The North Suburban Mennonite Church in Libertyville, Illinois, has invited me to speak to their congregation and Christ Community Mennonite Church in Schaumburg on October 10th and 17th.
I’m looking forward to it and am grateful to be invited. My family and I spent one year with the congregation some time back. Learning about Mennonite history, singing their music, and understanding how they read the Bible and live their faith made a deep impression on me. My faith would not be what it is without that time with them.
They started their month of services centered on Creation yesterday. During the conversation session that followed the service, I was struck by a trend that two different people’s comments related to. One was a biology teacher who shared that her students despair over the trajectory of the world in light of population trends and climate change. She fears that communicating the trends our world faces without also offering some hope leaves her students in a bad place.
Another person shared (and here my memory doesn’t serve me well) of a young person who had tried to commit suicide in part because of the perception the young person had that he/she was, just by living, contributing to the destructiveness of climate change.
What do we do with that?
First, we must affirm that in the face of the facts we are facing, some level of despair, anger, and sadness are normal and healthy. A person who can shrug off climate chaos and the disappearing of beautiful, complex life is not, in my mind, fully human. It would be as if we expected a child whose parents are getting divorced to be upbeat and calm.
Second, we take all this to confirm what we read in the Bible. There is a fundamental sin and dysfunction in people which results in sin and dysfunction in our human systems of how we treat God’s earth and each other. Sometimes what people in despair need is not false hope or anasthetics but resonance. Knowing that others care and also see the same problems and feel the same things makes us feel less alone.
Third, we need to accept that the pain people are feeling and the diminishment of the earth are signals that we can’t ignore as followers of Jesus. We must be people of action. We sometimes fall into passivity. Yes, God is at work, but there is no sense in the Bible that we are to do nothing. We must be able to offer people in despair a chance to be part of concerted efforts to chance what is causing the problem in the first place.
Fourth, we share stories of regeneration – of people’s hearts and lives through life-changing faith in Jesus and of the earth by people and communities who have committed themselves to action.
That is a response written in a hurry. But I recognize I need to wrestle with this more.
I am grateful to have been part of the conversation and look forward to sharing more thoughts next Sunday. I hope to be able to offer a video recording later.
P.S. I want to welcome members of the North Suburban Mennonite Church and Christ Community Mennonite Church in Schaumburg who are coming to this blog for the first time. Please use the Topics sidebars to jump to blog posts around different topics. In particular, I’d encourage you to click on the START HERE topic category.
Two posts in particular that I’d encourage you to look at are:
And my first blog post ever:
