Kyle Meyaard-Schaap | Environmental Evangelism

Meyaard-Schaap:

I think a lot of people assume that to do something like “Act on Climate” or to address climate change, it means it has to be technical. You have to know the science and the statistics. It’s better to leave that to the scientists and the policy wonks, and we need all of that, of course. But maybe one of the most fundamental things that we all have to do as we try to integrate climate action into our everyday lives is to exercise that muscle of imagination and to ask each other, what kind of world do you want to live in? What kind of world do you want to create? I am Kyle Meyaard-Schaap. I’m the Vice President of the Evangelical Environmental Network.

Hoogerwerf:

Welcome to Language of God. I’m Colin Hoogerwerf. The IPCC, the International Panel on Climate Change released a new report in March, and while there was some news of some ambitious work being done around the world, the overall summary was that we still need to do a lot more. This kind of news can be intimidating. It can leave people feeling helpless or confused or maybe just tired. Kyle Meyaard-Schaap has built a career out of helping Christians to understand what they can do in the face of this reality, how they can understand the science within the framework of Christian faith and take action.

His new book, Following Jesus in a Warming World, tells his own story and the story of many others who found ways to act on climate. And in doing so, to follow the call of Jesus, to care for the poor and vulnerable, and also to start creating the world we want to leave to those coming after us. Speaking of those, next to inhabit this planet. Both Kyle and I have young kids, and so we talk a bit about what it means to bring children into a warming world, and we talk about what it takes to imagine the future we want to bring about for them and for us. 

Let’s get to the conversation. 

Hoogerwerf:

Well, Kyle, glad to have you here in the BioLogos podcast studio.

Meyaard-Schaap:

Thanks for having me.

Hoogerwerf:

Yeah. So I have to say, you and I have a lot in common. We both live in Grand Rapids, grew up not too far away. I think I Googled that six miles apart in school when we were in high school. Two kids, similar ages. Both married, somebody named Allie. And we both found our way to this place of climate and environment and Christian faith work, and which led you to write this book Following Jesus in a Warming World, a Christian call to climate action. But where your story starts, I think is a little bit different from mine. So I think what I want to do is dive into your story because as you’ve pointed out in the book, the story is really powerful. So bring us back to those early childhood days. What was your family like? What was important to you back then?

Meyaard-Schaap:

Sure. So I grew up in a beautiful conservative Christian home that taught me a ton about what it meant to follow Jesus, how to love other people, how to have the fruit of the spirit be your measuring stick for integrity. But it taught me very little about what my faith had to say about creation care in general and climate change in particular, for sure. But it was a beautiful, tight-knit community. I went to Christian Day School, I went to Holland Christian, was really involved in my church, had an older brother and sister. My family’s really close, so I had a beautiful childhood, and I came to understand climate change and environmental issues through the lens of my faith a bit later. That was when my older brother was three years older than me, who I love and respect to this day, and certainly did back then. Looked up to him a ton.

He was in college at the time. I was still a junior in high school. He went on a semester abroad program to New Zealand where he studied at the intersection of theology and biblical studies and ecology and biology. The program was meant to bring the two into conversation together, and he came back totally transformed.

Hoogerwerf:

That’s pretty early for that kind of work, right? I mean that— 

Meyaard-Schaap:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was part of a program called the Creation Care Study Program, and it takes Christian college kids from all over the country, has partnerships with dozens of Christian schools to take kids to Belize and New Zealand, and it brings professors who are theologians and biologists down to educate them. And when he came back, this was 2007, I think, when he came back, he announced to the family that because of his experience, he was now a vegetarian, which—

Hoogerwerf:

A big shock.

Meyaard-Schaap:

To my parents’ eternal credit, they handled it in stride. They were curious, they learned, but it was a bit of shock. And my brother was gracious, but that was the first time I had ever experienced anyone who had ever made that choice because of their faith and not in spite of it. He was the first person who showed me that this was an attempt for him to live more deeply into the Christian values that we had been taught, rather than him rejecting it. That was really compelling for me. And that was kind of the spark that then was fanned into flame when I went to Calvin College myself a couple of years later. And it just took professors and classes and read books and went on trips and went to lectures, all of which was affirming for me, this idea that was developing inside me, that my faith not only allowed me to ask questions about the environment or about climate change, it required it that following Jesus in the world today required that I ask questions, who is my neighbor? And what is climate change doing to my neighbor?

It required me to ask questions if I’m supposed to love God with everything I’ve got. Jesus says, “Well, then what do I make of the fact that God’s creation, that God loves and calls us to love and protect is being degraded. And that it itself is not even able to praise and worship and glorify God the way that God intended because of the impacts that our actions are having on it.”

