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Creation-Care Movement Needs Pastors By Bob Allen Wednesday, May 13, 2009
DULUTH, Ga. (Associated Baptist Press) A member of President Obama’s advisory council on faith-based partnerships says pastors are key to winning the hearts and minds of evangelicals when it comes to caring for the environment.
Joel Hunter, pastor of Northland Church in Lakewood, Fla., said May 13 at a conference promoting “creation care” that it is important to get pastors “equipped and empowered in order to care about this issue.”
Hunter, author of A New Kind of Conservative, said pastors care passionately about people and about serving Christ, but many are insecure about losing their jobs.
“A lot of pastors feel like they are two bad sermons from, ‘Do you want fries with that?’” Hunter told evangelical leaders meeting May 13-15 at Cross Pointe Church in Duluth, Ga. “So we stay away from controversial subjects unless we see them as necessary for spiritual maturity for our people and unless we know facts.”
Hunter said pastors need to know enough about the science of climate change to be able to “explain to those who will inevitably come back as they should with skepticism on any subject.”
He said pastors also need a support community like Flourish, the sponsor of the gathering as well as a new collaboration for integrating creation care into the ministry of the local church, to call if they get “beat up” for speaking their mind.
Hunter said there is both good news and bad news for supporters of creation care.
“The bad news is that this movement honestly is going very slowly in the church,” he said. “By now we would have hoped to be meeting with multitudes, and you see what’s here. There’s a gathering of leaders.”
Despite that, Hunter said “the time is growing in its ripeness from several aspects,” so environmentally conscious evangelicals should not be discouraged.
Along with new technologies that allow humans to cultivate the earth in new ways, Hunter said “there is a ripeness in the church” in form of an expanding moral agenda.
“There is now an unstoppable expansion of what it means to be an evangelical Christian,” he said. “We are no longer going to be stuck on one or two major issues.” Hunter added that evangelicals must not abandon concern for the unborn in order to embrace a broader agenda. “Frankly, if you cannot protect a baby in its mother’s womb, that is the paradigm of all vulnerable life,” he said. “If we don’t continue to lift that up as central, then woe be unto us.” But Hunter said evangelicals need to understand “that ‘pro-life’ means a whole lot of things.” “It’s not just inside the womb, it’s outside the womb,” he said. “Life outside the womb is just as important as life inside the womb to God.”
Hunter said evangelicals have “an unprecedented platform in this country to speak to power on behalf of those who have no power.”
“You must know that those in power are listening to evangelical Christians in a way they have never listened before,” said Hunter, one of a quartet of preachers identified as praying with candidate Obama before his election as president.
He said the nation’s leaders are listening “if for no other reason because of our sheer number,” but also “because of our activism that has turned from being narrow, negative and combative to being constructive and helpful.”
“All of politics runs not on those who can argue the loudest not even those who can present the best arguments – but runs on those who are willing to offer solutions,” he said. “Politicians are like everybody else. If you’ve got something that can help me, I want to see it, and especially this particular administration, although all administrations have been like that.”
With that kind of clout, Hunter warned that evangelicals “need to not lose our way.”
“Power does funny things to people,” he said. “Attention does very funny things to people and all of a sudden we begin to think that it’s the justice of our cause rather than the Creator, the sovereign God who put us there, and the principles of Scripture that are more important than anything we can come up with.”
Hunter said Christians “need to attach everything we do to Scripture” and “have to be sure that we can be steadfast in knowing the facts and not merely be more clever with our opinions.”
“There’s a lot of politicization, a lot of polarization, there’s a lot of people who profit from polarization in our society today,” he said. “We cannot be drawn into that.” [[[ Is this guy REALLY that naive? ]]]
Hunter said the best way to build awareness about environmental stewardship is telling stories about vulnerable people most hurt by neglect for the earth.
“People are not moved by syllogistic certainty,” he said. “They are not moved by philosophy. They are moved when they see somebody they can help.”
Jonathan Merritt, manager of the Flourish conference and national spokesman for the Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative, introduced Hunter at the event.
“Dr. Hunter taught me that you can be a conservative who unashamedly defends the sanctity of human life, that you can believe traditional orthodox Christian views about some of the most pressing issues of our day and at the [same] time care passionately about God’s creation,” Merritt said, “that those things are not mutually exclusive.”
Ping me if you find one I've missed.
Ping me if you find one I've missed.
Evangelicals Seem Unfazed by Torture. Why?
05-07-2009 Greg Warner, Religion News Service
Does conservative Christianity encourage torture?
