“We made the Earth a member of our Church.”
A reawakening is breathing a new understanding of creation into the teachings and traditions of the western church. The faithful are awakening to see soils, plants, humans, the planet, and life itself as interconnected in a network of life. Rev. Dr. Robert “Bob” Shore-Goss joined the Climate Cafe Multifaith to talk about these relationships. Rev. Shore-Goss has spent a lifetime studying theology, the natural world, and human relationships. He was raised Catholic, and as a young man took orders as a Jesuit priest. After coming out as gay, Rev. Shore-Goss brought his gifts, ordination and ministry into the UCC (United Church of Christ) and has served UCC churches and taught at universities across the country.
Rev. Shore-Goss has also served as a path-maker for Creation Justice in the church. His studies introduced him to Indigenous wisdom and life-ways, and also Buddhist philosophies and practices such as nature meditation. He put these experiences into action. He led a congregation through the process of awakening and becoming a creation justice church.
“…for Christians, since Jesus is at the focus of spirituality, we need to reclaim a green Jesus as the green face of God.”
—Rev. Dr. Robert Shore-Goss
Sunflowers, fed by rain and recycled water, grow in the garden of the creation-centered church Rev. Shore-Goss served in North Hollywood. Photo by Joseph Shore-Goss, 2012. All rights reserved.
Rev. Dr. Shore-Goss recognized the importance of creation and brought those teachings to the church he served in North Hollywood. The congregation opened the scriptures and rolled up their sleeves, the Spirit moving in conversations about what faithfulness looked like in the context of life on a planet God created and God loved. They brainstormed how they could reduce energy, reduce or recycle waste, and set to work changing lightbulbs to LEDs, growing a garden and recycling water. But they did one more thing, an important step more, they made the Earth a member of their congregation.
“We made the Earth a member of our church,” says Rev. Shore-Goss. “No church had done this.” Recognizing and affirming that humans live as part of the natural world, inseparable, and expanding the understanding of just what made community, allowed this shift. Once the ‘ah ha’ moment came, care for the Earth was a clear and obvious part of a life of faith. Says Rev. Shore-Goss, the pastoral team set to work on the question “how do we passionately care about the earth?” They caucused together as a church, and the shared wisdom gained was the beginning of Rev. Shore-Goss’s work on the Rights of Nature.
In this video, Rev. Shore-Goss speaks to the idea of God as gardener and congregations as caretakers.
The environmental movement has been greatly influenced by Indigenous teachings and life-ways. As the people of the land for thousands of years, Native peoples of the Americas knew every tree, rock, and waterway, how to cultivate, care for, shape and honor the land that was life giving for food, shelter, and ceremony. Westerners are turning back to that wisdom as climate change and petrochemical pollution threaten biodiversity and even life itself—God’s creation.
Says Rev. Shore-Goss, “Indigenous peoples are keenly aware [of nature]…they find spirit, they're living with nature, they find kin, and they define that as family.” The deep understanding of our interrelatedness with nature is one we need to return to, and urgently. One way Christians might be helped to understand this is with the teaching of the incarnation. Explains Rev. Shore-Goss, “As a Christian, I argue that the incarnation is that God didn’t become just flesh. I translated ‘God took on DNA.’” This new path toward creation care, he explains, is not just incarnational, but also spirit-led, “we're going to have to follow the Spirit, because that's the only way to save us at this point in time, because we're absolutely reckless and moving towards catastrophe.”
In the above video, Rev. Dr. Robert Shore-Goss speaks to Indigenous wisdom and the interrelatedness of nature.
A huge next step for Rev. Shore-Goss was his work to connect theology and churches with the Rights of Nature. The idea of ‘Rights of Nature’ is a legalistic premise that a tree, as alive and biologically vital to its forest community, has an equal right to live its life as a human being does. We are well practiced in arguing about human rights. But the birds that migrate lake-to-lake over hundreds of miles, they have a right to live free of air pollution in flight and to rest and refresh in lake water free of plastic waste and chemicals.
Theologians connect these rights to the sacred belovedness of creation. “If you give nature rights as persons, then you have to say that nature is beloved. If you look at the biblical texts that Jews and Christians honor,” explains Rev. Shore-Goss, if you look to the account of creation in the book of Genesis, you see that “on the seventh day, God rests and he looks at the creation and basically delights in it. And basically, God delights and loves nature. And I think that's really important to recognize, and that nature is as much beloved as human beings are.”
The forest, then, is of sacred worth. The sacredness of a forest includes the whole ecosystem, with clean water for sap-making and a soil full of lichen and microbes to break down nutrients. The birds on the lake are as they were created by God. They have rights to stay as God created them, free of the threat of extinction or degradation of their DNA due to PFASs. The value of the natural world does not rest on the ‘uses’ humans might contrive, but is of sacred worth in its own right.
