Church Shopping

Source 1, Source 2*

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

You mentioned casually in your last letter that the patient has continued to attend one church, and one only, since he was converted, and that he is not wholly pleased with it. May I ask what you are about? Why have I no report on the causes of his fidelity to the parish church? Do you realise that unless it is due to indifference it is a very bad thing? Surely you know that if a man can't be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that "suits" him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches. The reasons are obvious...the search for a "suitable" church makes the man a critic where the Enemy [God] wants him to be a pupil.

What He [God] wants of the layman in church is an attitude which may, indeed, be critical in the sense of rejecting what is false or unhelpful, but which is wholly uncritical in the sense that it does not appraise—does not waste time in thinking about what it rejects, but lays itself open in uncommenting, humble receptivity to any nourishment that is going. (You see how grovelling, how unspiritual, how irredeemably vulgar He is!) This attitude, especially during sermons, creates the condition (most hostile to our whole policy) in which platitudes can become really audible to a human soul. There is hardly any sermon, or any book, which may not be dangerous to us if it is received in this temper. So pray bestir yourself and send this fool the round of the neighbouring churches as soon as possible. Your record up to date has not given us much satisfaction.

CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Letter XVI, emphasis added

Like many Christians of the last several generations, I was influenced heavily by the thinking of CS Lewis growing up. My dad read The Chronicles of Narnia to me and my sisters when we were in elementary school, and after it dawned on me that Aslan was Jesus I started looking for other Lewis books to learn from.

The earliest one I found was The Screwtape Letters, which I read over and over again as a nighttime devotional. It continues to prompt me to ponder from time to time, though I haven't read it in years and realized recently that my childhood copy is no longer in my library.

The Screwtape Letters takes the form of a series of letters from a mentor demon, Screwtape, to his nephew, Wormwood, an apprentice demon in charge of making sure a certain Englishman's soul will be damned rather than saved. In writing the book this way, Lewis creates a sort of theological treatise in reverse, one which must be read for the exact opposite of its surface sense in order to serve its intended purpose. As a teenager I found this to be irresistibly clever, and I have not ceased to find it charming in the years since.

In my teen years, I learned from The Screwtape Letters a list of the pitfalls available to Christians. I had only to notice my fellow Christians doing something heartily recommended by Screwtape, after all, and it was clear that it was a practice worth avoiding and, where practical, criticizing.

Few Christian practices were more obviously problematic to my teenage self than "church shopping," which is what it sounds like: going from church to church until you find one that suits you. In Letter XVI, Screwtape talks at length about the usefulness (read: danger) of church shopping; he highly recommends sending one's human round from place to place till they become "a taster or connoisseur of churches." The point of church, I reasoned, was not to feel comfortable or to demonstrate one's tastes, but to learn, to worship, and to be part of the body of Christ. I was flabbergasted that adults found it acceptable to be choosy about church. It was astonishing to me that people within my own denomination would drive past my parents' church on their way to one with a bigger scouting program, better music, or whatever.

I was a teenager, so it was easy to judge and difficult to empathize. It would only be a few short years, however, before I would be taking a train past a dozen churches in my own denomination (and hundreds in others) in order to keep going to my church from high school. This wasn't church shopping so much as staying where I was comfortable, but I still felt guilty, as it was, after all, a step away from "going to church where it makes sense" toward "going to church where I feel personally at home and comfortable."

David Shay and I have debated the question behind all this anxiety and hand-wringing a few times. "What," we've asked each other, "are the right reasons to go to a specific church?" For a while, he was feeling uncomfortable and unhappy at his church. He wanted to leave and go somewhere where he could be happy, but was happiness a legitimate reason to change churches? Meanwhile, I'd moved across town and was now an hour away from a church I originally joined because it was close to home. But I was a choir member and a Sunday school teacher there now! Was high participation in a particular church's life reason enough not to change churches (to somewhere that might need me more—or that simply wasn't as silly to get to)?

We didn't know. In the end, we both did what we thought made sense after prayer, reflection, and consultation with friends and mentors.

