For the last week, I have been in Birmingham, Alabama walking with a group of church leaders who are interested in the work of helping our congregations to rethink what it might look like to do church and to be church in our communities. The leaders who joined this walk were people who were interested in finding a way to reconnect our congregations with the communities in which they exist in a way that is grounded in the friendship of becoming beloved community, and they were curious to do this by letting go of the traditional metrics by which we might measure success in the church. In other words, the leaders were invited to imagine a church in which the building up of the kingdom of God in our community would become more important than the number of people who are sitting in a pew on a Sunday morning. (Though, I rather think that if we do the former long enough and with the faithfulness of Christ, we probably will not need to worry about the latter anyway.)

It seems to me that the leaders with whom I was walking were asking the right kind of questions about how our church, The Episcopal Church, can make a turn towards joining up with what the Holy Spirit is already doing in our communities throughout the church. They were asking new questions that were answering an age old question in the church: how do we wisely steward the resources God has granted to us in this place and at this time? How do we invite our lay leaders to grow and develop into mature Christian leaders who are out in the world doing the work of building up the kingdom? How do we make a new reality through our faithful commitment to walking in the way of Christ?

It seems that none of these questions are easily answered. All of them, however, can be entered into if we resist the urge to have a complete answer to those questions. We can enter into them with our neighbors and discover new things about our community and about our neighborhood.

Stewarding the gifts of God is an important tenet of our faith, and in keeping with that tenet, The Episcopal Church is sending a delegation to COP27, which is a conference for the parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. It is the 27th gathering of the Conference of Parties, and it is the 8th time that our church has sent a delegation to the conference, and the delegation from our church is taking up the cause of advocacy and accountability for what the framework calls “loss and damage.”

The Rt. Rev. Marc Andrus, Bishop of the Diocese of California, said, “Loss and damage is the devastation experienced by vulnerable communities, most often Black, brown, and Indigenous communities—devastation of such a magnitude that whole ways of life are lost, and whole communities are forced to relocate.” The advocacy and accountability work around loss and damage at COP27 is nothing less than the work of stewarding new relationships with communities who have been devastated by the way that resources in the world have been taken for granted. In place of how we have always viewed the resources of the planet, our church is inviting a new kind of understanding of the planet. We are invited to see the planet not as something providing all that we desire for our consumption but as a sibling within God’s creation that is in need of the same care and attention that we would provide to any other sibling.

Whether we are talking about the church as an institution or about the planet upon which we depend for our mutual flourishing, we are beginning to ask different sorts of questions about how we might be able to steward God’s gracious gifts in our shared lives. In the church, we are wondering about how we can reconnect with neighbors in our communities and how that reconnection can lead us into surprising territory in a place that we think we know like the backs of our hands. In our planet, we are asking questions about how we can see the planet as a sibling who needs to be nurtured and how we can recognize the ways that our historical (and current) use of planetary resources has had an outsized impact on communities of color across the globe.

God is granting us the opportunity not to be the heroes or to be the ones that come up with the plans all on our own. Whether it is in our neighborhoods or in Cairo considering the work of climate change and cherishing the planet, we are being invited into work that demands interdependence with our neighbors. God is inviting us to re-learn what it means to love our neighbors as ourselves.

In Christ,

Hunter+