Hoogerwerf:

So I’m really interested in that moment from when your brother comes home to maybe college, when you start getting a lot of influx of other ideas, that’s kind of a natural place to kind of open up, but something you could have easily dug your heels in. I mean, you came from a community that was skeptical about this. What do you think it was that kept you curious? I hear that your parents were kind of supportive of the openness, which is probably a good start. And being outdoors, was that a part of your childhood that…

Meyaard-Schaap:

You know what’s funny? Sort of but that’s not a huge part of my story. I’m not the kid that got lost in the woods and had to make his way back after the streetlights came on. I was the kid watching TV and playing video games. And obviously I grew up in Holland, Michigan, so the beach and Michigan are a big part of my story in the dunes. But being in creation is something I’ve had to, that’s a muscle I’ve had to develop, and it’s not one I was born with or loved from an early age.

Hoogerwerf:

I think some people will like to hear that because I think some people feel like if they’re not woodsy, they’re not going to be good advocates for this kind of thing, but you don’t have to start there.

Meyaard-Schaap:

That’s a great point. Yeah, I mean I often say that doesn’t need to be your entry point, and we need all kinds of people in this conversation. For so long, it’s been the outdoor rec people, it’s been the biologists and the hard scientists, and we need those people, of course, but we also need artists, we need poets, we need historians, we need people like me who are religion majors. We need pastors that this is going to take everybody. And all of us have our own reasons for caring and our own entry points into action.

But yeah, the outdoors wasn’t a big one. I mean, my parents, I think did set the tone for our family. They were intellectually curious people, they still are, and I think they set that example for us. But I think more than anything, it was my relationship with my brother, and I’ve seen this over and over in my work, that relationship is the doorway for so many people that because I respected and loved my brother so much, it was too painful for me to write him and his experience off and say, “Well, he’s just a nut job now, and I’m not going to be friends with him. I’m not going to have a relationship with him. I’m not going to love him anymore.”

So it was because of that love and that relationship that I could suspend some of those assumptions and some of those barriers could come down long enough for me to hear what he had to offer. And I really think… I mean, when I think back to that period, it was late night conversations with him that just kept me going, and I loved it. I don’t tell him that enough, but I really cherish those nights in those kinds of junior and senior year of high school that I had with him whenever he was home, when we would just talk and talk and talk. And I continue to believe that relationship is one of the most powerful tools that we have.

Hoogerwerf:

So going forward, you mix some other relationships with a bunch of people. So you have Margaret at a farm, Larry from West Virginia, Robert is from Louisiana. So there’s these people that tell you these stories and you learn these things about them that are really impactful. So maybe tell some of that story, but then what’s in there that I’m curious about is how do other people get their own stories like that? Is it important to hear those from people from their own mouths in person? How do you that?

Meyaard-Schaap:

Yeah. It’s a great question. I love this question because I think story along with relationship is another really powerful tool that we have. I had my own experiences like my brother did. I was able to get outside of my comfort zone, get outside my bubble meeting Larry, who’s on the front lines of the fight to end mountain top removal in his community in West Virginia. Margaret in Kenya, who told us firsthand that the reigns had stopped being as predictable as they used to be. And it was really hard to feed her family because of that.

And Robert in Louisiana, who survived Hurricane Katrina, but his mother and granddaughter didn’t. And yeah, it’s really hard to hear stories and come away unchanged, especially stories from people that you know, and respect, and love. So this is where I’ll go a little deeper than the stories that I share in the book about Margaret, and Larry, and Robert. And this is why I think my brother’s story was as powerful as it was because you don’t have to go halfway around the world to hear these kinds of stories. Like more and more, all of us are developing our own climate stories, our own stories of climate impacts, living through climate impacts. There was a time when we thought climate change wasn’t going to visit US shores for a long time, and we’ve been disabused of that notion, there’s—

Hoogerwerf:

In different ways than maybe we share thought too, right? Yeah.

Meyaard-Schaap:

Yeah. Yeah. So there are stories that are closer than you think. And so I think all of us do need to get a lot more curious about what other people’s experiences are and getting more curious about our own stories, even if we don’t have dramatic stories of living through a wildfire or a hurricane. We do all have stories about our relationship to creation, about the unique ways that God has made us to be interested in created things, the relationships that we have that are important to us, that we want to protect. I mean, you have kids, I have kids. I worry about their future, and that’s one of the reasons I do this.

I don’t tell that story enough. I don’t tell the story of the kind of world that my kids might inherit and why that scares me and why I want to do what I can to try to make that better. But all of us have stories about people we love and care about things that are being threatened right now by climate change. So yeah, I think we do, we both need to get better at telling our own stories about the things we love that are threatened by a changing climate that we want to protect, and we need to get more curious about hearing other people’s stories.