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I got married recently, and my wife and I moved to a new place to start our new life together. We are church shopping, heading to church after church, Sunday after Sunday, to find one that suits us. Each time we do, CS Lewis's warning via Screwtape's Letter XVI flashes through my brain: Don't be a "taster" or "connoisseur" of churches. Just pick one already and stick with it! And yet instead of heeding this warning, I hem and haw through the service, tabulating which elements of the service I do and don't like, evaluating what social opportunities are available, gauging whether the music or the architecture fits my taste.

Being a teenager is incredibly challenging in many ways, but a few things are easier than they are in young adulthood. I miss the self-righteous feeling of knowing I would never stoop to church shopping and that I could comfortably judge anyone who did.

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It takes only the eyes to see it to notice that American Christians are nothing like as radical as the men and women who founded our religion two millennia ago. They wandered from place to place, calling society to repentance, renewal, and change. We are sedentary, suspicious of change, and resistant to calls for radical action. My biggest worry in all this is that I'm simply not radical enough to truly follow Christ. If I were as radical as Christ was, as radical as Paul or Peter, I would just go down to the nearest church and do church there. Never mind doctrinal nitpicking, never mind the music; we're all the body of Christ, after all, so I'd just go be part of the body!

Over against this worry, though, I have learned to take some comfort in the idea (and perhaps, just perhaps, it is God who comforts me with it) that, in seeking and finding churches where I feel happy, at home, alive and nourished, that I will be preparing myself to be radical in other ways: radical in faith, radical in joy, radical in hope, and above all, radical in love. At all events, this is my prayer.

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*Behold the magnificence of my photoshop skills.

What Is Faith? What Is It For? A Conversation

Video Summary:

James Alison says faith is relaxing in the presence of someone you're certain is fond of you. Lutheran idea: faith is trusting God's promises, not intellectually assenting to a set of theological propositions.

Faith is not given to individuals in sufficient quantities, but communities. Similar to how an individual might not believe every line of a creed, but the church as a whole does. In organizing her faith community, the statement of faith required of members will be participating in the liturgy and sharing the eucharist.


David Shay: My initial reaction to this was that it was awesome to hear something that made sense to me about faith, but that I haven't articulated myself before in this way. I've seen a lot of these concepts in books on orthodoxy that I've read, especially the idea of things being based more in the community, the body, not just the individual. What were your thoughts, Dave?


Dave Mantel: I did a quick word study on that 1 Corinthians passage she mentioned, where Paul is addressing a "y'all,"--the community responsibility for faith, rather than the individual--and it doesn't normally get translated that way, but it could be, which is cool. I think a lot of times with this kind of stuff most people will translate something a certain way because it's always been done like that. So that stuck out as something I really liked.

But there was something I'm not sure I know how I feel about, where she talks about the creed, and how not everybody has to believe everything, as long as it all gets believed in the end--that's okay. I can see how that would be encouraging. But I don't know where I stand with that kind of thinking yet.


David Shay: I get that, but don't think we can take what she's saying in this video as "the rules" of faith. It's kind of a catch-22; the way she's presenting it, you almost can't say you disagree, because what she's saying is "Exactly!" and you'd be like "But I don't agree with that" and she'd say "I know, exactly, but we both love Christ and believe he's God." And that's kind of why a lot of what she said makes sense to me. Which brings us back to the first part of what she says, which is that faith is relaxing in the presence of someone you're certain is fond of you. Most of the time we only talk about the rules and the function of us being in love with the Creator, and we don't focus on the relationship with the Creator; what are the emotions that you feel, what are the unwritable things that happen to you; that sense is something that would be nice to bask in.


Dave Mantel: I understand what's being communicated, but I have a problem with the way that it's being put. I think it's really cool--there's two ways to think about this: one is that you don't have to have 100% faith in every doctrine all the time, and that's okay, because faith isn't about having all the right ideas all the time; and the other way is this, that there are a lot of extra rules... Rob Bell has a similar problem in his book, Velvet Elvis, where he talks about "flexible doctrine," and he uses the example of the virgin birth, and I'm like "That's not a good example!" because the virgin birth important to all of Christianity, but if you were talking about something else- things that are really side issues that not the whole Church agrees on (I view the content of the creeds as main issues, not side issues)- it's okay to wrestle with those things during different seasons. James?


