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Some in my faith community can get a little testy when Charles Darwin’s name comes up.  So when Carl Safina, my friend the atheist and ocean conservationist, told me that Jesus and Darwin were his two heroes, I decided it was time to read Darwin’s Origin of Species for myself. After all, I’ve often challenged those who have any prickly opinions about Christianity to temper said opinions by reading the gospels.  Much can be learned by going to the source documents.
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Carl Safina, an environmental scientist and science writer of some note, spoke at the Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor two weeks ago.  Our first secular scientist as a speaker–a man who professes no Christian faith, but is an admirer of Jesus of Nazareth along with Charles Darwin.  He was nervous to be speaking to a congregation in the evangelical wing of American Christianity. He was nervous as one might be who is crossing a minefield without knowing where the mines are located.  Would he offend people without even intending to? Would he get me into trouble with congregants by what he might say?  I told him not to be nervous: we wanted to hear what he had to say about the oceans and science and the environment.  Tell us what you know.  But I was nervous too.
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Advice to young pastors: to be a pastor in the context of the evangelical landscape is a privilege. By all  measures evangelical Christianity is the most vibrant form of faith in the United States. Evangelical Christians volunteer more, give more money to their churches and give more to non-church charities than any other group.  Nothing says “I love you” like time and cash.  Evangelicals get things done, so you could do worse than to be a pastor in an evangelical setting. But there’s also a cross to bear and your being truly evangelical requires that you bear it. You must be willing to face and confront religious hostility in the camp.
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Today marks the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, a man whose name has been much maligned by many in my own American evangelical tribe.

My friend, Carl Safina, an ocean conservationist and author of the acclaimed Song for the Blue Ocean told me that his two heroes are Charles Darwin and Jesus; Darwin for revealing the unity of all living things, and Jesus for teaching us to love our enemies. Would that my fellow believers understood as well the rule of Jesus, a rule which demands that we bother to understand each other.
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