Hoogerwerf:

Yeah. So move your story ahead here, and maybe this brings us to Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, and tell us a little bit about what that is and what they do. The name might be surprising for some people.

Meyaard-Schaap:

Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So I was having my own kind of epiphany and journey during college, and that brought me actually first to the Christian Reformed Church’s Office of Social Justice, where I worked as an intern right out of Calvin when I graduated. And over the course of my work there, I went to a conference of Christians and Christian organizations working around climate change, creation care in Washington DC in 2013. And one of the people there was Ben Lowe, who started Young Evangelicals for Climate Action. At the time, he was still the founding national organizer and spokesperson, and we had some conversations, and he invited me to join the steering committee, the Volunteer Steering Committee in 2013. So while I was going to seminary and working part-time at the Office of Social Justice, I was also volunteering on the steering committee for YECA. And then I came on staff when Ben and Rachel, who overlapped for a year rolled off. So I was on staff there from 2016 until 2021.

So all told, I was involved with YECA for about eight years. And YECA was founded in 2012, and it was founded out of the recognition that there were a lot of young Christians coming of age who grew up in the evangelical tradition. But the church had given them very few tools to figure out how to integrate their faith with the question of climate change, and even littler help on what to do about it. So we wanted to try to come along our generation of young Christians and say, “There are tools in our tool belt that we have as Christians to address this with faith and hope and love. We don’t need to be silent on this. We don’t need to be hopeless or helpless. We can do something about this.”

So YECA exists to educate our generation—I say our, I aged out—so exists to educate the younger generation of Christians around climate change to encourage senior evangelical leaders to speak out pastors, denominational leaders, and to pressure lawmakers to enact just and sustainable climate policy. So that’s YECA, and like I said, I was there until 2021. YECA exists under the umbrella of the Evangelical Environmental Network. So that is the parent organization, the parent ministry of YECA. So in 2021, I aged out of our target demographic at YECA, which is 18 to 30 year olds. So at that time, I transitioned within EEN and became vice president at EEN in 2021, which is where I serve now.

Hoogerwerf:

Okay. And EEN does a little broader kind of work in the similar vein? Say a little bit to that one.

Meyaard-Schaap:

Yeah. Yeah. So maybe put most simply, EEN does a lot of the same kind of work, just not with a focus on 18 to 30 year olds and not focus solely on climate change. So YECA is a little more focused in that way. EEN does work on climate change, educating people around climate change as well as other pollution issues. We’ve done work on preserving public lands, so more than just climate change kind of creation care broadly and trying to reach people across the age spectrum.

Hoogerwerf:

Got it. Okay. Well, our kids have come up here a couple of times. Let’s talk about parenting in a warming world. So in the epilogue to your book, you write this letter to your future grandchildren in which you imagine what the world is like in the case that we get our act together. But then even then you acknowledge that some things are going to be different than the world we have known. When it comes to thinking about raising kids in the warming world, there’s the extreme response, which is to decide not to have kids at all, which maybe we can talk about why that response is a problem. The other side is, I think, probably not as extreme, but I do sometimes worry about painting too rosy a picture of the future because it ignores some reality, and I fear our children are just not going to be as well-prepared to fix things. What do you think about that?

Meyaard-Schaap:

That’s a good point. Yeah. I think both extremes have their risks. You’re right. I do think that as people of our generation, you and me thinking about and having kids now, it really is incumbent upon us to grapple with the realities that our kids will face. Like you said, I think one extreme is choosing not to have any kids. I think the other extreme is actually willful ignorance and pretending there isn’t even a problem, or pretending that some technology will come along and will save us, or our kids will figure out something that’ll fix it down the road. And my wife and I have tried to inhabit a middle space where I think I’d say something in the epilogue about some people our age are choosing not to have kids. Something that my wife and I understand but could never fully embrace because I think our belief and the promises of God are more stubborn than our belief in our ability to derail them. That might be too trite for some people, but that’s kind of where we’ve landed.

And because we have chosen with all of the information in front of us, we have still chosen to have kids and to bring them into a world where their future will be more unstable, more uncertain, more dangerous than ours has been and previous generations have been, that then means we have a responsibility. Like you said, a responsibility to not paint too rosy a picture, but not leave people totally bereft. There’s a real communication challenge around climate change, around like, how do you tell the truth but not drive people into a fetal position of despair, and anguish, and cynicism that anything can actually be done that’s worthwhile?

So the way that my wife and I have approached it is we’ve made this choice in full view of the facts. So we have a responsibility to raise our children in a way that teaches them about the world around them, the state the world is in, why it’s in the state that it’s in, and to give them tools to try to contribute to a future that’s more sustainable, safer, healthier. I don’t know if that’s defensible. That’s where we’ve landed.