James Davisson: I have to admit that my initial gut reaction to this video was almost entirely negative. For whatever reason, my brain reacted to the sentence "James Alison says faith is relaxing in the presence of someone you're certain is fond of you" with the same kneejerk dislike I usually reserve for people proclaim inghow much they love eating organic produce while they do yoga. Liberal white people sitting around in a room agreeing with each other; I just reject the surface quality of this whole thing. Once I was able to get past that emotional response, I was able to get on board with a lot of what she was saying.

In fact, what I did with it was try to find someone more "orthodox" who might agree with or support her position, and what I came up with was something I remembered C.S. Lewis, that I think goes along with her second idea that faith might not require belief in every line of the creed:

The Resurrection and its consequences were the “gospel” or good news which the Christians brought: what we call the “gospels,” the narratives of Our Lord’s life and death, were composed later for the benefit of those who had already accepted the gospel. They were in no sense the basis of Christianity: they were written for those already converted. The miracle of the Resurrection, and the theology of that miracle, comes first: the biography comes later as a comment on it.

To me, that sounds like Lewis saying something similar, that the essence of Christian faith is belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the impact that it has on humanity; everything else is commentary on that.


Dave Mantel: This goes back to our last conversation: what is the point of all this? What is it for? The end result of this conversation should not be "Do we all think the right things?" but "How does this help our relationship with God and each other?" So whatever we conclude should be in relation to those two things; not about doctrine, but relationship.


David Shay: Let me jump on that, relationship: I think that might be the cheesy part that James hated so much. My struggle with faith is that, when I look for someone who "has it going on" with their faith, it can be tought, I'm not actually sure I believe there's someone who actually knows who God is. I get emotional at church, but I'm just like a secular person in line at the Chiptole, or getting gift cards at Target; we live a very mundane life outside of church, outside of our practices. What is it actually like, though, when we analyze our lives and know we're dwelling beside the Creator; how does it make things different, what is the answer? It's not entirely to be found in what you believe, in doctrines, nor only in how you treat people, because we all know really nice people who don't believe in God. It's found in something else, I can't put it into words, but it's found in something that has no need to be proven to others; it's simply dwelling with God and letting God change you. I think we've lost touch as Christians because we're trying to prove too much to others, that what we believe makes sense, and we've forgotten to relate to God and each other. That's the obsession of the individual; all of us just trying to better our own lives instead of contribute to a community.


Dave Mantel: That's where I get sometimes; I get wrapped up in "head knowledge," in having the right ideas and telling other people about them. It's not something that changes my life; I'm not letting it. It's not expressed in loving other people, and that's the trap I get stuck in sometimes.


David Shay: Right. She says that maybe faith isn't for the individual, but I think it can be--there are people who have just, crazy amounts of faith, overflowing faith.

I know people who I admire as Christians, with very different theological views from me. I know a guy, he's very Reformed, and I am not, and I admire him, and I look up to him because of these weird moments we've had, like this time we were out with a group of people at camp in the woods, and it's midnight and crickets and animals are going off, and he says "Let's just stop for a second--y'all hear that song?" And we just stand there, silent, but the woods aren't silent--I think that sort of thing is more the point even than what this person even gave a sermon on earlier that evening, that is how the Kingdom of God can work. And that sounds pretty tree-huggish, wishy-washy, I get it, because I can't tell someone that story and it really hits them, necessarily, but I think that experience of community, faith, and God, that happen within that story, is an important thing. This person's theology that's different from mine, that's not as important.


James Davisson: Couple things. I question too what's important about Christianity and what sets us apart from good, secular people. And what does that is that we live in the age where Christ has come and changed things, and we can spread the word about that, and we can further his Kingdom even change the world for the better because of that story and the knowledge we have about it. And we too often look to the distant, end-of-time future, rather than this immediate future that we have the power to shape, as Christians. 

