Caring for creation?  I thought it rang a bell.  Sure enough, when I looked in my files I found the October 1988 issue of New Times was on the same theme.  What's more I found a note from the editor saying New Times had won a national religious publishing award for that very issue - 20 years ago!

In the same dusty file I found a letter from Malcolm Macleod, a retired minister from NSW, responding to an article of mine on what was then the new field of 'ecotheology' (he hated the term but was supportive of the article).  He remembered writing a paper on similar themes for the Iona Community in Australia in 1948.  He was kind enough to send me the essay, 'Soil and Soul', and I've just re-read it.  With a little editing it would be right at home in this month's New Times with its focus on land care as a Christian calling.  But it's 60 years old!

So I spent some time in the rarely-visited bottom level of our library, to see how far back this theme goes.  It turns out that since the mid-19^th century Protestant theologians and preachers were raising an alarm about the destruction of the environment and identifying it as a matter of faith and theological vision.  And there are some big names there - William Temple, Albert Schweitzer and many more. More than 100 years ago they were drawing attention to dark sides of the industrialization and colonialism that fed western economies at the cost of unprecedented exploitation and destruction of the environment.  They called Christian capitalists to moderation and humility.  They encouraged people to give practical reverence to nature as God's creation.  And, as we know, they were generally ignored.

The core of the Protestant this witness in the modern era is currently being expressed well by Michael Northcott.  His theological diagnosis is that the refusal of modern people to see themselves as creatures, deeply connected to all other creatures and with their Creator, is 'at the heart of the pathology of ecological crisis'.  Moreover, he says that this refusal is 'the root of what theologians call sin'.  And all those generations of teachers and preachers before him say, Amen.

Frankly, we have ignored and tolerated and excused this sin long enough - in ourselves, in others and in our systems.  Let's change.

It's not about being good.  Still less about making ourselves holy.  It's about being open to the renewing power of the Holy Spirit who will enable us to live out the relationship we have with God in Christ in our dealings with one another and all our fellow creatures.  It's about really expecting that being a Christian is going to change my way of life.