Hoogerwerf:

So our kids are preschool, kindergarten ages, and younger. Are you talking about this frequently?

Meyaard-Schaap:

Yeah. So actually, I don’t know if you’ve noticed Colin, but kids shows have gotten really good lately, and some of our oldest shows that he watches talk about climate change. I mean, one of his favorite shows is Molly of Denali, right? So good. Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of episodes that touch on that, and Octonauts is another one, sorry to get old dad on you listeners, but that’s another great one. It’s about undersea rescuers, and they’re always talking about how the oceans are changing, how ecosystems are changing because of a warming climate. And so yeah, when we’re watching that with him, we’ll talk to him about that and try to explain in a developmentally appropriate way like, “Why is that happening and what does that mean for us?” So yeah, we’re trying to find natural ways to do it, but yeah, we’re feeling our way through it.

Hoogerwerf:

I mean, it’s funny, you and I came through at an interesting time when scientists knew a lot, but they didn’t know what they know now and the changes weren’t in the same place as they are now. So we were learning as they were learning, and now we can start our kids earlier than we were started, and there’s maybe some advantage to that. But our kids have a lot of more future than we do, and so you try to figure out how to broach that without scaring them, and it’s hard.

Meyaard-Schaap:

It is. And there’s the added layer of the inequality of climate impacts too. If I’m honest with myself, my white middle class kids living in Michigan, kind of the freshwater epicenter of North America, there are a lot of reasons to believe that their lives aren’t going to be as dangerous as a lot of other people around the world. And I think that’s part of the teaching too, is teaching them about the way the world is and the way the world will be and the reasons for that, but also helping them understand that the way the world is isn’t expressed equally across the globe. And because of where they live and who they are, the geographic and the social realities of their existence, they’re going to be cushioned from a lot of climate impacts. And there are a lot of people around the world who will not be.

And so I think it’s particularly incumbent upon those of us who have kids in that context to help them understand, look, this is about your self-interest, we want you to be healthy and safe in the future. And this is about how we love our neighbor in the world. And for me, whenever I talk about this, I always come back to that, Jesus says, “The most important things are to love God and to love our neighbor.” And I think for our kids’ generation certainly, and even for us too, more and more, I think the question of how do I love my neighbor in the 21st century has to go through the prism of climate change. We have to grapple with how climate change is disproportionately harming some neighbors more than others and more than ourselves, and figure out why that is, and then do what we can to untangle those realities.

Hoogerwerf:

So in the letter in your epilogue, you not only imagine this new kind of ecological economic situation, but also a new church experience for our grandkids’ generation. And it makes me wonder, is the planet’s health and the church’s health tied together? Can our grandkids have a healthy church without a healthy planet?

Meyaard-Schaap:

That is a great question. I don’t think anybody would argue the church is particularly healthy right now. And that makes me wonder, could an ecological revival be a pathway toward a healthier church, be a pathway toward a more integrated, integral holistic way of being human and way of relating to other humans, a way of living into the fullness of the kingdom of God here and now than we’ve been given previously? I touch on often in the book on things like a dualistic theology that separates the spiritual from the material on other realities on a hyperfocus around individual salvation versus a holistic collective salvation for all creation.

And I kind of make my case for why I think a more holistic integral vision of salvation is biblical. And it just strikes me that I think a lot of these theologies and these ways of being church that have been given to us, I think in a lot of ways are showing that they’ve run their course or they were never all that particularly healthy to begin with. And so, yeah, I do wonder if moving from a focus on individual spiritual salvation, for instance, toward a more holistic, embodied salvation, which has to include a deeper ecology. I do wonder if that would help enliven the church a bit and make the church a bit healthier. It’s a great question. I haven’t thought about it much. I’m going to think about it more.

[musical interlude]

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Hoogerwerf:

So here’s the eschatology question. Through the lens of parenting, I think. So the world, our kids is getting pretty clear, and our grandkids may be a little less. So if you take the indigenous wisdom of looking at the seventh generation, there’s still a spectrum of possibility, but some things are going to be obviously going to be a lot less biotic diversity, for example. But it seems to me like thinking about how we’re living the world for our kids and their kids is a really good motivation for changing the way we live. But there is some tension, especially in some Christian communities, which I think is probably misguided, but between making plans for 200 years from now and praying for Jesus to come and come soon, right?

Meyaard-Schaap:

Yeah.

Hoogerwerf:

How do we alleviate that tension maybe from a theological perspective?

