In honor of Earth Day 2009, Tri Robinson, the senior pastor of the Boise Vineyard and author of Saving God’s Green Earth: Rediscovering the Church’s Responsibility to Environmental Stewardship, talked to PurposeDriven.com about how his church made its ministry green.

Jesus did not say much about caring for the earth. Why do you say that Christians have a responsibility to be environmental stewards?

Jesus taught frequently about stewardship of the things given to us. He also taught about caring for the poor and the environment is directly related to the poor and impacts them in ways people in more developed countries couldn’t even imagine.

The condition of the environment determines if people can grow food and drink clean water. When Jesus said, “I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink,” that takes on a whole different understanding when you’ve been to countries in Africa where 80 percent of infant mortality is from diarrheal diseases. The people who are being affected the most by climate change are the ones who live in the low-lying areas of places like Bangladesh. As Christians, we can’t ignore this problem, even though we don’t yet see the direct impact of it in our backyard.

How does Christian environmental stewardship differ (if at all) from traditional environmental stewardship?

The action Christians can take isn’t much different, but the motive is. Christians do it because we’re commissioned to do it. Even if we don’t think that the little bit we do is going to have a huge impact, we do it out of obedience. Environmental stewardship is a biblical commission (see Genesis 9).

You’ve admitted you weren’t always an environmentalist—that a very specific incident changed your mind. What happened?

In the 1960s, I very much cared for the environment, but put that value aside when I started following Christ and entered into full-time ministry. There was no expression of caring for the environment in the church at that time and I just kind of forgot about it. [But] because of our lifestyle living on a ranch in California, our kids cultivated a deep love for the outdoors.

Before the 2004 election, I was having a conversation about politics with my children, who were now young adults, and they told me how torn they were about the election, being forced to choose between two things they loved—pro-life platform versus pro-environment platform. That’s when I began to take a deeper look at what the Scripture says and examine why I personally had left this value. I realized that by denying this as an important value, I was pushing a huge segment of the population away from the faith. By deriding environmentalists and dismissing their work, we were pushing them away from the Gospel (see Romans 1:20).

What is your church, Vineyard Boise, doing to protect and save the earth?

As a result of resurrecting this value with our church (caring for creation had actually been a long-time value in the church until the late 1800s), we started a ministry called “Let’s Tend the Garden.” It takes a comprehensive approach: from engaging our people in conservation projects, to environmental education, to justice projects that impact the poor. We also have a one-acre naturally grown community garden that is managed by church volunteers that produced more than 13 tons of fresh produce last year. We, in turn, give this produce to the needy in our area through a farmer’s market we host at our benevolence center.

Photo: courtesy of Boise Vineyard Church

How have other churches become involved in this movement?

As a result of starting a creation care program and seeing how it has impacted our own members as well as our immediate community, we have become a resource for other churches that are looking to implement similar ministries and initiatives. Churches started hearing about what we were doing and began coming to us for help. We’ve helped churches start gardens, curb their consumption, green their building, implement similar ministries, and educate their congregations on the issues of creation care. Slowly but surely, we’re seeing churches all across the country take this issue seriously and begin taking steps toward doing this in their own churches.

If someone wants to take action by starting an outdoor program at their own church, what should they do first?

An outdoor program that gets people out in nature is a great place to start. We discovered that if people don’t appreciate God’s creation, they won’t care for it. Our first steps consisted of building a team of people who were interested in these types of things (and believe me, they are in every church) and then creating opportunities to engage the church through hikes or camping trips that sometimes included conservation or clean up efforts.

RE:FORM is a ministry you started in response to environmental decline, but it involves many larger issues. How does environmental injustice relate to HIV/AIDS and/or sex trafficking?

As we began investigating the issues surrounding the impact of environmental decline, we discovered many of the world crises weren’t isolated and were in fact connected in many ways to the environment. When the environment goes, the condition of all life goes. And when that goes, desperate people do desperate things. RE:FORM is a way for like-minded churches, parachurches, and NGOs to connect and work together to address many of these issues.

Here’s an example of how these issues are interconnected. When it comes to human trafficking, parents will sometimes sell their children to traffickers (both knowingly and unknowingly) to help get money for the rest of their family because they can’t grow food. Or a mother may send her daughter two miles to the next village over to get fresh water because there isn’t access to clean water in their village, only to be captured by traffickers lying in wait. When you begin exploring many of the crises that we are being made more and more aware of through greater social network communication, you find the many overlapping layers of these crises and that addressing one issue alone is incomplete.

HIV/AIDS also falls under many of the issues RE:FORM addresses. When people can’t eat because of the state of the environment, they do whatever it takes to survive. For some women, that’s prostitution—and that’s just a starting point. Education and illiteracy as well as corrupt leadership and poor health and disease—it’s not just one thing that is fueling the number of people contracting and dying from the effects of HIV/AIDS.

You have said that discipleship is a verb. What do you mean by that?

“Discipleship is a verb” means you have to show action as a state of being. We need to be hands and feet of Jesus. And following Jesus is not a passive thing. Not just one person is going to do this. Everybody needs to participate in caring for our neighbors. If one-third of the world truly is Christian, that’s a huge potential workforce to address many of these crises. We could really change things if Christians took this call on their life seriously and put it into action.

Erin Jones is the Take Action editor for PurposeDriven.com.