Applications are now open for CCOP2024, a program sponsored by the Eden Vigil Institute for Environmental Leadership and many other amazing partners….

In the Fijian language, the word for enemies is meca, as in “dou lomani ira na kemudou meca,” which is Jesus’s command to “love your enemies” (Matt 5:44). This essay is my deep dive into what this means, what it feels like, and how it is deployed in the climate crisis. It’s always an exciting moment when one of our participants in the Christian Climate Observers Program (CCOP) gets to meet a US senator at a UN Climate Summit. How often does one have such high-level access to talk about climate change? How often do you meet a politician who cares? The US congressional delegation usually comes in at the start of the second week of the COP. They are greeted by the US Special Envoy on Climate, John Kerry. They come prepared with their talking points, including that one tweetable soundbite. For Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) that statement was: “The number one enemy to solving the climate crisis is the fossil fuel industry but the number two enemy is despondency.” Despite the buzz around Schatz’s quote, I however could only receive it uneasily. This, I felt, was one of the worst things the senator could have said at COP28. Read More.

This is unimaginably high-level influence.  Al Ghais himself shows up on December 10 to help advance his agenda.  He conducts a “Special Day—OPEC and the Youth.”  It’s a fireside chat.   According to Reuters, “roughly a dozen young people attended.”  Four of them were CCOPers. In the wake of that agenda, Al Ghais encounters pushback.  There’s protest out in the hallway—thank you, 350.org—but inside there are respectful questions and challenges—about Carbon Capture and Sequestration, about the false narrative that OPEC is spinning.  Our CCOPers know what they were talking about.  Al Ghais leaves.  The PR guy remains.  He is apparently frustrated—but that is because his plans have been frustrated.  What Reuters called a “charm offensive” has failed.  No one has ever likely stood up to them before in such an intimate setting.  No one has ever been given a chance to engage their falsehoods before in a dialogue setting. Read More.

I understand that the U.A.E. is rich in fossil fuels.  So is Canada, the United States, Mexico, and many of the other countries represented today in this room.  Faith communities must take up the prophetic task of promoting the love, harmony, and obedience behind Net Zero.  In the Appalachian region of the United States, there are many church buildings that have been built by the coal companies.  In the Athabasca region of northern Alberta in Canada, there are many churches dependent on offerings from families employed by the oil companies.  The same is true for churches around Houston, TX.  It is hard for a preacher to step into the pulpit with a commitment to the gospel and a commitment to the fossil fuel companies.  The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and our Apostle Paul had something in common: when they both entered the city they were disgusted, outraged, deeply troubled by the idolatry they encountered.  Today, may we also have eyes to see the idolatry that has sprung up around our use of fossil fuels. Read more

This year however, I’ve been tipped off about discovery, and am proactively planning it into my experience of COP28. This year, I intend to: 1) discover that you and I and every living creature who cares about our planet has enemies; 2) discover that “loving your enemies” introduces us to a new type of Christian love, a kind we never learned in the Sunday Schools of our dominant culture; and 3) test the validity of Martin Luther King’s assertion: “if you love your enemies, you will discover that at the very root of love is the power of redemption.” Planet Earth could use a little redemption. The climate movement could use a new type of power. Our enemies seem to be winning. Read More.

There’s a part of Jesus’s story in Luke 19—there’s some debate over whether it qualifies as a parable—that is about human solidarity. It begins in what we might call the ‘here and now’ with a certain rich man clothed in finery and eating the best food. A beggar named Lazarus, covered in sores, sits right outside his house.

For the sake of this paper I’ll mention only three capacities that, in my experience, evangelicalism has denied the creation care plant over the last two decades, namely: 1) a capacity for integration with the environmental justice movement, 2) a capacity to confront Christian nationalism and political conflation, and 3) a capacity to evolve that next step theologically: we abandoned Dominionism for the concept of faithful “stewardship”—thank God for Francis Schaeffer and Cal DeWitt—but now we need to develop a new, but biblical, anthropology of our creatureliness and interconnectedness. What I mean by “capacity” is: they didn’t let us go there. Evangelicalism didn’t let us go there. Read More.

