Combatting Climate Change: the Paris Summit and the Mission of the Church
I am very grateful for this debate, for the work done by the Environmental Working Group and the lead given by Her Majesty’s Government that we heard about earlier. I wholeheartedly support all parts of this motion. Together with other northern dioceses, Sheffield has supported the Hope for the Future Campaign, which has been one of the campaigns encouraging lobbying of MPs and candidates which continues its work. I want to address my remarks especially to what used to be clauses (d) and (e) and are now (e) and (f).
As Chair of the Ministry Council I wholeheartedly support the call of the Anglican Communion Environmental Network for programmes of ministerial formation and in service training which address this issue, and I will willingly ensure there is an audit of the way ordinands and others engage with these issues in the coming year, and I expect to find a great deal of good practice already in our Colleges and courses.
Pope Francis, in Laudato Si’, calls for nothing less than an ecological conversion of individuals and communities, and I love that phrase ‘ecological conversion’. He quotes Pope Benedict: “The external deserts in the world are growing because the internal deserts have become so vast” and he writes “a healthy relationship with creation is one dimension of overall personal conversion.”
The strength of Laudato Si’ is the deep rooting of the environmental crisis not in some esoteric branch of theology but in the centre of the Christian vision of God and the earth, the centre of what it means to be human and the centre of a theology of hope. Limiting carbon emissions is absolutely vital but will not in itself address the whole problem. The environmental crisis, as we have heard, is also a social crisis and a spiritual crisis and the roots of this crisis lie, according to Pope Francis, in what he calls the omnipresent technocratic paradigm, in the cult of unlimited human power and in the rise of a relativism which sees everything as irrelevant unless it serves one’s immediate interests.
So I am cautious about a new branch of theology called eco theology and a new branch of ethics called eco justice. We simply need to rediscover the ecological imperatives at the heart of all Christian theology and all Christian ethics, and set these perspectives at the heart of all Christian formation in catechesis, in schools, in local churches and in all forms of ministerial education.
One of the pieces of work I have done over the last few years is on the Lord’s Prayer and I have become more and more convinced that the petition ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ is not a petition for God to give us things but it is a petition to learn contentment in all our lives and in every day that we ask each day only for enough for that day. Thank you.
