Unlike the other clips we've been showing in this "countdown to COP15," Empowering Peacemakers hasn't shown this one in workshops, but it is often mentioned by students. It comes from a science teacher named Greg Craven, whose little exercise in risk assessment of "to act or not to act" on climate change has had more than 7,500,000 views to date. The viral success of his 10-minute clip, called "The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See," consists of this delightfully daggy high school science teacher armed with "dad jokes," a whiteboard, and warm yet unemotional logic talking us through the pros and cons of acting on climate change.
But I wanted to show another video of his that I thought God's Politics readers would find useful for discussion. It's his response to a sincere Christian who thinks climate change is God's will. It's not so much a theological response as a prophetic challenge from outside the fold to not "blame God" for the consequences of human sin and fail to hear the call to repent and change.
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), inviting them amid our ecological crisis to become [eco]prophets and introducing 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, 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.
Jarrod 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 areas in his city, in Western Australia heads up an award-winning multifaith 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.
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