As a speaker, writer and advocate on issues of environmental justice for churches, alumnus Caleb Cray Haynes (’08) has gathered many resources throughout his career for Christians who want to become more involved in creation care.
Yet he believes the most profound changes will occur when believers stop thinking their environmental efforts are a list to be checked off and instead embrace creation care as part of the work God designed for his people to participate in as part of their own thriving.
“When we talk about creation care, we are ultimately talking about the people and places that God loves,” Haynes says. “Every little thing we do matters. The moment we start believing it doesn’t matter is the moment we relinquish our God-given creative power.”
In this Q&A, Haynes shares his perspective about how caring for creation is linked with a theological and practical understanding of God's view on waste, as well as the flourishing that comes when we embrace our limitations.
Growing up in rural Tennessee, I spent a lot of time outside in the woods. I gardened with my grandmother. I’ve always loved nature and creation.
After church planting and co-pastoring a Nazarene church with my wife for many years, I read a report in 2018 published by the United Nations on climate change that impacted me deeply. The report outlined the devastating effects of global warming that will occur in our lifetime if environmental change doesn’t happen. I experienced what Pope Francis would describe as an ecological conversion. It was a new vocational moment of surrender for me. I told God, “If you want to use me in any of this, I’m available.”
I worked bi-vocationally as a pastor while operating a local trash-hauling business with my friend, Ryan. I drove an old GMC Sierra around Nashville, cleaning up after home remodels or evictions.
I was confronted with so much waste every day. My house is full of stuff from those years. We have a Sleep Number bed someone paid me to remove. I witnessed the overconsumption that has permeated so much of our culture. That experience led me to write my first book, “Garbage Theology.”
I realized that interwoven into creation is a design that is wasteless. Everything feeds something else in an endless loop.
For example, in nature, when something grows and then dies, it feeds something else. But our current economy and lifestyles don’t reflect that. We may pluck something from the earth, consume it and then throw away whatever is leftover before going to get another one. As I considered this, I wondered, What could it look like for the church to re-enter into a right-relatedness with creation? How could we get back into that circular economy that God designed?
In 2018 I started Nazarenes for Creation Care with Nazarene leaders Jason Adkins and Brit Bolerjack. The following year, we put together a creation care summit that became a catalyst moment for Nazarenes in how we re-engage with God’s creation in a healing way.
It’s tempting to think everything we can do is small, and this can feel self-defeating in the greater scheme of environmental problems. But every decision does matter. For example, moving away from single-use products in order to create a reusable culture is huge. This could look like moving away from styrofoam coffee cups or plastic forks and using real dishes. A lot of churches back in the day did use real dishes and still have them; they just don’t use them anymore.
Churches can also use LED lighting and install sensors so that the lights automatically turn off when no one is in the room. Or instead of mowing the grass on the church property, they could consider planting a community garden or a pollinator garden. We also encourage churches to create a community compost site that residents nearby can use. We discuss all these ideas and more in the Eco-Church Program we created.
We ask churches to do three things. First, form a green team to begin having creation-care conversations once a month or a quarter. Next, sign an eco-covenant saying why this all matters. The last part is to begin making some tangible changes, and we help with ideas for this. As soon as a church makes its first three changes, we give them a certificate that says it has become a Nazarene eco-church.
I think we need to get past thinking of creation care as this “other cause” that needs addressing and instead look at it as something linked to who we are and how God created us to be. There’s nothing God designed that doesn’t have limits and borders. We aren’t able to talk about anything we love without recognizing the shape of it. We live on a planet with gravity, which itself is a limitation.
Yet technology is constantly trying to push us to overcome our limitations. Cars help us overcome the limitation of distance. Artificial intelligence helps us overcome limitations of knowledge. Social media filters exist to help us overcome the limitations of beauty. But what are the consequences of all these advancements? Many of them are producing negative outcomes for God’s creation and God’s people, both ecologically and psychologically.
When we step back and see these connections, we perceive that perhaps gravity and limitations are a gift. And then we can consider how we as God’s people can lean into those limitations.
Through examining our framework of how we view our own humanity. Do we see it as a curse or a gift? I think too often we’ve been guilty in the church of talking about humanity as if it’s part of the curse rather than part of a gift. This is crucial when it comes to how we treat each other and how we treat creation. Is creation a commodity to use or something we are in a relationship with?
By asking themselves a few key questions: What are the areas in my life where I can slow down? And how can I partner with others to share resources?
Perhaps that could look like creating a neighborhood tool shed where we share tools with our neighbors instead of everyone crowding their garage with an overflow of their own tools. Or it could look like resisting the temptation to overcome aging through spending significant money on beauty products or procedures.
It may look like growing native plants in the yard and using a plant like yarrow medicinally when you’ve cut your finger. It could look like all sorts of ways we re-engage the natural world in order to unearth what flourishing is.
We talk about flourishing as if it occurs when we overcome every limitation, rather than flourishing happening when we lean into our God-given limitations. I think the latter is the definition of true flourishing.
Caleb Cray Haynes is an ordained elder in the Church of the Nazarene and earned a Bachelor of Arts in religion and philosophy from Trevecca. He went on to study theology and ecology from Nazarene Theological College in Manchester, England. Haynes is the host of “The ecoChristian podcast.”