This other thing I was reminded of in listening to your comments was this item we've been meaning to talk about, this blog post called Twelve Myths Too Many Christians Believe, and the first myth is "Christianity is a relationship, not a religion." The idea is that we say things like this because we're uncomfortable with admitting that Christianity is a religion, because then maybe it's just one religion among many that are all equally right/wrong, the slippery slope of pluralism, etc. I'll quote from the post:

[I]it is entirely possible to believe that there are more religions than one while still holding to the perspective that yours is the right one. I feel that it is important to keep in mind that Christianity is indeed one religion among many because it will help us to see the Other as real – someone with beliefs that they hold as dear to them as we do ours. Naturally we think Christianity is the best religion available; if we did not, we would hold to a different one. Further, we believe that our particular church or denomination is the best expression of that faith; if we felt otherwise, we would go elsewhere. We must, however, allow ourselves to remember that there are others who do feel otherwise and are not idiots.

David Shay: My response is that God is not a religion, nor is Christ a religion; I think that our desire to know God is what created a religion. I think my biggest issue is that people don't acknowledge God as real, they acknowledge God as a figure, someone they know about that they read about in a book. But you have to experience God in the world.


James Davisson: I've heard some Christians speak on the idea that some people are given the ability to have faith, and some are not. Which is something that seems to be borne out in reality; cognitively speaking, there seem to be people who are and others who are not able to experience God, in terms of brain function. What do you guys think about that?


David Shay: I wonder about that; I wonder if it's something that appears outside of western societies. But it's an interesting question; what can you do? You love them, you share with them in experiences that you maybe see as spiritual and they maybe see as a good time. Go to a concert that you think is a spiritual experience and that they see as fun. And just believe what you believe; believe that the concert was spiritual and you shared it with someone who didn't feel that way.

Example, Erica and I went to a Sufjan Stevens concert and we all sang together, a capella, Come Thou Fount, I'm sure the theater was not filled with just Christians, but we all sang that song; people sang and closed their eyes, and I believe it glorified God. I don't know what the non-Christians would say about it, but I can say that I think it was good.



Dave Mantel: I've had similar experience; I was a Thrice farewell show, and there was a song where the bridge was "We are the image of the invisible," and I looked around and thought of the people singing along "Do you believe in that, or know what you're singing? Because it's true." That was one of those moments where I thought, this is interesting, it's a moment that glorifies God, this primal acknowledgement of God.

I think this ties into our other conversation about salvation and evangelism; if it's not about believing the right things- if someone is not predisposed to believe in or desire a deity, how do we interact with them? We have to live differently, not to make them conform to a doctrine, but to bring them into contact with the invisible.


David Shay: I think we've come full circle! Because that sounds a lot like "relaxing in the presence of someone you're certain is fond of you." James, I want you to agree.


James Davisson: I mean, just after that sentence, I was like "I'm mostly on board," but before that I was like "Shut up!" That sentence just sounds so...homeopathic and new age-y to me.  My gut reaction, not my actual analysis.

Is "The Sinner's Prayer" Harmful?

This week, we sat down for a discussion, prompted by the video below, in which pastor David Platt talks about the Sinner's Prayer, a prayer that many evangelicals and people in other Christian groups ask people to pray when they convert to Christianity. The prayer consists of an admission of sin and a request for Jesus to "enter your heart" or become the central figure in the pray-er's life. Platt questions its validity and warns about its use, and that's the jumping off point for our conversation. Note that this is a transcript of a verbal conversation; we're speaking off the cuff. So feel free to take issue with things we've said, and talk to us in the comments section; we may very well agree with you, and at all events you'll give us a chance to clarify our thoughts.



James Davisson: Platt starts the video by claiming that people in churches are "missing the life of Christ" because of the sinner's prayer. What do you guys think of that?


David Shay: The main thing I disagree with David Platt about is a little outside the context of the video—I don't agree with him because I think that, there's a level of "the life of Christ" that reaches all life on this planet, regardless of a sinner's prayer. But in this context, he's saying there are people who aren't true followers of Christ because they are saying a prayer that doesn't really mean anything, that they're told to say, and it doesn't reveal the full essence of Christ to them. And I agree with that.

JD: Can you talk more about why you agree, David? Do you feel like you know a lot of people who fit his description, people who go to church but are missing the life of Christ?