Jacob was fleeing the wrath of his brother Esau and the disappointment of his father Isaac, when he 'stopped for the night because the sun had set' (v.10). The 'certain place' he had reached was named Luz, which according to the name apparently refers to an almond grove. In a fact that never failed to amaze us Sunday School kids as much as the glorious ladder did: Jacob took a stone and used it as a pillow!

The global stocktake (GST) at COP28 will be the first conducted since the Paris Agreement went into full effect and began its five-year cycles. In the third year of a cycle, the parties will conduct this 'inventory' of 'where they’re collectively making progress' on the Paris Agreement goals. Two years later, they will return to the COP (in this case COP30 in 2025) and bring more ambitious targets for emissions reductions, based on what the GST reveals.

Jesus died for us. We often need to be reminded that he also lived for us. I don’t simply mean that he lived long enough to articulate for us a set of teachings, as wonderful an accomplishment as that is. I mean that in his incarnation, in his en-flesh-ment, as an embodied being embedded in creation, Jesus showed us how to be a human being. This month’s theme prayers for Climate Intercessors will feature the role that plastics—its production and its pollution—play in climate change. Jesus showed us how to be a consumer. Read More.

Below you will find Bible studies about climate action authored by Lowell Bliss, the Director of The Eden Vigil Institute of Environmental Leadership. We hope you find them encouraging and helpful in your personal journey or as you gather in like-minded community to seek God over this important topic. For more resources and opportunities to connect, visit the Eden Vigil Institute of Environmental Leadership.

Cataclysms and bad news aren’t the only things that can cascade. So can thoughts and memories and connections. I remembered that the first time I had ever heard about the possible collapse of what is called the global ocean conveyor belt was in Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

Hope for the possibility of the 1.5°C target has been an illusion for nearly a decade; an assessment by experts siloed within their narrow disciplines projecting a possible case provided that, if everything outside of their realm goes just right (e.g. politics, international relations, military conflict, banking systems, religious engagement, etc.), then maybe they can still model their 1.5°C scenario.” Glibness? Cruelty? Irrelevance? Whatever it felt like, it made me wake up and realize that desperate hospital waiting rooms are populated by more than just medical experts, grieving families, and timid siblings. Chaplains—professional in their own right—are also common figures at hand in a hospital when calamitous pronouncements are made. It is an act of great leadership—spiritual, emotional—for a chaplain to step forward and compassionately suggest, “It may be time that we consider a different approach to care.” Read More

Excerpt: There is no doubt about it, John 11 is the story of a miracle.  Jesus calls Lazarus forth from the grave and it is another one of Jesus’s seven signs in this gospel that he is divine, another occasion for one of his seven I AM statements, in this case, “I am the resurrection and the life.”  I will begrudge no one in our Climate Intercessors prayer network who wants to pray for the miracle of preventing a 1.5°C warming.  Yet, as I read John 11, while it is obviously the story of a miracle, I don’t believe it is a story about miracles.  It is about death and life, and about how in Jesus we live, and breath, and have our being even unto eternity. Read More.

Dear Ed and Julia: I am concerned about God’s creation and so I try to stay informed and engaged about climate change. I am greatly troubled by the recent announcement that the host government for COP28, U.A.E., has appointed Sultan Al Jaber to serve as the president of the climate summit. Meanwhile, Al Jaber intends to retain his role as CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), one of the world’s largest petroleum producers. Read More

It’s December 2018 at the COP24 climate summit in Katowice, Poland, and I am as depressed as I have ever been. It didn’t help that I had an attack of kidney stones during my layover in Brussels. It didn’t help that my normal set of colleagues at these climate summits weren’t attending this one. I was alone. I was alone on a mattress on the floor of my price-gouging AirBnb, touk and gloves on to try and ward off the cold. And then there was the summit itself. Poland was hosting COP24 in their coal-mining region, promoting “just transition” seemingly as a way to keep promoting the fossil fuel itself. When the climate march rolled around on the Saturday after the first week, phalanxes of Polish police in riot gear were out in full force. COP24 is generally considered a “failed” COP, precisely at the time when the Paris Agreement needed to shift into a higher gear.