Creation care: A mandate for American Baptists
Photograph by Li-An Lim via Unsplash
Rev. Dr. David L. Wheeler
On February 12 the Trump administration slashed U.S. environmental regulation by “eliminating the Obama-era Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding and all subsequent GHG emissions standards for vehicles and engines of model years 2012 to 2027 and beyond.”
Meanwhile, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration notes that “2024 was the warmest year since global record keeping began in 1850 by a wide margin.” The extremes of hot and cold, drought, and catastrophic flooding experienced in recent years match scientific predictions of the effects of increasing levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and are not limited and local but global in scale, endangering human well-being in rich and poor nations alike. How does this reality relate to the mission of the church?
In August 2024, I wrote in The Christian Citizen that “all the ´traditional´ priorities, activities and concerns of the Church – evangelism, discipleship, spiritual formation and the pursuit of justice in all its forms – can only be practiced in the context of creation care. If a livable world does not exist, we cannot follow Jesus.”
The “Mission Table” conducted at the Conclusion of the San Juan biennial in June 2023, with representatives of ABC program boards and caucuses present, voted “creation care” close to the top of a lengthy list of concerns animating American Baptist leaders. Creation care and the related mandate to seek “creation justice” are an ongoing concern among American Baptists, but much work needs to be done to express this concern in all aspects of American Baptist life – personal, congregational, and programmatic.[i]
Many in church leadership are preoccupied with “survival,” that is: How do we attract the people – most often imagined as “younger people” – and resources we need to keep our institutions going? And let’s be honest: We Baptists, across the spectrum from ultra-conservative to liberal/progressive, have a strongly anthropocentric faith. We may sing “This world is not my home, I’m just a passing through,” and concentrate on readying our immortal souls for heaven, or we may march for human rights and strive to do justice, but it’s still about human fulfillment, and this world is often no more than the stage setting.
Allow me to suggest an alternate reading of key scriptural references to creation. In the first Genesis creation narrative, God looks out over each day´s work and declares it “good” on its own terms (Genesis 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25), and God´s declaration at the conclusion of his work that “it was very good” applies to “everything that he had made” (Gen. 1:31, my emphasis). Even God’s declaration, “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness. . .” (Gen. 1:26) does not set us above the rest of creation; our “God-like” capacities are for a task: caring for God’s creation (“dominion” exercised in the manner of Jesus (Mark 9:35). Imago Dei is not privilege but a call to service.
We rarely consider seriously the inverse of God’s delight in creation and providential care for it; if we who are God’s called and equipped caretakers of creation instead exploit it and dismember it, we oppose God’s plan for ourselves and creation.
Psalms praising God’s creation in all its myriad forms reinforce the insight that God’s love and God’s providence comprise far more than simply human well-being.
“O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your works! There is the sea, great and wide, creeping things innumerable are there, living things both small and great . . . These all look to you to give them their food in their season; when you give to them they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are filled with good things” (Psalm 104: 24-28).
We rarely consider seriously the inverse of God’s delight in creation and providential care for it; if we who are God’s called and equipped caretakers of creation instead exploit it and dismember it, we oppose God’s plan for ourselves and creation. Instead of delight and flourishing there is a harvest of degradation and suffering. Yes, suffering for human beings and human communities, especially the most vulnerable, but also for field and forest, the seas and the “living things both small and great” that look to God for “their food in their season.”
But if we do take seriously God’s mandate that we be caretakers of God’s creation, then we might say that these “living things both small and great” look to us for their food in their season – not in the sense that we feed them directly but in the sense that we maintain and enhance the integrity of the ecosystems that sustain both them and us!
