Creation Care: UP, IN, OUT & OVER

‘The Magicians Nephew’ by CS Lewis tells the story tells of how Aslan, the Great Lion, created the land of Narnia. He does so by walking across a dark and barren landscape, singing creation into existence as he comes. Every beautiful note and chorus in someway corresponds to the sudden appearance of bright new stars in the black sky, of grass springing up underfoot, of trees and plants and birds and animals emerging from bubbling mounds of turf, or rivers and waterfalls suddenly bursting forth.

 

This scene was beautifully and forever burned into my imagination well before I read the creation story in Genesis and so I overlaid these images as I read the relevant parts of scripture. Aslan goes on to charge the talking animals with responsibility to take care of this beautiful new land that he has just created, warning them not to return to dumb and witless ways, lest they lose the power of speech and become ordinary animals again. 

 

Genesis mandate

This Genesis mandate of creation care has been sorely neglected in the theology and practice of the church; our call and charge to nurture the beautiful and deeply woven ecosystem that God has placed us in, this global garden whose wellbeing is so directly related to our own. Heaven and earth holds us accountable for how we embrace this responsibility.

 

During the pandemic we all learned to appreciate nature in new ways, and COP26 underlined the need for a recovery of the Genesis mandate in everyday church life and discipleship. Concern for the health of the planet is the top contributing source of stress for young people and is likely to remain so for some time, so how can we make creation care a simple part of our everyday discipleship? 

Doing a message or a series on Creation Care certainly won’t hurt, but it certainly won’t solve the deeper challenge of creating a discipling culture that includes this crucial subject. We need ‘sticky and memorable’ tools to help people embed creation care into their memory and their culture. For a number of years I have used the Triangle to embed the culture of church as Jesus modelled it to us: His relationship with his Father (UP), his relationship with his disciples (IN) and his relationship with the crowds; the last, the least, and the lost (OUT).  

 

The rhythm of Jesus’ time in the gospels reveals these priorities and relationships as he seeks to mentor his disciples. Jesus wants us to grow in the Up IN and OUT dimensions, deeper love and intimacy with our Father, deeper relationships with one another, and a clear and growing call to mission and service. The visual that many have adopted to share this teaching is a triangle. There is however a fourth dimension and relationship that Jesus models to us which is his relationship with creation.

 

Authority comes from having a right relationship with something or someone and Jesus relationship with nature can be clearly seen through his teaching, his rhythms and his miracles.  

 

So given the importance of this fourth dimension, I want to introduce to you the Simplex. A simplex is a lesser known geometric shape that is a triangle with four dimensions. The fourth dimension of our being and wellbeing is that we are creatures of this earth who are also sons of heaven. At the dawn of creation we, just like the talking animals in The Magicians Nephew, were given charge of the earth. We are told to be fruitful, to multiply and fill the earth; to subdue it and to rule over it. 

 

So what went wrong? Well, just as with other places where the language of scripture is one of nurture and loving care, people somewhere managed to mangle the command to bless and nurture and instead imbued the words with violence and a justification for selfish exploitation.

 

So let’s take them back!! 

 

Recovering the Genesis (and Jesus’) creation care mandate is an essential theological journey for leaders which we don’t have space for here but we encourage you to thoroughly engage in one. We want to simply offer the Simplex as a discipleship tool through which to teach and embed creation care culture in your discipleship culture. 

 

UP, IN, OUT and OVER

P.S. My wife Julie is/has been a thoroughly active advocate of creation care through her involvement in our local park over the years. I wrote about what it led to. You can read it here. 

 

P.P.S. I’m a big fan of science and exploration and the prospect of venturing into space and settling on other planets, not for fear of losing the earth to an asteroid or other disaster, but because I believe God created that hunger to explore his wider creation in us. However, if we can’t look after our home planet why should God bless and release us to explore / inhabit the rest of universe?

 

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts re this, or any of the above.