Christians like to sing about creation. Hymns like “How Great Thou Art” describe the fantastic thing about creation that moves the church to sing, “I see the celebs, I hear the rolling thunder / Thy power throughout the universe displayed.”
Nature can be a source of confusion or anxiety for believers as they observe eclipses and earthquakes and take a look at to discern God’s role or intent of their unfolding. And as climate change more visibly impacts humans, the natural world can seem increasingly hostile, whilst it stays a source of inspiration and joy for the Christian.
Where is God’s hand at work? And how should we reply to mysteries and chaos in our prayers and worship?
British scholar Mark Porter believes the Christian imagination can hold a fancy view of creation—as can music. His research looks on the intersection of music, faith, and climate change, showing ways to interact nature beyond using it as a signpost of God’s glory, contending also with its beauty, chaos, fragility, and brutality.
“There’s not only one thing that nature imagery does,” said Porter. “It can do something besides encourage a person to look to God in worship.”
Porter’s forthcoming book For the Warming of the Earth: Music, Faith, and Ecological Crisis describes how faith communities and organizations are responding to climate change and environmental crises with music, equivalent to Resound Worship’s Doxecology album, the activism of groups like Christian Climate Action (CCA), and Catholic song festivals centered on Pope Francis’ landmark encyclical, Laudato Si’.
It’s not a how-to book for worship leaders trying to more explicitly address creation care or environmental justice, however the resource offers a window into a wide range of Christian practices and postures around worship and creation.
Classic songs like “For the Beauty of the Earth” and “This Is My Father’s World” and newer offerings like “God of Wonders” turn observations of aesthetic and sensory wonder into outpourings of praise. Their verses describe ornate details and panoramas, punctuated by laudatory refrains like “Christ, our Lord, to thee we raise / This our hymn of grateful praise” and “God of wonders beyond our galaxy / You are holy, holy.”
Porter, a senior lecturer on the University of Erfurt in Germany, identified that the favored hymn “When Peace, Like a River (It Is Well with My Soul)” offers a more multifaceted acknowledgement of humankind’s relationship with nature.
“You have ‘when peace, like a river’ and ‘sorrows like sea billows,’” he said. “Nature is there as each potentially comforting and potentially threatening.”
The mystery of nature—its majesty and violence—has at all times been a fount of creative inspiration for Christian artists, but hottest hymns and worship songs put nature imagery to make use of in a single particular way: as a approach to be moved to praise.
“It’s just me and God and nothing else,” said Porter. “That’s a reasonably recent development. And I believe there are methods to return into Protestant pondering and rescue some things.”
The charismatic influence in these songs, though, also brings a willingness to search for God’s hand in all the pieces. “From that perspective, God can use anything to talk to us, a butterfly or a bird,” he said.
Climate change continues to be a contentious issue amongst American Christians, with roughly half of white evangelicals saying that the phenomenon is most certainly attributable to natural processes—across all Americans, only 28 percent hold that view.
But while many evangelicals could also be skeptical of projections showing escalating climate change–related deaths and the human contribution to environmental change, they’re more likely than other Americans to consider that God causes natural disasters.
Most Christians reject animism—attributing divine power or “ensouledness” to creation—but still search for the hand of God in natural events. So while the difficulty of climate change may cause division, Christians broadly listen to changes within the environment, whether expecting signs of apocalypse or human-caused damage, and so they find these changes meaningful.
They also take notice when natural disasters cause human suffering, which, in Porter’s view, will be the thing that starts to maneuver more Christians’ opinion on the difficulty. He’s seen churches on each side of the pond grow more comfortable with the language of environmental and social justice than they were 10 and 20 years ago.
“There was a number of suspicion within the church within the UK about engaging with social justice,” said Porter. “It was widely thought, That’s something that liberal churches do.”
Recent books like Kyle Meyaard-Schaap’s Following Jesus in a Warming World and scientist Katharine Hayhoe’s Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World offer Christian perspectives on living faithfully in light of climate change, but the difficulty stays on the perimeter.
Porter identified that the musical initiatives and projects he writes about within the book are still very much on the periphery of their denominations and traditions, but they could be a part of bringing climate conversations into more evangelical churches.
“The practices on this volume don’t all rest on a way of hope,” Porter writes within the book. “Some don’t orient themselves to the longer term, some center on loss, and others are deliberately cautious about voicing a hope they aren’t sure they will really consider in. Some, in other words, is likely to be suitable accompaniments even in a world that continues to be irretrievably broken.”
Some Christians criticize the nihilism of climate change advocates who discuss irreversible damage to the earth. But even in the event that they reject nihilism as counter to the gospel, Christians may feel stuck or lost in the case of engaging in climate justice activism. Hayhoe argues that this stuckness, not disinterest, is the stumbling block for most individuals.
“The biggest problem shouldn’t be the individuals who aren’t on board; the most important problem is the individuals who don’t know what to do,” Hayhoe said in an interview with The New York Times. “Connect the dots to your heart so that you don’t see climate change as a separate bucket but moderately as a hole within the bucket of each other thing that you simply already care about in your life.”
For the musicians in Porter’s book, singing, performance art, composition, and gathering in nature are all technique of connecting faith, community, and creation.
Hopefulness isn’t a throughline in Porter’s book, nevertheless it is a standard theme amongst many he spoke with.
“Quite a lot of people involved in climate change activism are struggling to carry on to hope and it’s something that folks of religion are capable of offer, I believe,” said Barbara Doye, one among Porter’s interviewees. Doye is an activist and musician who adapts hymns and folk songs as a part of the Forest Church movement.
The interviews and vignettes in Porter’s book aren’t meant to be prescriptive—few of us will probably be convicted to interact in performance art or start a Forest Church—but it may possibly help Christians see music as a way into climate work.
For those unsure where to start, Porter points to the simplicity of the primary chapter of Genesis: “God said it was good.”
