eucharist in the midst of chaos and piles of rubble.
They were leaders who had been called upon to respond through the years to poverty, gang violence, natural disasters and a significant period of civil war, and they taught me in a few short days about sacrifice, tenacity and hope.
They knew, then and still, that communities ache for safe strong houses, nutritious food,
health services and education – a path to dignity and wholeness.
Together with those leaders, and with the support of thousands of Episcopalians across the United States, we spent several years building Anglican villages complete with
water systems, houses, clinics and social programs. With these relief activities, we planted seeds that we prayed would grow into a solid foundation from which good things could spring, undergirding growing families and enabling them to flourish.
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Not too long ago my church, St. Lydia’s, moved into its own storefront location. Previously, we had borrowed or rented space for just a few hours each week. It wasn’t an easy process in New York City, and in some ways it mirrored the process my wife have been experiencing as we look for a new apartment. We have been asking ourselves: What kind of home do we want to create? What can we afford? Where can we best create community? In a sense we are asking ourselves: Who are we and who do we want to be?
In this past Sunday’s readings, Jesus says, “Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake."
Advent is a time of preparation. Part of this preparation is examining ourselves, our desires and our needs, and asking what kind of home we want to make in this world. Who are we and who do we want to be?
In light of recent events in Ferguson and around the country, these are questions our country has been asking itself. Have some of us fallen asleep to the realities of racism and poverty that many people face? Can we be better? Are we awake?
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I often tweet about climate change. Occasionally I’ll go to meetings of an organization called 350.org and every now and then sign a petition or post some flyers. All of these things feel small in the face of a big problem.
On Sunday, however, as I marched with more than 300,000 other people down the streets of Manhattan, I felt as if I were doing something big.
Now, I suspect the average Episcopalian, like me, is not a radical. I’ve never loved marching or shouting chants. I would have rather spent my Sunday reading or watching a movie.
Yet, there I was, with other people from my church marching against climate change, doing what felt necessary. Not only our planet and the creatures in it, but also many humans are suffering because of climate change and it will only get worse. To ignore the problem is to turn our back on our neighbor.
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On Sunday, Emily Scott, the pastor of St. Lydia’s, preached a sermon about “standing in the tragic gap,” a phrase that comes from Parker Palmer, and a reminder that we must stand in the space between idealism and cynicism. Palmer sums it up well in an interview in the Sun.
"By the tragic gap I mean the gap between the hard realities around us and what we know is possible — not because we wish it were so, but because we’ve seen it with our own eyes. For example, we see greed all around us, but we’ve also seen generosity. We hear a doctrine of radical individualism that says, “Everyone for him- or herself,” but we also know that people can come together in community and make common cause.
"As you stand in the gap between reality and possibility, the temptation is to jump onto one side or the other. If you jump onto the side of too much hard reality, you can get stuck in corrosive cynicism. You game the economic system to get more than your share, and let the devil take the hindmost. If you jump onto the side of too much possibility, you can get caught up in irrelevant idealism. You float around in a dream state saying, “Wouldn’t it be nice if . . . ?” These two extremes sound very different, but they have the same impact on us: both take us out of the gap — and the gap is where all the action is."
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Note: The application deadline for ECF's Fellowship Partners Program is March 14, 2014.
In his 2013 application to the Fellowship Partners Program, P. Joshua Griffin (Griff) noted that “Even within the Episcopal Church, environmental risks and benefits are experienced differently across differences of race, culture, and social class. For some of us, climate change seems far off – something we fear for the sake of our children and grandchildren. Yet for others, climatic risk is already the context for daily life and worship.” Griff’s 2013 ECF Fellowship supports his dissertation research as a doctoral student in Sociocultural Anthopology at the University of Washington. Griff discusses his project - a multi-sited approach to the lived experience of climate change - in the following video interview.
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A long-time friend reports that comments on her Facebook post following Pete Seeger’s death were a poignant cross-generational tribute to a man who made a difference for all of his 94 years—with the exception of one man who quipped “I got over all that in college.”
I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind.
Got over what? Justice? Peace? Idealism? Working – really working- for love between our brothers and our sisters? No wonder the world is in such a sorry shape!
My friend and I were on the edge between the passivity of the ‘50’s and the activism of the ‘60’s. Young women brought up to wear pearls and say ‘yes ma’m”, we might have made different choices. We met at church, in a prayer group of young married women- most soon to deliver their first children; others busy with toddlers. We wanted more than anything to bring them into a peaceful world. We had experienced desegregation in our high schools, and wanted our kids to grow up in a world free of discrimination. We went to peace rallies; we convinced the kindly sexton at our church to assist us in hanging signs for open housing over the urinals in the men’s rest rooms. We were part of training groups for more honest, loving ways of being in our families and other relationships. We shared a vision for what the church and the world could be at their best.
