EARTHKEEPING NEWS A NEWSLETTER OF THE NORTH AMERICAN COALITION FOR CHRISTIANITY AND ECOLOGY Volume Fifteen, Number Four July / August 2006 The Church: A Counter-Cultural Presence Nineteen years ago Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, General Secretary of the Reformed Church in America, made these comments in a talk at the First North American Conference on Christianity and Ecology, held in North Webster IN, 1987. There is a crisis in which the church finds itself today. In the Bible, Creation is given as a good, and we are described as servants of creation. But all through the Bible, humanity tries to take the place of God. Instead of tending creation, we have become alienated from it. We have individualized the biblical message of redemption and allowed Western Culture to interpret the Bible for us. The church has been captive to Western Culture. It is Western Culture that thinks the world was given us to own and control and plunder. Where in the Bible does it say the more we consume, the better the whole order is? Greed used to be one of the sins. Now we have built a whole economic order around it. We have an obligation to raise a vision of the kingdom of God in conflict with the current culture. The founder of the Christian faith was organizing people to oppose the status quo, and he was crucified as a trouble-maker. In the area of economics, and as we relate to the environment, we as people of faith are always bound to conflict with the prevailing culture, and will always be a countercultural presence. Home     Table of Contents