That debate has been reignited by new numbers from the Pew Research Center that show white evangelicals are more supportive of “torture to gain important information from suspected terrorists” than any other religious or political group in the survey.
Less than half of the general public (49 percent) say government-sponsored torture can “often” or “sometimes” be justified, compared to almost two-thirds of white evangelicals (62 percent).
That view is almost identical to the view of Republicans (64 percent), giving fuel to the charge that evangelicals’ views on torture are rooted more in politics than their faith.
“Conservatives are living within their own moral universe,” said Joel Hunter, an evangelical megachurch pastor from suburban Orlando, Fla. “In the last few decades, we have kind of created our own moral terms more neoconservative than walking in sacrificial love.”
The torture debate within evangelical circles is as complex and multi-layered as evangelicals themselves. First, do the Pew numbers matter, and how much? And second, if evangelicals are finding their way to an endorsement of torture, how are they getting there?
The Pew numbers have prompted a great deal of soul-searching among Hunter and other evangelical leaders. David Gushee, an ethicist at Mercer University who has worked with the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, is one of them.
“These answers reveal deep problems in the moral formation of evangelical Christians, especially in the South, our capitulation to utilitarianism and nationalism rather than submission to the lordship of Christ, and our weakness in developing and committing to a human-rights ethic,” he said.
The Rev. Richard Land, who heads the Southern Baptists’ Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and was a close ally of the Bush White House, is another torture critic.
“If the end justifies the means, then where do you draw the line?” Land said in an interview. “It’s a moveable line. It’s in pencil, not in ink. I believe there are absolutes. There are some things we must never do.”
Yet some say the Pew numbers, like all survey data, can be problematic. Researchers did not define “torture,” and that’s the problem, say defenders of the Bush administration policy of “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Two conservative Christian scholars insisted waterboarding is not torture, and can be morally defensible for Christians.
“Evangelicals, like everyone else, do not support any immoral use of force for any reason by anyone,” said Daniel Heimbach, professor of ethics at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C. “And evangelicals, like everyone else, also believe that coercive methods of interrogation can be used within strict moral boundaries. There is, in fact, no moral disagreement on this.”
Keith Pavlischek of the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center agrees with Gushee and others that Christians are not properly informed about the torture issue. But he insists if they were, they would understand that torture is not inherently evil according to Christian principles, “classic natural law” and just-war theory.
Labeling certain techniques as torture without doing the hard work of applying consistent moral principles distorts the debate, said Pavlischek, a former Marine lieutenant in Iraq and now director of EPPC’s Program to Protect America’s Freedom.
Simple slogans don’t help, either, he said, because the debate itself is not simple.
“If your first question is ‘What would Jesus do?’ you get a mess,” said Pavlischek. “The reason evangelicals are confused (on torture) is because evangelical leaders are confused.”
While many evangelical leaders say they were shocked and embarrassed by the latest Pew findings, they were equally troubled when survey data last October indicated evangelical views on torture are more often influenced by “common sense” and “life experiences” rather than Christian teachings or beliefs.
“The data in our survey points to many white evangelicals thinking first as partisans and second as people of faith,” said researcher Robert Jones, whose firm, Public Religion Research, conducted the October study for Mercer University and the Washington-based group Faith in Public Life.
“When they engage their faith in thinking about the issue, support for torture drops.”
Hunter, for his part, blames “a whole lot of evangelicals (who) are listening to a whole lot of talk radio” and seeing the debate solely through the lens of national security and homeland security.
“Many of them see patriotism in terms of protecting our country rather than remembering the admonition in Scripture that you don’t overcome evil with evil but rather overcome evil with good,” said Hunter, who holds an advisory seat on President Obama’s faith-based office.
Support for torture can’t be blamed on a lack of religious education; in fact, the Pew numbers showed that support for torture actually increased among those who attended church more frequently.
“It would be easy for casual news watchers to conclude that if you want to end torture in this country, the best thing to do would be to empty out the churches,” Gushee wrote in a column for the Associated Baptist Press.
Some evangelicals aren’t just worried about the survey numbers, but also whether those numbers will tarnish evangelicals’ public image. Gushee, for one, worries about the perception “that evangelicals have a strangely selective moral vision.”
Heimback, however, disagreed, saying the problem is not so much with evangelicals as with an unfriendly media that is anxious to portray Christian conservatives in a bad light.
“Those reporting on evangelicals are also responsible to avoid unjustified stereotypes and should rather assume the best, not the worst, of evangelical Americans who take the teaching and example of Jesus Christ seriously,” he said. ” … Evangelicals are not suddenly less adept at media relations, rather the culture is becoming decidedly less friendly toward evangelical Christians.”