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Whether we watched it or not, we’ve all heard the news: the Seattle Seahawks won the Super Bowl. We probably also heard another set of news stories: that sex trafficking increases during the Super Bowl. Except, it’s not clear this is true.
I am happy to see that church leaders and others are raising awareness of this important issue, but we also need to be careful to check our facts first. It turns out, there isn’t much actual evidence that sex trafficking increases during the Super Bowl (just as there aren’t statistics back up the claim that domestic violence increases during the Super Bowl). The problem of human trafficking is complicated and it is real, and it is much bigger than the Super Bowl.
In our efforts to be a prophetic voice in the world, it can be easy to choose the most eye-catching news, the factoid that’s relevant to the upcoming sporting event or news of the day.
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A few days after my arrival in Nanyuki, Kenya, my friend Carol Erickson and I stopped by the chapel on the grounds of the British-owned Cottage Hospital to visit with a few friends she hadn’t seen since her return to Africa. When she relayed to them the details about a recent trip to the District Children’s Officer in Nanyuki to report the alleged abuse of staff member Pauline’s three children, living up-country with her Samburu husband, Jill asked Carol:
“How did you know what to do?”
“I didn’t,” Carol answered in the matter-of-fact way that is a hallmark of Imara’s 38-year-old director.
Fourteen months since the opening of Imara House just north of Nanyuki, in Kenya’s Laikipia district, Carol and her staff have come a long way. They are housing eight teen mothers and seven babies (Sarah is due in three weeks), all of whom are now benefitting from a safe, clean home, three meals a day, and an education that will allow the girls to receive a secondary school diploma.
To someone coming from the US, where public education is accessible to all, this may not sound impressive. But the girls who live at Imara House have come from desperate circumstances. Many were forced into early “marriages” and not given even a primary school education, since their value was to cook, clean, tend the animals, and bear children. Others were raped or taken advantage of and left to fend for themselves. One girl discovered that forced sex with her abuser left her testing positive for HIV/AIDS.
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We were about to start our Epiphany play when Sarah walked in the door of Imara House – a rescue center in Nanyuki, three hours north of Nairobi. Sarah is 17 years old and 7 months pregnant. She bears scars on her face from the repeated beatings she suffered while living with her aunt in Isolo, about an hour north of Nanyuki.
Sarah’s story is similar to that of the 7 other teenage girls at Imara, a safe place for teen mothers and their babies, started by 38-year-old Carol Erickson, an Episcopalian from Minneapolis. Carol lives here and runs the center with her Kenyan colleagues Jayne and Reuben, a married couple who serve both as teachers and role models for a healthy relationship.
We’d spent the day planning our five-act play. While Ngine read aloud from the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, I typed out our script on my laptop. Together we wrote, cast, costumed, and performed a 5-act play the evening of Epiphany. The scenes included the Annunciation (Mary was played by Felister, who stuffed a pillow under her blouse, causing much hilarity); the shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night (we almost cast Winston Churchill, the sheep, in our play but worried that he might defecate on the floor); the three Kings (Naomi’s "crown" was a Santa hat leftover from Christmas celebrations); the nativity, with the fireplace serving as "manger;" and a final act with the entire cast singing "Joy to the World," which Jayne had taught them several weeks earlier. Ngine played Joseph, wearing an Army fatigue hat and affecting a serious swagger. (Not coincidentally, the British Army has a base in Nanyuki.)
Hard to know what Sarah thought as she crossed the threshold into this strange new world.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about the Wise Men lately. Like them, I will be traveling to the East in just a few days – East Africa. I, too, am looking forward to meeting a poor teenage mother – and six others like her – and their babies. God willing, I will arrive at my destination in time for Epiphany.
Imara, which means “strong” in Swahili, is the name of the house where these teenage girls live. It sits in the shadow of Mt. Kenya near a town called Nanyuki, three hours north of Nairobi. A 38-year-old Episcopalian named Carol Erickson launched this fledgling ministry 18 months ago after learning about the desperation of teenage girls who have been raped or forced into early “marriage.”
The youngest of her charges was “given” to a man when she was 9. Instead of playing with dolls, Anna soon became pregnant with her first child. After her third pregnancy she escaped through the deep bush, was treed by a hyena and eventually found her way to Carol, and to safety.
These stories haunt me. Can’t get them out of my mind.
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Last week I traveled to Haiti with other staff and parishioners from Trinity Wall Street. The purpose of the trip was exploratory, to determine whether mission trips to the northern area around Cap Haitian are feasible. We saw villages, churches, and a college as well as schools being built and others filled with children.
I learned a lot, but I received only the smallest glimpse into what the lives of Haitians are like.
I was reminded how different the lives of Haitians are from mine in some ways.
Speaking to one young man about the minimum wage, he told me he had heard it was $7 in the United States, meaning $7 a day. He was more than a little surprised when I explained it was $7 an hour (many people in Haiti are paid $5 a day).
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