Caring for Creation Is a Biblical Calling
Recycling. Composting. Conserving. Reducing environmental footprints. Restoring biodiversity and beauty.
These aren’t merely partisan talking points or greenwashing strategies for businesses to make more money. As Christians, we should all be regularly engaged with these activities – not waiting for politicians or marketing agencies to lead us into a more creation-affirming future.
Creation care is central to our identity and calling as Christ’s followers, and we must take seriously God’s call to protect, preserve, and enhance his creation. In fact, not only should Christians care about this issue, we should be the ones leading the charge.
When God situated Adam in the place he had lovingly created, God told Adam to serve and keep that place – to take care of God’s beloved creation. And when John summarized why Jesus had come, it was because God so deeply loved the world he had made (John 3:16).
This is why we should be asking, “How can I serve and keep God’s beloved creation today? What can I do to protect, preserve, and enhance the world God has created and in which God has placed us?”
When many people look out upon God’s works today, they see a heartbreaking reality: smokestacks and polluted rivers, trash heaps and strip-mined mountains. Humans have been misusing God’s creation to the point that many places today can no longer communicate God’s nearness and goodness the way they were intended to.
At Calvin University, where I teach biology, we take seriously the mandate to serve and keep God’s beloved creation. When I joined the faculty in 1997, the Calvin Environmental Assessment Program (CEAP) was just launching. CEAP was a group of faculty and staff who considered how our campus impacted creation. One focus of the group was to evaluate the water that flows off Calvin’s property and into our local Plaster Creek.
That’s when a new focus emerged. Unfortunately, at that time Plaster Creek was the most contaminated stream in western Michigan. As a university, we set out to change this distinction by implementing the Plaster Creek Stewards, a group of faculty, staff, and students dedicated to restoring health and beauty to the Plaster Creek Watershed.
Today, the initiative supports five staff members and thousands of volunteers. The group has been serving God’s creation by planting trees, creating native habitats, teaching workshops, publishing scientific papers, and working to transform the entire area into a more biodiverse, healthy, and beautiful landscape that more clearly displays God’s goodness and grace.
It’s one of the many initiatives Calvin’s faculty, staff, students, and alumni are doing to care for God’s creation – for this corner of the garden.
Calvin also features a unique oasis in the heart of Grand Rapids: a 100-acre ecosystem preserve. While half of the preserve is open to the public, the other half is intentionally off-limits to give a large section of the property a perpetual Sabbath. It was decided this would be a place where the owls and coyotes, butterflies and stately oaks can do what they were created to do without the interruption of people.
I believe that by giving the land a Sabbath, we are helping to “keep” the creation – to preserve it, allowing creation to raise its own voice of praise to the Creator. Sabbath is not just for humans. All of creation benefits when we allow time and space for rest (Lev. 25). God himself showed us what Sabbath looks like by resting on the seventh day after creating the world.
It seems to me that of all the issues we debate today, creation care should be the easiest to transcend party lines. We should resist attempts by political groups or marketers to hijack or distort God’s calling. This is an issue that should pull us together, not divide us.
All Christians would affirm that humanity and the world in which we live ought to flourish in ways that communicate God’s nearness and goodness. But we need to recognize that none of us can flourish in an environment that’s not flourishing.
As Christians, let’s not absolve our responsibility to care for creation. Let’s remember it is a Biblical mandate and commit to doing our part to recycle, plant trees, buy fewer belongings, restore beauty, and preserve biodiversity – allowing spaces of rest and recovery for all of creation.
Creation is waiting for us to serve and keep the world God deeply loves. We are capable of doing so much good. Let’s come together and embrace our calling to care for the places where God has situated us.
