God’s Quiet Conspiracy in a Post-Oil Future
by Tom Sine
I consider the first Earth Day in 1970 my birthday. James Dator, then a political scientist with the University of Hawaii, spoke on campus about the future of the environment and the challenges facing us in the coming decade. It was easily the most disturbing presentation I had ever heard. It had never occurred to me that the future might be radically different from the present.
This was the beginning of a process in which I was, quite literally, born again. The more I struggled with the issues Dator raised about sustainability and the growing inequality in society, the more his message became a call. These concerns have been the center of my life and ministry ever since.
In 1972, a book called The Limits to Growth exploded in the public consciousness, posing the provocative question: “What are the limits to growth on a finite planet?” A group called The Club of Rome had created the first computer-based model forecasting the future of the planet, examining five components: economic growth, depletion of nonrenewable resources, pollution, food production, and population growth. The sobering conclusion was that unless drastic changes were made, the world would end, not with a bang but a whimper, by about 2025.
In his new book, Eaarth, Bill McKibben reports that for the past thirty years, Graham Turner, an Australian academic, has been tracking these same five variables. He has concluded that essentially the Club of Rome got it right. McKibben goes on to make a convincing case that, since we failed to act sooner, there will be no easy transition from our high-growth, cheap-oil past into a slow growth, post-oil future. This is true primarily because all the architects of unrestrained growth in the global economy are still largely in denial that we are in crisis; and secondly, because those of us who are aware that there is a crisis are not acting quickly or comprehensively enough.
McKibben documents the list of climate change symptoms we are already experiencing: escalating natural disasters in the tropics which are placing growing numbers of people at risk; mega fires in our forests; growing droughts in some areas and torrential rains in others; arctic ice caps in a death spiral; the unexpected release of huge quantities of methane gas from the melting ice caps; dangerous increases of acids in our oceans; a growing global water crisis; the radical alteration of our ability to grow food on our warming planet; and the rapidly escalating costs of petro-chemically based fertilizers which could cause a world food crisis.
Clearly, life as usual will not serve. Leveraging the international response needed to envision economic and environmental policy and persuading large numbers of middle class in all of our countries to begin to reinvent their lives are enormous tasks.
As followers of Jesus Christ, we need to remind ourselves that the creator God has not lost control. Scripture’s promise is that in Christ all things will be made whole, including God’s good creation. Once we reconnect to a confident hope that God intends to restore creation instead of destroy it, we confront the question of how we can become more fully a part of this process of restoration.
Certainly a call to create simpler, more sustainable lives is part of it, but followers of Jesus aren’t called to just do a simpler version of the American dream. We are called to reimagine it and reinvent it. Considering the broad spectrum of churches in North America, this will be a huge challenge. Unless we help these sincere believers examine some of their fundamental life assumptions, we will never be able to persuade most of them to make the changes that will be necessary. Many have settled for a compartmentalized faith. The American dream and the seduction of the imperial, global mall have defined their choices, and their faith life is little more than a devotional “add-on” to the normal, consumptive North American life. Consequently, many of these good people not only contribute to our huge and growing carbon footprint, but participate in an extravagant expenditure of time and money on self-interested activities that could otherwise be invested in God’s quiet conspiracy to transform our world.
We are constantly trying to motivate followers of Jesus to take back their lives. Instead of allowing class, income, and culture to define their lifestyles, we want them to turn to Scripture to help them redefine their notions of the good life. Jesus’ paradoxical teachings remind us that we can’t find life by pursuing it. Only as we lose our lives in service to God and others do we have any possibility of discovering the good life of God.
Christine, with whom I share my life, recounts how exceedingly difficult it was for her as a young doctor in 1980 to leave behind her practice, friends, and newly purchased home in New Zealand to fly to Greece and build a hospital on an old cruise liner. “I went around my beautiful home crying because of all I felt I was giving up, while my friends weren’t called to give up anything.” Years later she looks back and declares, “I didn’t give up anything that mattered.” Like so many others, she discovered the good life of God in bringing health and wholeness to thousands of lives, from Ghana to Thailand. Nothing can match the joy of discovering how God can use our mustard seeds to make a difference.
I encourage Christians to begin the journey into a more authentic and whole life faith not by simplifying, but rather by celebrating the good life of God. Create celebrations that put forth a very different vision for the human future than the one trumpeted by the global mall or the U.S. idols. Create imaginative, joyful celebrations around the imagery of God’s homecoming as a banquet feast, a wedding jubilation, or a harvest celebration.
Christine and I live in a small community called the Mustard Seed House. We are constantly creating new ways to party into that new world that is already here. We grow 40 percent of our vegetables on an urban lot in Seattle, and regularly celebrate God’s bounty in a summer harvest celebration.
The place to begin discovering the good life of God is by gathering in a small groups to discern God’s call on our lives. Using active listening, help one another reinvent how we steward both time and money to more intentionally live into that call by freeing up daily time for spiritual practices and weekly time for community, and by reaching out to neighbors, caring for creation, and making more time to celebrate!
Some may be motivated to abandon the single-family, detached housing model and create a more sustainable, community-based ways of living. (After all, single-family dwelling did not come with the ark of the covenant, and is the most isolated and energy-land-capital intensive way one can live.)
A host of other options exist. Take the Temescal Community, a Christian co-housing community in Oakland started almost fifteen years ago. Designed from the ground up, it is based on strong creation-care values as well as witnessing to God’s shalom in the neighborhood. It has nine units and a common building on a quarter acre. They have solar on their rooftops and collect enough solar energy to sell it back to the utility company.
I encourage Christian colleges to construct intergenerational co-housing communities on their campuses which provide students an opportunity to experience a more cooperative, sustainable way of life. Our young people need to see the viable options beyond living into the script of current lifestyles.
We must create many and diverse approaches to local and regional economies. Furthermore, as Christians, we must find ways to reduce our vulnerability in order to free up time to become God’s compassion to neighbors near and far in what promises to be turbulent times. These are how we will begin to glimpse that new creation and God’s quiet conspiracy that is destined to make all things new.
