Churches Call For Creation Care
Attendees at the Lausanne conference
The Lausanne Global Conference on “Creation Care and the Gospel” is calling for the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) and other Evangelical churches to take, as soon as possible, strong, radical, and biblically based action to address the critical need to be better stewards of God’s creation.
Peter VanderMeulen, director of the CRC’s Office of Social Justice, was invited to attend the conference that took place in St. Ann, Jamaica in early November.
VanderMeulen says he was invited as a representative of the CRC because of the action taken by Synod 2012 which adopted a report on creation stewardship.
In adopting the report, Synod 2012 said churches and their members should learn all that they can and then to do all that they can to address ecological problems, including climate change and the growing scarcity of energy resources.
Two major convictions emerged from the Lausanne meeting:
- Creation Care is indeed a “gospel issue within the lordship of Christ.”
- The world faces a crisis that is pressing, urgent, and that must be resolved in the present generation.
Based on these two convictions, says a Lausanne document, “we therefore call the whole church, in dependence on the Holy Spirit, to respond radically and faithfully to care for God’s creation, demonstrating our belief and hope in the transforming power of Christ.”
The Lausanne Movement began in 1974 under the auspices of major evangelical leaders such as Billy Graham, Carl Henry, John Stott, and others. It was created to promote world evangelism as well as to apply the gospel to the contemporary world, and works to understand the ideas and values behind rapid changes in society.
