Season of Creation Formation Resources from Building Faith; includes:
Creation Care Pilgrimage - Planning a Youth Creation Care Pilgrimage
Green and Growing Club - The Green and Growing Club: Engaging Families in Creation Care Practices
Greening Congregations Toolkit - Greening Congregations Toolkit
Nature Trekking, Journaling, Sketching, and Wondering - Celebrate Creation with Wondering Questions
Prayer Calendar and Bingo - Prayer Calendar & Bingo Sheet for Creation Season
Stations of Creation - Via Creationis: The Way of Creation
Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land by Norman Wirzba (University of Notre Dame Press, 2022)
9 chapters; 6 spiritual practices - through the lenses of an agrarian-centered theology.
The Art of Being a Creature: Meditations on Humus and Humility by Ragan Sutterfield (Wipf & Stock, 2024)
42 short meditations (2-4 pages each) on soil interwoven with personal narrative and theological reflection.
Becoming Rooted: One Hundred Days of Reconnecting with Sacred Earth by Randy Woodley (Broadleaf, 2022)
100 short meditations (2 pages each) draws upon the author’s Indigenous experience to encourage readers to learn from and to become more connected to creation in the places and lands where they live. Each meditation also offers reflection prompts and practices.
The Creation Care Bible Challenge: A 50 Day Bible Challenge edited by Marek P. Zabriskie (Forward Movement, 2022)
50 devotional entries (~4 pages each) with scriptures, reflections, and prayers on creation.
Everyone Must Eat: Food, Sustainability, and Ministry by Mark L. Yackel-Juleen (Fortress, 2021)
Features rural church ministry as a vital site for engaging ecological degradation and creation care. It aims to equip ministry leaders in various contexts with deeper theological, biblical, sociological, and economic insight into the significance of contemporary land practices so that Christian communities can better discern faithful and sustainable ways to care for food systems and all the lives impacted by them.
In Deep Waters: Spiritual Care for Young People in a Climate Crisis by Talitha Amadea Aho (Fortress, 2022)
Discusses how to minister among youth amid the current climate crisis. It uses stories and reflections to highlight adolescents’ experiences and concerns around grappling with the ecological devastation that has been handed to them, and it provides pastoral wisdom for those who minister with youth in attending to their gifts and needs in responding to the climate crisis.
Abundant Life Garden Project (Episcopal Relief & Development, 2020, Episcopal Church)
A free digital curriculum for children and intergenerational groups; emphasizes the abundant life that God gives to creation and the importance of sharing that life with others. Includes 6 lessons on the topics: Water, Soil, Seeds, Animals, Harvest, and Celebration.
Climate Justice Curriculum for Youth and Young Adults (Lesson Plans That Work, 2021, Episcopal Church)
A free digital curriculum for middle and high school youth and for young adults that enables them to reflect on the climate crisis theologically so that they can draw upon faith to act for ecological justice. Includes 7 lessons and age-specific (youth & young adult) plans.
Faithful Resilience (Creation Justice Ministries, 2022, multi-denominational)
A free digital curriculum for adults; explores communal resilience practices and seek equity and justice in the face of imminent changes that the climate crisis is bringing, especially rising sea levels and people having to relocate to other communities and places as a result. It offers 6 lessons that include scripture, questions for reflection, research prompts to learn about local ecologies, actions to take, and stories spotlighting communities that put resilience into practice.
Follow Me: Care for Creation (Growing Faith Resources, 2024, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.))
One unit within the “Follow Me” curriculum that grounds creation care in Christian faith. Available in versions for children, youth, adults, and intergenerational groups, and it can be purchased as a standalone printed or digital product or in a bundle with other units. 4 lessons on: Appreciate God’s Creation, Till, Share the Planet, and Restore Creation.
God’s World in Community: Creation Care (GenOn Ministries, ecumenical)
A digital intergenerational curriculum that invites participants into scripture readings, creation care activities, and prayer. 7 lessons that follow Genesis 1 in tandem with related psalms.
An Illustrated Earth: Celebrating God’s Creation (Illustrated Ministry, denominationally unaffiliated)
A digital children's curriculum designed that highlights scripture's creation stories. 12 lessons / 4 main topics: water, plants, food, and animals Lessons include gathering activities, age-appropriate scripture paraphrases, open-ended questions for wondering, coloring pages, and prayers. A separate version of the curriculum made for families to use at home is also available.
Resources for conversations with climate change deniers / people of other spiritual/faith/denominational persuasions include:
Katherine Hayhoe's interview with Jimmy Kimmel and her references to Global Warming's 6 Americas, a classification created by the Yale Program on climate change communication. Take the Six Americas Super Short Survey (SASSY!) to discover where you land.