“If we didn't have biodiversity, we would not be alive. We lose biodiversity, we become extinct. No question about it. We exist. We are part of the community of nature.”
—Rev. Dr. Robert Shore-Goss
Photo by Vincent van Zalinge
Rev. Shore-Goss set about teaching and writing about the sacred worth of nature. He offers book and other recommendations for those interested in learning more, including The Rights of Nature: A Legal Revolution that Could Save the World by David Boyd, the work of Catholic Eco-Theologian Thomas Berry, and indigenous voices, perhaps especially Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
On July 18, 2021, UCC became the first Christian Denomination to pass a resolution affirming the Rights of Nature. The resolution, “Who will speak for the trees,” passed overwhelmingly, setting a standard for others to follow. The resolution declares in part “…the Rights of Nature to be free from human harm, including the right to healthy habitats, the right to species flourishing, the right to a fair share of the bio-region and its goods, and the right to fulfill their ecological potential without human infringements.”
“If we're going to begin to change our relationship to nature, we have to have an eco conversion—the transformation of how we view nature.”
—Rev. Dr. Robert Shore-Goss
Photo by Sandra Rodriguez
The resolution sets out the ‘whys’ but also the ‘what to dos,’ listing out actions churches and people of faith can take to be faithful to God’s word manifested in grass, insects, and oceans filled with fish. The resolution includes a call to “renewable energy,” “organic farming and regenerative agriculture,” and “incorporating creation care into each liturgical season (Tenebrae, Easter sunrise service outdoors, and Earth Day).”
Legislation, policies, practices and resolutions are important milestones. Yet Rev. Shore-Goss recognizes that simply telling people they should do something is not enough. There must be a Spirit-led change, a transformation of perspective. And that comes from love. He explains, “I think that the implementation of this is really important. Implementation is ‘how can we transform ourselves and our faith communities to live with nature, in a holistic, healthy, responsible ecological fashion? How can we learn from nature?’” His mantra, he shares, is “if you fall in love with nature, you'll fight for it. I think that falling in love is the first step.”
There really aren’t any other options. The existential crisis of climate change is here. And churches must address it, not simply as people, but especially as people of faith. Young people are far ahead of most Protestant, Evangelical and even Catholic Churches when it comes to understanding the true urgency and stakes of the climate crisis. The church has not attended to the human-caused crisis of creation.
In the video above, Rev. Dr. Robert Shore-Goss offers a word of warning and opportunity to churches.
A buzz-word of the last decade is ‘perspective taking.’ Perspective taking, to simplify, means looking at something from someone else’s point of view. Doing this, scientists believe, is an important part of human development. The idea of perspective taking can be applied as a technique to help humans to better understand nature and the natural world, as well. And perhaps doing this is more important for human development than we realized—perhaps life-affirming on a planetary scale.
We can learn to see things differently, but it will be a process with its share of resistance and challenges. Rev. Shore-Goss recognizes two of those challenges: 1) that we must abandon ego for interconnectedness, and 2) rethink capitalism as it is practiced today. “We have to abandon ego centeredness for a wider interconnectedness and eco-relationality…recognizing that we're not separate but interconnected,” he explains. And more, “ a capitalist agenda is basically still so heavily based on fossil fuel, but it's an economy that is an economy of death. We need to move to an economy of life and renewable energies.”
Rev. Shore-Goss understands changes as necessary to one more thing as well, the church. He says, “I think that churches are not going to survive climate change, for the most part, unless they change. They need to adapt.” With young people focused on saving the planet, churches must show up to support that work and recognize that support as an act of faith— for themselves, their children, and the planet itself.
In the above video, Rev. Dr. Robert Shore-Goss speaks to what gives him hope.
Rev. Dr. Bob Shore-Goss is a retired UCC clergy, college professor, and theologian. He has earned a Th.D. in Comparative Religion from Harvard University, with a specialty in Tibetan Buddhism and Christian Theology. He pastored the first Creation Justice Church in the UCC (North Hollywood, CA) and served on the UCC Environmental Justice Council for six years. He now serves as well on the Florida UCC Conference as Co-Chair of the Environmental Justice Team. He authored God is Green: An Eco-Spirituality of Incarnate Compassion and The Insurgency of the Spirit: Jesus’s Liberation Animist Spirituality, Empire, and Creating Christian Protectors. For a full exploration of his books, see the website mischievousspiritandtheology
Rev. Richenda Fairhurst is here for the friendship and conversations about climate, community, and connection. She organizes the Climate Cafe Multifaith as a co-leader of Faiths4Future. Find her in real life in Southern Oregon, working as Steward of Climate with the nonprofit Circle Faith Future.