Meyaard-Schaap:

Yeah, great question. Yeah, I run into this a lot in my work, and actually interestingly enough, I think a lot of people presume that kind of a pre-millennial eschatology that believes Christ’s return is imminent and things have to get really bad before he’ll return. So maybe if we contribute to the bad he’ll come faster. That a lot of people presume that that’s one of the main drivers of evangelical resistance to climate change, climate action. Actually, the research shows that kind of theology plays a role, but it’s not as operative as people’s politics. Politics is the number one indicator of where somebody’s going to be when it comes to climate change, which says a lot about us. And I think it says a lot about the church that a lot of times we’re letting our politics dictate our faith and drive our faith rather than letting our faith drive our politics.

But in a hyperpolarized public square, evangelicals are not alone in that. I think that’s true of all of us if we’re honest, if we look in a mirror ourselves. But around that question, because it’s an important one for Christians to grapple with. I’ll say two things. One is I don’t think that eschatology is particularly biblical or particularly faithful to the history of Christian eschatological thought that kind of dispensationalism that believes humanity and creation are devolving. They’re getting worse and worse and worse, and Christ will come back very, very soon to put it all right or worse to destroy everything and then to bring us to heaven. That’s actually a very new theological innovation in the history of the church that actually came about only in the last 150 years or so, maybe 200 years. And it’s a particularly American theological innovation that’s been exported for lots of reasons. So you won’t just find it in America anymore, but it started largely here.

I take a lot of my eschatology from N.T. Wright, and he argues that the ultimate Christian hope is not life after death as many of us believe and are told, its life after life after death. And what he means by that is that we are people who proclaim the resurrected Christ and who say, every time we recite the apostles creed, that we believe in the resurrection of the body. What do we mean by that? Do we actually mean what we say when we say that or not? He says, “If we actually believe what we say when we say that, then that means that our ultimate hope is life in resurrected bodies. It is a new creation, a new heaven and a new earth.” He points to Jesus and says, “In the person of Jesus, heaven and earth came together in a person.” And the point was for Jesus to be the first fruits of what God would ultimately do, which would be to join heaven and earth completely.

So Jesus is the first picture of heaven and earth coming together in a person through his resurrection, he inaugurated God’s ultimate future, which is the joining of heaven and earth in its totality. And he does a lot of other theological work to make the case that our hope is not a destroyed earth. It’s not disembodied human souls being sucked up into heaven, to sprout wings and sit on clouds and play harps. That’s much more Plato than it is biblical theology. He says, “While we may go to be with Jesus in an intermediate state after we pass away, and scripture does hold out that promise, that is not our ultimate hope, that while we do go to be with Jesus, somehow mysteriously our ultimate hope is returning with Jesus in resurrected bodies, to be in perfect communion with God in a new heaven and a new earth.”

So that’s the first thing I would say, is that I think that eschatology, that escapist, the eschatology is actually, it doesn’t reflect the fullness of the Christian tradition, and it isn’t particularly biblical. Second, I would say, even if you disagree with all of that, and that’s fine. You don’t have to agree with me on that. If you disagree with all of that and you still believe that our ultimate future is to be in heaven and to discard our bodies and for the earth to be burned up and destroyed, that’s fine. I think we still need to look at the words of Jesus when his disciples ask, “Lord, when is the day of the Lord coming?” And Jesus says, “Literally, I don’t even know. Only the Father knows. And it’s not our job to speculate, what is our job right now is to do what we can to love God and to love our neighbor to the best of our abilities.”

And so sitting on our hands, time tabling when the end of the world might be, or ignoring the suffering of our neighbors because of a changing climate because we say the Lord is coming back soon. That’s a direct disobedience to Jesus when he says, “Don’t worry about the day of the Lord. The Father knows that.” “Our job now is to be faithful to the call, and the call is to proclaim the good news of the gospel to the whole creation,” as Mark says. And I guess the one last thing I’ll say is, again, even if you believe that eschatology is true, you still buckle your seatbelt when you get in the car, you still buy insurance, you still go to the doctor when your kid is sick. You still take precautions in your everyday life, even if Christ’s return is imminent, even if this earth has no eternal destiny, you still take precautions in everyday life against disaster and harm. So why wouldn’t we do what we can to take precautions against more disaster and more harm being visited on us and our neighbors?

Hoogerwerf:

So I’ve come to think that imagination might be one of the keys toward building hope and motivating people to act. And so I found the epilogue really compelling for that reason. When you imagine the way in which the church leads, I think is inspiring, and I’m wondering what it takes to conjure up a future like that. And my gut says anyone could do it, and I’d love to hear 100 versions of this from 100 listeners because they’d all be different, right? But then I wonder if it’s not quite as easy as it sounds, does it take some experience and hearing people’s stories to put something together like that? And I wonder if imagination probably doesn’t come easily out of a place of fear and dread, how do we build emotional and spiritual places where imagination like that can thrive?