DS: I can think of people, but of course I wouldn't want to say who I think is a "false Christian!" But I think this stems from a culture where, say, a person would be like "I said the sinner's prayer when I was four years old!" and then that person goes to church every Sunday, and they say they love Jesus, but you want to say to them "Remember when Jesus was yelling at the Pharisees for these reasons? You're kinda doing what the Pharisees were doing, every day. I think Jesus would yell at you." But you can't have that discussion with them.

So it's maybe not even the sinner's prayer that's the problem, but the culture of a church that thinks that all you gotta do is say the sinner's prayer and then you're in. There just isn't discipleship; the church becomes a hangout of people who have said this prayer at some point, and there's no difference between them and non-Christians. I've always wondered with people like this that I've met, like "Why don't you just not come to church on Sunday, and be productive on Sunday morning instead? It seems like almost nothing Jesus said matters to you."


Dave Mantel: And what is "salvation" anyway, right? Are there people in the church who really believe, in their heart of hearts, that doing a "repeat after me" thing is sufficient for an immediate, complete life change? Or is it something more? Something we don't actually understand, but over the years have consistently whittled down to these three or four sentences that somehow transform a person eternally? I know there's the whole "confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord" in Romans 10 but... I don't think what we're talking about is exactly what Paul had in mind.

JD: When English the word "salvation" comes up in the Old Testament, especially when it's used in the Psalms, it doesn't have the meaning that the New Testament does when it talks about "salvation," and it certainly doesn't mean what evangelicals mean when they use the word. In the OT, it just means, "[I am in physical danger right now and require] rescue [from said danger.]" It's a mistranslation or an imposition to call that eternal salvation. But we've stated elsewhere on the blog that reinterpretations and fresh meanings for older scriptures can be positive, so that's not to say that we can't use the Psalms to talk about a different kind of salvation from what the Psalmist meant.


DM: Right, and there are so many different kind of examples in the New Testament, too, of how salvation happens in people's life. Jesus told Zacchaeus that salvation had come to his house when he just said he was going to be a better person—he hadn't actually done anything yet. Just said he was going to. The criminal on the cross just asked to be remembered, the lame man was brought to Jesus by his friends and lowered through a roof—he technically didn't do anything except have cool friends...there are loads of other examples...it just seems to me that salvation comes in a lot of different ways and means a lot of different things in scripture, so to make up this thing about some kind of prayer happening and then a moment in time when you receive "salvation" seems a little silly (to put it mildly) to me.

Unfortunately, instead of simply accepting that salvation is something mysterious and possibly different for everyone, evangelicalism has created this kind of easy, one-size-fits-all answer, because Modernity had this need to create answers to every question, even if they're wrong. The focus in evangelicalism has been, for decades: get-saved-so-you-don't-go-to-Hell. But if that's not the point, since that doesn't seem to appear anywhere in scripture...if salvation isn't something to be achieved, per se, and doesn't take place in a single moment in time, and its primary purpose is not to save us from an eternity in Hell, then what is it, and how does it happen?


JD: It's a big question. Let's focus for now on shallowness of Christians that Platt is pointing toward, and how that's related to the sinner's prayer. Are there other sources of shallowness in Christianity, besides this notion that Christianity is about trying not to go to hell?


DS: I feel like that's the biggest one. That's almost why some people might say that Catholicism and "Christianity," western, Protestant Christianity, are two different religions. Western Protestantism today seems to be based around that notion of avoiding hell. I think there's all kinds of shallowness, though, there are shallow things Christians say all the time, and I think that's why many people raised in the church are becoming atheists. Do you know that there are people in the church who use Job to comfort people? "Hey guess what, God's just ruining your life to test you, are you going to follow God?" And people are like, "I would rather believe that there is no God and the world is chaotic than believe in a God who would torment me on earth just so I would still love God."

I'm bringing up that example because it's in the nature of what Dave Mantel was saying: there's something that we don't know, so we just insert an answer so we can sleep at night. Well you can't sleep at night, though, when your family members have died and say you then have a terminal illness, you know—when your life starts to look like Job. Before that point, you might say God tests people who say they love God by making their lives suck, but once that happens to you, you might think "I don't believe in a God that does this."

