Climate Justice Clips: Archbishop Rowan Williams on 'Fashioning a Christian Response' to the Climate Crisis | Sojourners

Climate Justice Clips: Archbishop Rowan Williams on 'Fashioning a Christian Response' to the Climate Crisis

Many would have read reports of Rowan Williams's wonderful sermon in Copenhagen. Below are some of my favorite quotes. What some may have missed is this fantastic talk he gave. Pencil in sometime, make a cup of tea, and prayer-sit back as Rowan Williams outlines "The Climate Crisis: Fashioning a Christian Response."

Love casts out fear. If we begin from the belief that God wants us to rejoice and delight in the created world, our basic attitude to the environment will not be anxiety or the desperate search for ways of controlling it; it will be the excited and hopeful search for understanding it and honouring its goodness and its complex, interdependent beauty.

In this season of Advent, we renew our confident hope that such a future is possible. We give thanks for the Christmas gift of Jesus Christ that has broken through our selfishness and begun the work of our liberation. We reaffirm our conviction and commitment in the name of love; and we say 'don't be afraid' to all who stand uncertainly on the edge of decision. Don't be afraid; act for the sake of love.

Love casts out fear. The truth is that what is most likely to get us to take the right decisions for our global future is love.

For the best daily coverage of what is happening at COP 15, visit here. And feel free to join EPYC's facebook group.

SERIES INTRO: This year alone, EPYC has run nonviolent climate justice workshops with more than 8,000 young people (most with little or no contact with Christianity). The workshops invite them amid our ecological crisis to become [eco]prophets, and introduce them to an understanding of Christianity that provides a spirituality of compassionate engagement modeled on Jesus (rather than indifferent escapism dressed up in Jesus-drag that simply reflects the patterns of the world). In the countdown to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (COP15), these are some of the most popular, inspiring, informative, and provocative video clips we have used in our workshops.

Feel free to post them on your blog, send them to friends, and share them in your sermons, small groups, and Bible studies. Let them help you "think critically, plot creatively, and act compassionately" in witnessing to the gospel's message of good news to our warming world -- not a lubricant for the destruction of God's good creation.

And join us in praying with Tim Costello and Brian McLaren for climate justice for the poor at Copenhagen.

portrait-jarrod-mckennaJarrod McKenna is seeking to live God's love as a dad, husband, brother, activist trainer, and [eco]evangelist. He is a co-founder of the Peace Tree Community serving with the marginalised in one of the poorest of areas in his city, in Western Australia heads up an award-winning multi-faith youth service initiative called Together for Humanity, and is the founder and creative director of Empowering Peacemakers (E.P.Y.C.), for which he has received an Australian peace award in his work for empowering a generation of [eco]evangelists and peace prophets.