Care of Creation @ Urbana09

Hello World…

Environmental Missions? Whose Idea Was This Anyhow?

See, it goes like this. If you’re being called to missions, you’re signing up for two things. First, you’re signing up to spread the gospel to those who may not have ever heard it and second, you’re signing up to help others live a life that honors God.

That sounds like a pretty simple task list but in reality, it’s not.

See, in this fallen world, there’s lots of things that make it really difficult to get the gospel into people’s hearts.

Sometimes it’s just hard to get there to be face-to-face with them. Sometimes, it’s hard to gain their trust as a friend and sometimes, circumstances like their living conditions, poverty and disease get in the way of people hearing and accepting the gospel message.

People and organizations who do Medical Missions have understood this for a long time. They understand that the connection between  life conditions and delivering the gospel is a strong one. They know that people can and will be much more receptive to the gospel when they have at least some hope of being physically healthy and they also know that as God originally planned it, men and women were not supposed to live in a constant struggle against poverty and disease.

That’s why, if you are a medical missionary, you probably see your first task in delivering the gospel as relieving day-to-day human suffering and helping to put the world back to the way it was when God made it.

Ok, that makes some sense.

But, if relieving suffering is part of delivering the gospel, where do the environment and environmental missions come in?

Well here’s a fact (and one you probably already know) — when the environment that people live in is destroyed or degraded, when people can’t feed themselves because the soil on their farms has eroded and washed down the hillside or when people suffer from drought or air and water pollution, they’re not living the lives that God intended them to live; and because of this, getting the gospel to them is going to be really, really hard.

After all, when you can’t feed your family (or yourself for that matter), is your mind and soul going to be in a condition to hear God’s word? Probably not.

That’s the basic premise of EM (Environmental Missions) – improving peoples lives and delivering the gospel as part of improving the environment that they live in. All in all, it’s about helping people care for creation and the land that they live on and helping put this earth back to the way God originally meant it to be.

Sure EM is a new concept and you can count on one hand the other people you have met that really get it. But that has no reflection on how important it is as part of delivering the Gospel.

See, EM is important because we humans, who were charged with caring for God’s creation have stretched God’s creation to the limit. If you don’t believe this take a look across the globe and you’ll see that in every country, in every contenent there are people groups suffering because of  the condition of the environment they live in.

Drought, soil erosion, air-pollution, flooding and starvation … they’re all clear evidence of how the environment has reacted to the way we have treated it.

And all these things are things standing in the way of you delivering the gospel to those who desperately need to hear it — and need to hear it before we yell “Hello World” and there’s no one there to answer us back.