Another example: no one can say what happens after death. We can say what we think, but we can't know. And I was talking to a Christian friend, and he said, "People need direction!" And I said "Are you saying they need answers? Because what's worse, not telling people something that no one knows, or making up an answer to something that no one knows?" As far as life after death, we only have what we believe; we can't direct people to certain answers. I think you can be a Christian and still say that.

JD: For me, the big source of shallowness in Christianity is the failure to articulate really well the other reasons there are to be Christians outside of not going to hell. I got the message growing up that it was also about being free from sin and ceasing sin was part of it, and I think being free from sin is good and is a part of why being Christian is worthwhile. But the thing is, you can stop doing wrong without being a Christian, you can be an atheist who doesn't habitually do wrong things—there's lots of them, I know them.


DM: And there's another point where I feel like, at least for evangelicals, we've really missed the mark... because, what is the Gospel? What is the point of being a Christian? Is it to be able to stop doing bad things? To avoid hell when we die? I don't mean to sound like a broken record here, but if we don't know what the point of all of this stuff is—why we do what we do—then we're just following a morality paradigm and maybe being involved with a social group once or twice a week, you know?


DS: I feel like the only convincing argument for creating a religion out of Jesus' life is the Great Commission, "go and make disciples," and I don't even see that as being a convincing reason to make a religion. But I do think that making disciples is an essential part of the gospel; the book of Acts is full of this, it's a great follow-up to the gospels, because it's just the disciples going and being empowered to make connections with other people in other lands. I think we are meant to connect with each other, and I think that's part of the message of the gospel; you see Jesus breaking down walls and getting judged for it, eating with sinners, going to Zaccheus's house, talking to a woman at the well. That seems to me to be more in the nature of what God wants from us. I don't know if that would be on David Platt's agenda, but to me, that's the thing about the sinner's prayer, it distracts us from the importance of making connections.


JD: I think the gospel is something along the lines of: Jesus came to change human history, in part by teaching us not to exclude people and to love each other and be in community, and also in some mysterious way, by defeating death. I don't know how to define the gospel, and that's embarrassing. The big problem for me is that my definition of the gospel doesn't feel uniquely Christian enough—anyone can come along and say "love each other, and also we'll never really die."


DS: I think that's a pretty good answer though. I've had this conversation with others, atheists and agnostics, who are like "Anyone can be nice!" and I'm like "I know anyone can be nice, because Jesus is for everyone, God is for everyone; everyone can be nice because these things are from God and God wants them for everyone." Which is kind of a cheap answer, an infuriating answer, and it's one way that my theology is kind of cheap and shallow. It's kind of a cop out. But you can't believe in a God who is love, but the only way to experience that love is to say some words properly. What is more ridiculous, that a God has come and given us love, and everyone on the planet experience it and have it whether they know God by name or not, or the other thing, where some white guy from the U.S. comes to you and says "Say this! 'I'm a sinner and I accept Jesus.' You feel it? You feel the love?!"


JD: Any final thoughts?


DS: I agree with David Platt in that this prayer specifically is causing people to not really be Christians but believe that they are Christians. What an actual Christian is, he and I might disagree on, but we agree on that, and I think it's nice that he said it.

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Photo Sources: 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnragai/6999511358/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/powazny/2999422498/

Christians and the Earth

by David Shay

“The books of Sacred Scripture contain much more than what is written in them. Our soul also has depths unknown to us. On the sacred pages and in our soul, there are melodies we do not hear. In the spaces of the world there are melodies which no one catches because no one listens.”

—Eugenio Zolli

“The Earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.”

—Psalm 24:1

It’s 2009, and I’m at a large Christian conference. This is my senior year at a private Christian university, and I'm beaming with confidence as I start to be immersed in the Western Christian culture that is so prominent at Christian conferences in the US. I understand what attracts this sub-culture and what enrages and disgusts it. Having spent the last few years in a Christian university, I'm eager to hear the controversial hot topics of Western Christian culture discussed and debated. I also look forward to being in community with other semi-progressive Christian young adults, who want to push the communities of their faith forward.

