DULUTH, Ga. (ABP) — A vice president at the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission said he was both challenged and encouraged by a three-day conference on Christians and the environment at an Atlanta-area mega-church.
"You know, whether you believe in human-induced global warming or whether you're like me, really skeptical about that, there is one thing we can agree on, and that is the earth is the Lord's and everything in it," Barrett Duke, vice president for public policy and research at the ERLC's Washington office, said during the May 13-15 Flourish conference at Cross Pointe Church in Duluth, Ga.
Duke said recognizing that truth "in itself should lead us to think about how we're treating God's creation."
"We have a responsibility that the Lord has given to us," he said. "This is given to us in trust."
"We are stewards of all of creation, because none of it belongs to us," Duke said. "We must treat the things the Lord has given to us in an appropriate and responsible manner."
"I have to confess that I haven't done not only all that I should but not even all that I could," Duke said. "The 'should' is way out there somewhere, the 'could' is right here. And yet I still have lots of room to make up for in my own life as I consider God's call on my life to be a good steward of all the Lord has entrusted to me."
Jonathan Merritt reads Scripture at the inaugural Flourish conference in suburban Atlanta.
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Duke's irenic tone delighted Jonathan Merritt, a lead organizer of the conference and national spokesman for the Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Change Initiative. In March 2008 the group issued a declaration criticizing the nation's largest Protestant faith group as too timid on issues of the environment and climate change.
Though not officially attached to the Southern Baptist Convention, the declaration was signed by several high-ranking denominational officials, including current SBC president Johnny Hunt.
Richard Land, however, head of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, distanced himself from the initiative. He issued a statement explaining he would not sign a document not "supported by the broadest possible consensus among Southern Baptists."
The Southern Baptist Convention adopted pro-environmental resolutions in 1970 and 1983.
Recent resolutions on the subject were more conservative. A resolution adopted in 2006 opposed public policy solutions "based on questionable science, which bar access to natural resources and unnecessarily restrict economic development, resulting in less economic opportunity for our poorest citizens."
A 2007 resolution on global warming urged Southern Baptists "to proceed cautiously in the human-induced global warming debate in light of conflicting scientific research." Seeking clarification before casting a vote, Wiley Drake, at the time the SBC second vice president, summarized the resolution's message as, "We don't believe in global warming."
Duke didn't sign the Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change, either.
His name appears instead on an open letter endorsing A Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Response to Global Warming.
That document was produced by the Cornwall Alliance to dissent from a call to action on climate change by The Evangelical Climate Initiative in 2006.
Disagreement over global warming nearly cost Richard Cizik his job as the National Association of Evangelicals vice president for governmental affairs in 1999. Cizik finally was forced to resign in 2008, after saying publicly he supported civil unions for same-sex couples.
Against that backdrop, Duke commended organizers of the Flourish conference for "finding a common ground" in the debate over global warming
"They're saying, 'The global warming thing is important from one perspective or another, climate change is important.'" Duke said, "But wherever you are on that question, we can all agree that we can do better as stewards of God's creation without even having to think about the policy aspect."
He said organizers, including former Evangelical Environmental Network head Jim Jewell and Rusty Pritchard, who taught environmental studies for seven years at Emory University in Atlanta "are to be congratulated for your vision of see a way to bring all of God's people together in an effort that really does matter, in an effort that finds common ground for us that unites us rather than divides us."
Merritt, who serves with his father on the staff of Cross Pointe Church, said he would have preferred a larger crowd, but with exhibitors and presenters numbering just under 200, he said it still was the largest creation-care conference ever put on. "We are confident that next year will be bigger and the next year after that will be even bigger," he said.
Merritt said he thought the inaugural conference went extremely well.
"A lot of times the evangelical church has glorified the Creator but neglected the creation," Merritt said. "At this conference we were able to both glorify God and put creation in its rightful place. I don't think there is another conference that does this quite like this venue."
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.
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