Meyaard-Schaap:

That’s such a good question. I agree. I think imagination is huge. I think one of the fundamental failures of the climate movement to date has been a failure of imagination. So many people believe the climate movement is the scold in the room, weighing their finger at us and telling us everything we’re doing wrong, everything we have to change and give up and sacrifice without a correspondingly inspiring vision of, “And here’s the world we can create together if we do this.” There’s been very little vision casting of the kind of world we can build if we do the things we have to do. It’s only been we have to give this up. We have to stop doing this. So I totally agree that imagination is huge. And I liked what you said about how imagination is hard to conjure if you’re living in a place of fear and dread.

I have a whole chapter in this book on joy because I believe that we have to find joy in this work, otherwise we’re going to burn out. And I’ve experienced that myself. I write that, for a while, I was changing my lifestyle. I was doing what I could with the knowledge that I had, but I was gritting my teeth and I was forcing myself to do it, and burnout just came so quickly for me. And it was only once I found community, I found friends, I found meaningful practices that I began to find joy in the work. So to your question about how do we build imagination, I think part of it is we have to practice imagination in community. And whether that community is your church, whether that community is your close group of friends, whether that community is your family, your partner, your kids, I think it’s really hard to imagine a compelling future divorced from the relationships that make our lives worth living. We have to imagine the future with those relationships in it. And I think if we’re going to do that, then we have to involve those relationships.

So I would love to see more churches cultivating this kind of imagination in their worship. What would it look like in children’s worship to invite kids to imagine what kind of world do you want to live in when you’re an adult? What’s one thing that you see in your neighborhood right now that’s a result of our poor care for creation? And what would it take to change that? Or what would it look like if you could change that?

I think, like you said way at the beginning, I think a lot of people assume that to do something like “Act on climate” or to address climate change, it means it has to be technical. It has to be jargon laden. It has to be policy and wonkish. You have to know the science and the statistics. So it’s better to leave that to the scientists and the policy wonks, and we need all of that, of course. But I think maybe one of the most fundamental things that we all have to do as we try to integrate climate action into our everyday lives is to exercise that muscle of imagination and to ask each other, what kind of world do you want to live in? What kind of world do you want to create? I don’t ask people that question a lot. I loved writing the epilogue because I got to ask myself that question, and it was really meaningful for me. But now I kind of want to go ask people that, maybe I’ll ask my wife, my Allie that, and you can ask yours, and we can compare that.

Hoogerwerf:

Well, I love this idea of instead of thinking about these things as things we have to give up, there are some things we probably need to give up. But when you do that, you realize that there’s not a void that’s left. It’s filled with something, and often you find a lot of joy in that, in that space. And so I think that is a part of imagination, exploration, and discovery. There’s surprise there that we need to open ourselves to.

Meyaard-Schaap:

Yeah. One of my big surprises when it comes to joy was I took my brother’s lead and gave up me soon after I started at Calvin. And the relationships that I built around that, and the times that the memories I have in the kitchen with friends, like cooking, plant-based meals, cooking with things we’d never cooked before, figuring out what do we do with this? I don’t know what to do with a kohlrabi. I still kind of don’t except fritters. That’s all I got. But just I still cherish those memories and those relationships to this day. And you’re right, there’s so much gift there. And when we open ourselves up to discovery, I love how you put that. I think that’s a great way to cultivate imagination.

Hoogerwerf:

So I think this is a good place to talk about advocacy as evangelism. So I think the question everybody always asks is what can I do? And there are a lot of answers we’ve talked about. Some of them, I don’t know that I want to talk about them right now because I think what’s interesting is that no matter what you do, it’s intimidating. And so I like this idea that you bring up of advocacy as evangelism because I think it gives a new reason, a new motivation to act. So you say. “There’s nothing inherently evangelistic about gardening or advocating for public policy, but when Christians do these things with the hope of God’s coming kingdom in our hearts, in the name of Jesus on our lips, they become proclamations of good news for the whole creation.” So this made me think of one of my own acts of gardening evangelism, which I’m calling it now.

We live on a somewhat busy road in town, and our wide stretch of grass between the road and the sidewalk got all dug up from a road construction thing this winter. So I decided this spring, I’m going to plant pumpkins, and it’s going to look a little unusual in a town where people have a high value on nice lawns. And I feel a little pressure in this, but I was reading this and I realized this is evangelism, right?

Meyaard-Schaap:

Love it.

Hoogerwerf:

To say, I think Jesus prefers pumpkins to fertilized lawns. Maybe a stretch, maybe not. So that was one example. What are some other ways? Because this is a lot more broad than that, but just talk a little bit about that idea and what that can give people.