See also Sandra Richter's Stewards of Eden; a trailer is here.
A Resource For Congregations
An Initiative of the EcoFaith Network of the Minneapolis Area Synod, ELCA
We won’t save places we don’t love
We can’t love places we don’t know
We don’t know places we haven’t learned
- Baba Dioum, Senegalese Environmentalist
Water Is Life: Biblical Reflections
We know that Water is Life from almost every book of the Bible. Biblical scholar Diane Jacobson selected five different ways Scripture illuminates water as life and illustrates why and how the Bible encourages us to support remarkable work like that of Winona LaDuke, whose stories, lived experience, and current critical work shaped the 2022 Johnson Symposium.
10 Films to Inspire Your Inner Environmental Superhero by Leigh Fine
Movies have long helped us understand what it means to live on earth and contribute to an ecologically sustainable planet. Here are ten of our favorites.
Still from FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992).
Hear Matthew Fox in conversation with Alex and Allyson Grey, of the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, on "Easter, Christ, and Creation Spirituality."
Pope Francis was joined by nearly 40 global faith leaders for "Faith and Science: Towards COP26". Their signed joint appeal was given to Alok Sharma, president-designate of COP26, and to Luigi Di Maio, Italy’s foreign affairs minister.
“Future generations will never forgive us if we miss the opportunity to protect our common home. We have inherited a garden: We must not leave a desert to our children,” said the written appeal, signed Oct. 4, the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, patron saint of ecology.
See the Catholic News Service write-up here.
View AlJazeera's report here.
View a trailer, join a multi-group event, or create a virtual screening
Gather Together: 8 Intergenerational Events to Explore All Creation Sings
Bring your entire congregation together to learn about All Creation Sings, worship, and spend time in community with this intergenerational guide. This will be a great addition to the worship life of your church. Participants will grow in faith, build relationships and have fun together.
Regeneration is a group of researchers and advocates who connect humanity to the possibility that the climate crisis – the existential threat to civilization – contains myriad solutions, actions, and initiatives that can help create a better world for all.
Their mission:
To help bring an end to the climate crisis in one generation [through a growing set of interlocking initiatives [that will] inspire, guide, and nurture sustained climate action from global citizens and organizations to bring about lasting climate relief.
The website includes:
Can your congregation become a place for young people to process complex emotions and develop resilience and hope by participating - with adults who are passionate about climate care - in taking action to mitigate damage and restore health to all?
Finding Climate Solutions in Fairy Tales
What can stories of witches tell us about solving the plastics problem?
BY KATHERINE ELLSWORTH-KREBS &
BECKY TIPPER
YES! Magazine
Scientists deliver ‘final warning’ on climate crisis: act now or it’s too late
IPCC report says only swift and drastic action can avert irrevocable damage to world
The Guardian; March 20, 2023
The history of nature from the Big Bang to the present day represented in a spiral with notable events annotated. Each billion years (Ga) is represented by 90 degrees of rotation of the spiral.
Created and rendered especially for Wikimedia.org by Pablo Carlos Budassi. Learn more here.
Murmurations: Returning to the Whole
JUN 29, 2022
To heal ourselves, we must remember that we are a small part of a much greater whole.
We need real solutions that hold corporations liable for their part in the climate crisis.
The fossil fuel industry uses greenwashing and woke-washing to shirk their own responsibility.
Rev. Dr. Cameron Trimble points out the connection between our Mistakes about God and our mistakes about nature - and vice versa.
Richard Rohr spent a week Contemplating Creation - short, daily devotionals to help us see and develop awareness of our oneness with creation.
Welcoming the Many Names of the Divine Feminine by Matthew Fox highlights how our theology - specifically our inclusion of and appreciation for the Divine Feminine - affects our zeal for and approaches in creation care.
Climate Change: At-risk Nations Fear Extinction after IPCC Report
Nations vulnerable to climate change have warned they are on the "edge of extinction" if action is not taken.
The Keystone XL Pipeline Is Dead. Next Target: Line 3 - from the New York Times
Podcast Episode 34: "Renewing" with Eileen Flanagan, a nationally-known activist and award-winning spiritual writer from the Quaker tradition whose online courses help peoples' activism more effective and whose work focuses on how to build a spiritually grounded and effective climate justice movement.
The Office of Social Justice and Faith Formation Ministries offer this resource to address God's call to care for creation. Ten Ways to Care for Creation includes ideas such as starting an intergenerational gardening project, holding a storytelling series, and much more!
Download this free resource or order printed copies for a small fee at FaithAliveResources.org.
