WorshipCentral

So the other night I’m driving home in the rain and to my horror I see this drunk guy lying in the middle of the road on the other side of the central reservation.

He’s almost invisible, flat out on the tarmac on one of the busiest roads in London. I watch in slow motion as the lights change a couple of hundred meters up the road. There’s a familiar roar as the wall of traffic surges forward, blinded by the weather.

People start to scream. The fastest car is about three seconds away, when out of nowhere a young guy in a dark suit leaps out into the road and throws himself between the car and the soon-to-be-dead-man, screaming and waving his hands. Tyres tear on tarmac and the car swing wildly to avoid him: the driver has still not seen the man lying on the ground.

I watch this nightmare unfold in front of my eyes, in a daze. Suddenly I wake up, swing my car across the central reservation and block the road. The wall of traffic screeches to a halt in a cloud of angry horns and hand gestures. But it’s over: the young guy in the suit starts to breathe again. Someone should give him a medal. He saw what no one else could see and started screaming on behalf of someone who could not scream.

People start to scream

They’re called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and they’re a group of the most senior scientists from the four corners of the planet. They’ve just published the most comprehensive study on the pending environmental crisis. They’re telling us that this is no longer a debate: it is a global accident waiting to happen. They’re standing in the middle of the road, screaming and waving their hands.

Three seconds away

The extraordinary thing about this moment in history is that we know what happens next: if carbon emissions continue to rise after 2015, we cross a significant threshold and systemic change starts to happen. The 1% of the earth that is currently experiencing ‘extreme drought’ rises to 12% in this century alone. Africa will experience a continental drought that will make the appalling suffering of past decades look like a nice day out at the beach. There will be extreme weather, floods, sea rises: scenarios like New Orleans will become commonplace. 250 million people will become environmental refugees.

And even more chilling is that we already have the understanding to prevent this accident from happening, but we only have ten years to make a difference. If global carbon emissions peak in the next decade and then start reducing at 3% per year, creation’s fragile eco-system will avoid the horrific crash that’s waiting to happen.

Wonderfully, the church community has begun to engage with this challenge: there has been some great teaching on our response to this as Christians, some localised action and a general sense that we need to engage with this issue. We now recognise that this is an urgent moral issue and we’ve placed environmental concern on the discipleship radar for the first time in our communities.

However, Kofi Annan has recently criticised ‘the alarming lack of leadership’ shown in response to this challenge by governments, business and communities. It is clear that, as the church, we must continue to press ourselves on this, both at a theological level, and practically in terms of our action as a collective of individuals.

Zero Carbon Church

What if we threw ourselves into the road on this one? What if every church ministry decided to become carbon-neutral by 2010? The steps to reducing our carbon footprint are beautifully simple: each church would need to appoint a carbon auditor to advise on how they could reduce contributions. Key areas for most of us would be switching our energy providers to renewables, encouraging a mind-shift on transport (car-sharing, off-setting travel fuel emissions), making sure that production of resources and consumables was as sustainable as possible. Any remaining carbon contributions made by the ministry would be off set: there are a number of safe, proven and effective ways to do this and a growing number of Christian organisations that will enable carbon stewardship.

Of course this will cost money, but not a lot. The truth is that legislation will eventually make the current status quo uneconomical. But why should we not be leading the way? If church leaders decide to adopt this idea, the way church ministries are run will shift radically and the individual members of each congregation will follow.

It is surely time to act on what we now can clearly see and start screaming on behalf of future generations who cannot yet scream.

Zero Carbon Church is not a charity, a campaign or a petition: it’s simply an idea that we can make happen if we want to. Have a think about it.