Meyaard-Schaap:

Oh, man. That’s so good, Colin. I love that so much. Thank you for telling me that. That makes me so happy. And that makes me think we are getting a new rain garden in that same strip of land from Plaster Creek Stewards here in Grand Rapids this spring. We just moved and applied for that. So I’m looking forward to that as a proclamation to the bees and the butterflies that God wants good things for them too, including yummy plants to sip on. So yeah, I think it’s chapter four, kind of exploring this idea of how have we thought about evangelism previously or to date in the church, how’s it talked about? And how could we think about climate action and advocacy around climate change as part of our evangelism? And I explore a little bit about what Jesus spends so much of his time talking about, and it’s the kingdom of God.

Jesus talks about the kingdom of God more often than anything else, and the kingdom of God is his phrase for the world made the way that God intends to make the world through him right again, it’s that shalom that we’ve lost ever since Genesis 3, and have been trying to get back ever since. And he describes what the kingdom of God is in a lot of different ways. All of his parables are about the kingdom of God.

But he talks about it first in Luke 4 when he announces his ministry, and he says, the way he chooses to describe the kingdom of God and the work that he’s going to do on Earth is by lifting up the poor and the lowly, freeing the prisoner, giving sight to the blind, in essence, flipping the status quo on its head and saying, “These people that society pushes down to the bottom, I’m going to lift up.” And that’s nothing new. His mother, Mary, said the same thing in the Magnificat when she was told that she would have Jesus. And that’s taken from the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, these themes of lifting up the lowly and humbling the proud.

So I thought about that a little bit, and I thought, well, if our task is to proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God, and if the kingdom of God represents a upending of the status quo, well, what is our current status quo? Our current status quo is climate, chaos. And what does that do that pushes people down to the bottom of society? So shouldn’t good news about the kingdom of God be about lifting up these people whose society pushes down to the bottom and flipping the status quo of climate chaos?

And what does it take to do that? When we think about evangelism that way, that our task, like you said in the reading, “Our task is to proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to all creation,” as Mark says. What does it mean to proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to all creation? Well, when we think about it that way, evangelism becomes pretty expansive. When I was growing up, evangelism was described pretty narrowly, and it was… When you sit next to a stranger on a plane, you better be ready to share that Bible verse and pray the sinner’s prayer with them. Otherwise, you failed. And I felt a lot of pressure to like… Yeah.

Hoogerwerf:

Well, so you grew up six miles away, but I grew up in a mainline tradition where evangelism, I was very wary of it. And if I ever was ever to quote a Bible verse was about Jesus telling us to pray in a closet, right? It’s like I tended to hide my faith not my environmentalism. And so this feels like it gives me a chance to do the thing I thought I was supposed to do but was scared of doing.

Meyaard-Schaap:

Yeah. One of the ways that I think people I’ve been fortunate to work with have evangelized through climate action is when I was working at Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, we all have shirts that says, “Young Evangelicals for Climate Action.” And on the back it says, “Love God. Love your neighbor. Act on climate.” We wore those to every protest we went to. We wore those to every march we participated in. In 2014, there were over a quarter million people in New York City marching for the People’s Climate March, and in Washington DC in 2017, they did it again, and they were like 500,000. We were at both of those. We had these shirts on. We were carrying signs that said, “I hug trees for Jesus, or love the Creator, care for creation.”

So as I write in the book, like marching isn’t inherently evangelistic, but when we do it with the name of Jesus on our lips and with God on our shirts, and it’s very clear we’re doing this because of our faith, I do believe that becomes an act of evangelism because we’re showing the world that we believe this is part of what it means to proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God, the good news that things that are trampled down, like creation, like the poor, our neighbors who are being pressed down by climate change, they’re going to have good news delivered to them through Jesus.

And we want to be part of that. We want to be part of creating things that are actually good for our neighbors, and that’s not a platitude. That means like food in their bellies, and that means a sustainable income so that they can care for their families because that’s what Jesus was about. Jesus didn’t pray for the leper and say, “Hey, good luck out there.” He healed him, and he didn’t say to the blind man, “I hope you find ways to experience God through this hardship. I hope it brings you closer to God.” He gave him sight because Jesus was impatient for the kingdom. And sometimes I don’t think we’re impatient enough for the kingdom because if we were, then our evangelism would be much less spiritualized and much more about creating actual conditions in the world that bring good things and good news to people who are poor because that’s what Jesus said to do, and that’s what Jesus did.

