“Together with All Creatures: Caring for God’s Living Earth,” the Commission on Theology and Church Relations’ (CTCR) report “on the responsible Christian stewardship of the environment,” is being mailed in late September to all congregations and rostered church workers.
Adopted by the CTCR in April, the 150-page document was written in response to a request from the 2007 LCMS Convention.
The report seeks to answer the question: “How do we see ourselves in relation to the earth and all its creatures?” and provides three responses:
- We best care for God’s earth when we embrace our “creatureliness.”
- We best care for God’s earth when we delight in our creaturely connections.
- We best care for God’s earth when we tend it with creaturely humility.
It concludes that “we live as Christians who embrace our calling as human creatures to care for the earth in the certain hope that the new creation in Christ will be completed by the Holy Spirit.”
Several thousand copies of an abbreviated version of the report, designed for a younger audience and for use in Bible studies, were distributed at the CTCR’s booth during this summer’s National LCMS Youth Gathering in New Orleans.
The expanded version includes the abbreviated version in an appendix. Both versions are available free online at www.lcms.org?514 or may be ordered from Concordia Publishing House (item no. 09-2621 for the abbreviated version, $2.50; item no. 09-2622 for the expanded version, $3) by calling 800-325-3040 or visiting www.cph.org.
Posted Sept. 15, 2010