What I am trying to say in my previous post is that I think that the UMC, like other mainline denominations, do not know how to talk about the Climate Crisis. This is part of the problem of not having an eco-centered theological education base from which to be formed in that way. One way I think we will begin to change this is through the examples of church folk who have come to this awareness of the earth and creation, and see the peril in which we (humanity) have placed it. As we come to know of their stories of creation care, and the importance of such a journey, our theology will adapt and change.
Along with that, we will naturally begin to realize that people want to talk about this crisis. There are deep fears about this, and what we are to do; what CAN we do. This is a matter for God’s people. And it requires a tight-knit community. It requires pastoral care. It requires mutual support. We are a culture and a people who need to be “in recovery”, and weaning ourselves away from the old “growth” culture to a sustainable culture.
Sometime during September 2014. I had a dramatic conversion. During that time, I was reading Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate. I immediately turned to my Christian roots to recover what had been pushed out of sight in most of our theology in this epoch of the Anthropocene, where humanity has assembled a story that has told us “FULL SPEED AHEAD”. Then, soon after the middle of the 20th century, science began to see that something was amiss, and that a dramatic change had been occurring since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Humanity’s ingenuity had constructed a monolith unmatched in all of history, and combined with explosion in population fed by this massive increase in “productivity”, have begun to “Overshoot” the delicate balances of the earth’s ecosystem. By 1989, and the first widespread scientific announcements from a rapidly growing Climate Science brought us the bad news. We now no longer have the defense of ignorance. We must act.