Welcome to Deep Green Church and Deep Green Faith, a site dedicated to empowering faith communities in restoring right relations with the full community of living things on earth. For the moment, these two websites are one, but they represent two overlapping communities of thought and practice: 1) The Province IV Environmental Network, and 2) The Center for Deep Green Faith. Both communities are dedicated to a journey of reconciling religious faith with justice for all creation. Stay tuned for further developments.
This work consists of Restoring Right Relations. At the heart of the pollutions, the extinctions, the climate changing, the consumption and the ugliness is the fact that we have fallen out of right relationship to the earth, each other, ourselves and to God. The environmental degradation is a mirror into which we could view our souls, if we but had the eyes to see. This means that much of the work of Restoring Right Relations is spiritual work. The depth of the problem is well articulated by Thomas Berry:
In our present attitude the natural world remains a commodity to be bought and sold, not a sacred reality to be venerated. The deep psychic shift needed to withdraw us from the fascination of the industrial world and the deceptive gifts that it gives us is too difficult for simply the avoidance of it difficulties or the attractions of its benefits. Eventually, only our sense of the sacred will save us.
In other words, all our effort at “doing better” by recycling, conservation and technology will not, in the end, lead us to the necessary transformations required of our hearts and minds. We need spiritual transformation for our own healing, as does the earth.
As Christians in particular, we need to revisit, reclaim, and renew the threads, themes and theologies within our tradition that will serve us in this transformation. Those elements are there, but they are often buried under the concerns of days long past or the fears of the present. Much of what passes for Christianity in our day is neither life-giving to the web of life nor transforming to our souls, and the time is upon us to say so in the strength of love and prophetic urgency. As Brian McClaren has said:
It is far easier to put a price tag on a fallen creation than on a still sacred one.
This is our special focus here – people of faith in communities of faith bringing their faith to bear on the ecological crisis (and allowing the ecological crisis to bring challenge to their faith). You are welcome here as a visitor, contributor, or scavenger, because hospitality is close to the heart of making the Great Turning. When our hospitality begins to extend to the whole created order, we will be on our way to making the needed turn. I am sure we will find our hospitality returned to us as well.