What might this mean for the mission and the ministry of the church? As early as the 1970s, Latino theologians such as René Padilla, Samuel Escobar and Orlando Costas, in the context of the Lausanne Movement for World Evangelization headed by Billy Graham coined the term “integral mission,”[ii] to describe the application of scriptural principles to social, political and economic problems. This evangelical movement from the global south joined the “social gospel” movement of Northern Baptists pioneered by Walter Rauschenbusch,[iii] the predominantly Roman Catholic proponents of Latin American “liberation theologies,”[iv] and the theological voices of the civil rights movement in the United States.[v]
“Integral Mission” and companion initiatives from many Christian traditions aimed to anticipate and realize, as far as it might be possible, comprehensive Reign of God values and relationships here and now, in every sector of life. But once again: “If a livable world does not exist, we cannot follow Jesus,” and we cannot realize any of the goals proclaimed by Jesus. So our integral mission must be carried out in the spirit of self-conscious and intentional kinship with all of creation as I have described above.
Our personal piety, our worship, and our ministry as Christ’s church must address the climate crisis just as we have historically addressed social, economic, racial, and gender justice as Gospel issues.
The doctrine of redemption is at the heart of the theology of Baptists and our ecumenical kin. “Since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:23-24). But Paul goes on to say, almost as if he were time traveling, that “the creation (my emphasis) waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God, for the creation itself was subjected to futility” but perseveres in the hope “that the creation itself will be set free from bondage and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:19-21). Creation as subject, creation as victim, creation as beneficiary of the grace of God in Christ! Therefore, our work of evangelization and doing justice will include all of God´s creation.
If we look at traditional passages describing “the life everlasting” or “the Reign of God” – our ultimate hope as Christ followers for ourselves and our neighbors – with our vision refined by ecological theory, what do we see? Let´s take two classical examples. First: In the vision traditionally called “the peaceable kingdom” in Isaiah 11, “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them . . . They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; and the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:6-7, 9).
In context, this is the work of the Anointed One, who works wisdom and righteousness through the Spirit of the Lord; in Christian tradition, Christ the Redeemer. Redemption through Christ, as described and foreseen centuries later in Romans 8, is creation-wide in scope.
Second, in the vision of the new Jerusalem in Revelation 22, “the river of the water of life” flows “through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:1-2).
This vision describes what ecologists call a “riparian habitat,” one of the richest habitats on earth, where vegetation and flowing water and birds and insects and fish and herbivores provide food, shelter, and climate moderation that creates a rich web of life for them all. An urban paradise? Given that demographers estimate that nearly 70% of global population will be urban by 2050, what a prescient image!
Here in the United States, churches own millions of acres of land nationwide. What if every congregation, every association and region leveraged their properties for gardens, hostels, cultural centers, community service organizations, and understood their biblical task of evangelization as comprehending and promoting every dimension of humanity’s and creation’s wellbeing in their communities and beyond?
On this earth not only do we live in ecosystem, but we are ecosystem. The earth’s atmosphere rushes in and out of our lungs with every breath, the waters of the sea flow through our veins, the microorganisms that enrich the soil dwell within us and enable our digestion and our metabolism.
In the light of the understanding of creation and redemption which I have described – which I believe is both scientifically and biblically accurate – our personal piety, our worship, and our ministry as Christ’s church must address the climate crisis just as we have historically addressed social, economic, racial, and gender justice as Gospel issues.
David Wheeler is adjunct professor of theology at Palmer Seminary in St. Davids, Pennsylvania. He served previously as senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Portland, Oregon, and as professor of theology and ethics at Central Baptist Theological Seminary.
The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of American Baptist Home Mission Societies.
[i] It is interesting to note that American Baptist theologian Owen Owens was a prophetic voice on “creation care” a generation ago. See his posthumously published work Restoring the Earth: A vision of Hope for God´s Creation, Judson Press, 2025.
[ii] C. René Padilla, What is Integral Mission? Regnum Books, 2021.
[iii] Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel, Westminster John Knox, 1997.
[iv] Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation, Orbis Books, 1988.
[v] James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, Orbis Books, 2010.
Get early access to the newest stories from Christian Citizen writers, receive contextual stories which support Christian Citizen content from the world’s top publications and join a community sharing the latest in justice, mercy and faith.