Hoogerwerf:

So you are ordained, and I’m sure you’ve worked with a lot of pastors, talk to a lot of pastors. At one point in the book, here’s a quote, you say, “The barometer for success says Jesus is not butts in seats, number of sermon downloads, or cash and collection plates. It’s released for the captives, freedom for the oppressed, hope for the hopeless,” things we’ve just been talking about, “If your ministry in the name of Jesus doesn’t result in actions that are good news for the poor, you’re doing it wrong.” So thinking about the pastor’s role in this, I once heard Tony Campolo speak. The only thing I remember from the talk is he made some quote to the effect of, “If you’re a pastor and you’re not getting fired, you’re doing it wrong.” I think he was making a similar point with more embellishment as was his style, but that the pastor’s role is to make people uncomfortable because Jesus’ message is uncomfortable. In the world we live in, does a pastor have a responsibility to make this challenge to congregants and probably doing so at some risk?

Meyaard-Schaap:

Yeah. Oh, man, it’s such a good question, and it’s such a hard question. So the very first thing I want to start with is compassion for pastors. Like, man, the culture wars have come to church and it’s ugly if they weren’t there before COVID, they’re there now. And I know that there are so many pastors out there who every Sunday have to choose between saying a hard thing and feeding their family. And I am ordained, but I don’t serve a congregation, my livelihood isn’t wrapped up in my ordination or my ability to remain a pastor. So I just have so much compassion for pastors in this context that we’re in right now. And I mean, it’s not just the culture wars. I think there’s been the general decline in respect for expertise and experts has hit pastors too. I think I saw a meme with a coffee mug or something that said, “Your Google search does not equal my master of divinity degree.”

And I just think a lot of pastors, they’re not really seen as experts anymore. They’re years of schooling in how to read scripture well and how to interpret it, and theology and church history. That just feels like it’s totally denigrated by a lot of congregants. So my answer to your question is yes, I think pastors do have a responsibility to bring this to their congregation and to not let their congregations go to sleep to this. But here’s the big but and the big caveat, I think pastors also have a responsibility to convey the message of the gospel in a way that can be heard by their people.

So pastors are part prophet, but they are pastors too. Pastors need to be able to meet their people where they’re at, recognize that hard truths need to be said, but they don’t necessarily need to be said in a hard way. And a lot of the work that we do, and the research around climate messaging bears this out that when it comes to climate change, if you’re not communicating in a way that connects climate change to who people already are and to things they already care about, it’s a really tough sell. So to pastors, I guess I would just say, if you’re feeling a call to move into this space more intentionally, to challenge your people more directly on climate change and the gospel, think first about your congregation’s values. Who are you? What’s your identity as a congregation? What do you all have a heart for? What do your people take pride in about your church?

One of the things that’s of value at my church here in Grand Rapids, and I think we’re really good at and that we take pride in, is hospitality. We’re a very welcoming community and congregation. I think that’s a real asset and a gift for us. And so finding ways to connect climate change to the things that already matter to your congregation, connecting it to hospitality. What does climate change mean for the people in our community that we’re trying to be hospitable to? Maybe we should consider opening up our congregation as a cooling center or a warming shelter as an act of hospitality because that’s going to become more and more necessary in a warming world. Can we extend our hospitality in that way so that we’re living more deeply into our values? Just like my brother showed me, just like my brother showed me, he was living more deeply into his values by the choices he was making.

So helping your people understand that you’re not inviting them to reject who they are to completely overhaul the church and who the church is. You’re inviting them to live more deeply into who the church is and to get better at being that church because if you’re ignoring the things that already matter to people and you’re ignoring who people are in your messaging, you’re going to turn them off really quickly. And every pastor has to make that decision for themselves. Only pastors know their community as well as they do. So think about your community, think about the things that they value and about your identity as a congregation. Find ways to invite people to live more deeply into those things by addressing climate change.

Hoogerwerf:

Yeah. Well, this has been really great. We’ve heard about your book you’ve written. We like to end by asking about the books you’ve been reading. Anything recent that’s been of note?

Meyaard-Schaap:

Yeah. I am reading currently Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver.

Hoogerwerf:

That’s on my list.

Meyaard-Schaap:

Yeah. It’s great. But having an almost five-year-old and a one-year-old make reading hard, so I’m slowly, slowly making my way through. But I’m a big Barbara Kingsolver fan. One of my favorites of hers is Animal Vegetable Miracle on more closely related to this topic, but I’m enjoying Demon Copperhead right now.

Hoogerwerf:

Good. Well, Kyle, thanks for the conversation and the witness in the book, and I look forward to living into the future we imagine together.

Meyaard-Schaap:

Thanks, Colin. It’s so fun.

Hoogerwerf:

Language of God is produced by BioLogos, has been funded in part by the Fetzer Institute, the John Templeton Foundation, and by individual donors and listeners who contribute to BioLogos. Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. That’s me. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River Watershed. If you have questions or want to join in a conversation about this episode, find a link in the show notes for the BioLogos forum, or visit our website biologos.org, where you’ll find articles, videos, and other resources on faith and science. Thanks for listening.