Congregations can learn respect for God’s creation, and experience a call to environmental stewardship, when these concerns are incorporated into their worship experiences. Greater Washington Interfaith Power and Light suggests that you ask your clergy and/or appropriate committee to include concerns about global warming and the appropriate use of God’s gifts into worship experiences of your congregation. This might be done through prayers, hymns, or scripture readings, as well as relevant sermons or homilies to address these issues.

In most congregations and faith groups, worship serves to glorify God, remind the faithful of the teachings of their religion, enable worshippers to grow in faithfulness, educate them on important issues facing the world, and help them apply their faith to these issues. Each of these functions of communal worship helps people of faith learn to protect God’s creation.

Worship is also about sharing our faith, our concerns, and our commitments publicly. Those who attend worship – whether or not they are members or believers – can hear what faith might teach them about the urgent issues facing our world and our lives. Worship is an opportunity to say important things to our community – and especially here, in the Washington, DC area, to the nation as a whole.

General Suggestions for incorporating these concerns into worship

• Let the prayers and scriptures of your traditions speak for themselves. You should not and need not force a concern about protecting creation into your worship experiences. Most of the major religions of the world include a deep reverence for creation, an understanding that people of faith are called to be stewards of the earth, a contemporary assessment that human beings have not done that task well, a belief that God redeems and heals the creation which human beings have hurt, and a call to believers to participate in God’s healing of creation. All we need to do in worship is to let the words of our liturgies and our traditions speak for themselves.

• Emphasize the vision of a world that most if not all great religions share – one that is marked by faithful environmental stewardship, justice for all people, and peace on earth. It is this profoundly spiritual vision that inspires and gives us both energy and wisdom for the task.

• Include a description of the basic facts about global warming and the threats to God’s creation. These are not meant to frighten people, but to remind them of the urgent need for environmental stewardship. Sermons, homilies and scriptural interpretations should be specific about the threat of global warming. Vagueness neither inspires nor enables people of faith to apply our traditions to today’s urgent issues. Let worship be a place where congregants can unite their civic and religious selves by enabling theology and science and policy to come into creative dialogue with each other.

• Recognize that these issues are not always easy to understand; be both careful and honest in what is said about these concerns. Quote the scientists and others who understand the challenges before us. Work hard to communicate both the facts and the application of our faith to these facts, so that they can be understood well.

• Be gentle in interpreting these dangers, which can be frightening. Plan the worship service in a way that enables people to continue to think and feel fruitfully about these issues, and then to go home to take appropriate actions.

• Give hope! Suggest concrete things that people can do: purchasing renewable energy, making their homes more energy efficient, talking with their neighbors, taking these concerns to their workplaces, and sharing these concerns with their local, state, and national policymakers. There are also concrete tasks that our congregations can do together, including purchasing renewable energy and making changes to our buildings that will make them more energy efficient, and educating our adults, youth and children about these concerns.

^ To Top of Page