This specific conference has a large variety of workshops to choose from. The workshops are the place to hear to tough questions answered, or at least to hear an attempt to answer the tough questions. The workshops are where a lot of the challenges of our faith come out and are tackled. Before I even know all the workshops that are on offer, I decide to go to whatever environmental workshop I can find, because I really care about the environment and want to hear what my fellow Christians are saying about it. I see that there are a few such workshops, and I go to the first one on the list, alone yet still very excited to learn. I’m not too surprised when none of my friends or fellow church members joins me.

However, I do feel a bit surprised at the small amount of people who show up for the workshop. It was a rather large ball room for such a small audience. (Technically, I’m sure now that there must have been more than two of us, but the only person I can recall is this girl with a large dreadlock—yes, singular—and bandana and then of course myself, sitting an aisle away from each other. So I have this kind of terrible mental image of the workshop being me and the single-dreadlock girl alone in a huge room listening to this topic I really care about.)

The workshop begins and I feel my excitement slowly deflating as I realize that the speakers are not touching on anything I haven't already…thought of myself? I feel bad thinking that these speakers are not very good, because they seem like great people. They are a young 30-ish-year-old couple and they talk about how having a healthy environment has made them feel better and helped them raise their children. That’s the thesis of the workshop. I get no new, fascinating knowledge to take away and share with my friends and fellow believers. No ideas to discuss with people. Nothing.

But still, I remain optimistic as I have seen that in a few days a speaker will address the issue of environmentalism and Christianity in the main conference session. This means she will be responsible to give a message on this topic for 20,000+ people to hear. Surely she will have something groundbreaking and important to say. However, when the message comes I have that same experience of excitement deflation as before. What I take away from the message is this: Trinidad is a beautiful country. And Christians should love each other.

I hear some of my fellow conference attendees talking about this message at the main session being the weakest one of the entire conference. I become even more deflated. The agenda that was so important to me is being overlooked and forgotten by my peers and fellow believers. I ask myself if my passion for the natural world is unimportant. Is the fulfillment I get from time praying in the forest preserves of suburban Chicago simply romanticized and irrelevant to the larger Christian picture? Why doesn't anyone seem to care about this?

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Ever since that conference, the more I’ve thought about it, the more compelled I’ve become to make the case for the natural world and our place within it, from a Christian perspective. I don’t think even progressive and environmentalist Christians are really grasping or communicating the full picture.

Let’s start at a material level. Our relationship with this planet is necessary for our existence to continue. Photosynthesis, the process by which plants take carbon dioxide and give off oxygen is amazing and awesome to witness. We give off a gas we do not need and in return receive oxygen.

Also, you have heard it said that money doesn't grow on trees. But I tell you the truth, that the sustenance you need to survive literally grows on trees. Money is something that we added.

The Christian environmentalist argument is usually that God created the Earth,; therefore we are obligated to love it and take care of it. But what if we changed the word “obligated” to “designed?” We have learned through the word of God that loving one another is what we were designed for. When we love one another and express that love by caring for each other, it is healthy for our spirits. What if the same could be said about our relationship with the Earth? It's not that we have to love the Earth, but that loving it and caring for it is what is good for us.

I'm not trying to use 1 John 4:12 to say that we need to love trees. If you ever have to choose between a human life and a tree, by all means choose the human. But perhaps when we hear that Yosemite is burning and ancient trees are dying, we should feel sorrow because we have a relationship with this Earth. Is it healthy for children to want to destroy ant hills instead of study them? Is it healthy for us to see the ways God's creation provides for us and exploit it? When God delivers manna, we take what we need for the day and leave it at that. Yet it's engrained in our culture to take more than we need.

At the start of this post, I placed a quote that speaks about "melodies we do not hear...because no one listens." There are unheard melodies—that is, untapped meaning and depth and beauty—both in sacred scripture and in the world around us. I feel like Christians already know that there are new meanings and beauty to be discovered in scripture, and that it is very precious to us in part because of that. Is it not also possible that our world—a place much larger, more poorly understood, and less explored than scripture, and created by the same God—is equally precious?

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Photo sources:
1. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/3650600124/
2. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/pleeker/139418540/ 
3. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/peddhapati/9703395209/
4. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/vkreay/6195960810/
5. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/80901381@N04/7950216844/