ken wilson online

Something wonderful is happening, driven by a sense of desperate need.  Secular scientists are recognizing the need to reach out to people of faith, especially people of evangelical faith, in order to bridge the cultural divide that is now hindering our capacity to respond in love and wisdom to the global environmental crisis.  And people of evangelical faith are open.  They are willing to engage people of science.  Because God is a myth busting God, and a God who likes to shake things up.  All this wonderful turbulence and cultural quaking left me sitting in a large meeting room at Ohio State University–excuse me, The Ohio State University–with about 15 scientists, professors of astronomy, environmental science, biology, mostly, and 15 evangelical pastors and leaders.  And I must say, I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit in the room with us. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve known it for a long time, but it’s another thing to face it. A massive shift is underway that is profoundly reshaping the spiritual/cultural/religious landscape of American Christianity. Everything that can be shaken is being shaken it seems in the life and perspective of the church. Missionaries are grappling with deep theological issues raised by the efforts to bring the gospel into an Islamic context (how to understand Islam? who is Allah in relation to the God of Abraham, Issac, Jacob and our Lord Jesus Christ?). Worship is shifting–and I mean contemporary worship. When Vineyard was forging a new way forward in contemporary worship there was a cultural consensus regarding contemporary music–pop/rock was king and had a vast following. But that’s changed with the internet and itunes and the millenial generation whose musical tastes are nothing if not eclectic. Read the rest of this entry »

Facts:

1. Coal burning power plants release mercury particles into the atmosphere with well documented health effects given the fact that mercury (the stuff in thermometers) is a poison.

2. We have the technology to burn coal cleaner, but it costs more to do so.

3. We tend to want the cheap energy of coal burning power plants without the mercury poisoning, but we’re less concerned about the poisoning effects of mercury if it affects someone else.

4. People with the means to keep coal burning power plants out of their neighborhood, tend to exercise that power.

4. Poor people don’t have much money. Money is power. So they have more coal burning power plants in their neighborhoods. And they and their kids and their unborn babies tend to suffer more harm as a result.

5. If people with power had more coal burning power plants in their own neighborhoods, they would be more likely to insist that we all spend a little more money to build clean power plants.

Am I missing something, or shouldn’t we all insist that no more dirty power plants be built? And that we spend money to clean up the ones that are spewing the mercury over poor people?   Whose children suffer memory loss and greater learning disabilities with all the mercury wrecking havoc in their brains?  One in six children are born at risk of this,  according to the EPA, and most of them are poor kids who can’t move away from the flipping power plants.  Excuse me, I got a little annoyed there.

After attending a retreat with top environmental scientists and evangelical leaders (I was representing Vineyard because the national director couldn’t make it), I found myself working on a project to remind evangelical pastors that environmental stewardship is a normative part of Christian discipleship. Sounds pretty obvious. Except that a few big time evangelical leaders have for some reason decided that climate change is bogus and somehow a problematic issue to tackle from a faith perspective. Read the rest of this entry »

Article in the NYT caught my eye, A Clutter Too Deep for Mere Bins and Shelves. Apparently there’s a run on organization bin systems in the new year. No wonder, with all the stuff that accumulates over the holidays.  But it’s got me thinking about the sheer volume of stuff that finds its way into the house.  I swear it’s more now than ever.  I’m purchasing more online than before, which saves gas for shopping, but the boxes proliferate from shipping.  I’ve got more cardboard from amazon than I can recycle right now.  Each box with extra inserts, plastic bubble wrap.  And then everyday from the mailbox, I’m bringing in a handful of stuff that I’m not interested in, but dutifully, I bring it in to the  house.  Maybe I should get a recycle bin for the front hallway and just put it in there, instead of laying it on the counter “to be sorted…”  This is getting out of hand. That’s the thing about the environment: it’s the little things, and it’s difficult to picture the impact.  But it’s real and the impact is devastating. Read recently that if everyone in china started using toilet paper, it would decimate the world’s forests.  

Latest Ann Arbor bumper sticker sighting on the back of a red Honda Insight-Hybrid: My car sips gas; your car sucks. Great! I thought. Just what we need to convince more people to buy cars that get better fuel economy. Nothing motivates the unmoved like a little self-righteousness from the newly moved. I couldn’t help myself, and drove next to the bumper sticker displayer. Doing a little profiling, expecting to see a middle age white guy, thin, with glasses and a beard. Sure enough, stereotype held. Middle age white guy, thin, with glasses and a beard. Sigh. We’re literally in this hurting environment together. We’re hurting it together and we’ll only be able to be kinder to it together. Could we please drop the self-righteousness? Unseemly in matters religious and environmental. And worse, ineffective, which we can’t afford to be right now.

Read an article in the New York Times by Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs and Steel on the consumption gap. We in the developed world consume-acquire-use 32 times the amount of stuff consumed by the typical person in a place like Kenya. If everyone in the world–all 6.5 billion of us–consumed as much stuff as we do, the consumption rate would be equivalent to a world population of 72 billion. Not sustainable. I look around my living quarters and it’s awash with stuff. (See thumbnail above from our basement.) The paper and packaging material alone is staggering. Plastic everywhere, designed not to degrade. It’s overwhelming. And points to the amazing lack of proportionality in the business as usual standard American Christian view of sin. Our consumption greater by a factor of 32 (a doubling five times over) compared to someone in the developing world. Much of it, unnecessary, wasteful. We know how to do it better, differently, but don’t for lack of will rather than know-how. And it barely registers on the radar screen of what’s wrong with the world. More love, less stuff this year, please God, help.