"Now the green blade rises from the buried grain" | |
An online publication of the EcoFaith Network NE-MN Synod with Saint Paul Area Synod Care of Creation | |
|
Response to the EcoFaith Summit is surpassing expectations, with 212 people registered to come to Duluth and another 55 to attend via livestream.
If you or someone you know hasn't registered yet but is interested, there are a few additional openings. Register soon! Registration will remain open via the link above until capacity is reached. Online registration will remain open through the day of the Summit.
All participants under the age of 30 can register for free, and childcare is available. Scholarships are available to cover the cost of registration. Contact ecofaith@nemnsynod.org for the code for free registration. A sermon by the Rev. Emily Meyer that can be preached in your congregation on April 7 will be sent to everyone who registers.
| |
|
The Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy (MCEA) has released an action alert to support 100% collection of e-waste in Minnesota. They write:
Minnesota currently throws away or incinerates over three-quarters of electronic waste every year, costing us over $2 billion. HF 3566 (Hollins) / SF 3940 (Kupec) would create a nation-leading program that would provide free, convenient collection and recycling of e-waste devices. Join MCEA in supporting this legislation, we made it easy.
| |
Applications for NE-MN Synod Microgrants Now Open! | |
|
Each year, the EcoFaith Network provides microgrants to congregations, camps, and campus ministries in the NE-MN synod for projects related to creation care. Projects in a variety of areas are eligible for funding in pursuit of the following mission goals addressed by EcoFaith Network efforts: worship, education, congregational life, buildings and grounds, community action, and other creation care centered activities. Grants are available in amounts between $100-$1000.
Applications need to be received 30 days prior to the EcoFaith Network Leadership Team monthly meeting to allow for consideration during the upcoming meeting.
Learn more and find application materials here
| |
Green Blades in Congregations and Synods | |
|
Healthy Earth, Healthy Kids EcoFair on Saturday, April 27
by Jack Behr, Calvary Lutheran Creation Care Team, Willmar
Southwestern Minnesota Synod
| |
|
The purpose of the Calvary Creation Care Team is “to be a catalyst for encouraging creation care awareness and actions at Calvary, in the community and beyond”. One of our six (6) goals is to coordinate creation care with the community.
It was decided early on that the EcoFair would include the already annual YMCA Healthy Kids Day. The event was set for Saturday, April 27 at the Willmar Civic Center. There will be a fun run, main stage speakers and up to 50 exhibitors, with Vinje, Calvary and Bethel Lutheran Churches being one of them. The Creation Care exhibit booth will include: information on the “NexTrex Recycling Challenge” that has resulted in Calvary keeping 2 ½ tons of plastic film out of the landfill; a TREX bench made of recycled plastic film; photos of team projects; a list of team accomplishments; how to Reduce/Reuse/Recycle; a new Calvary Creation Care brochure; drawings for wildlife photography and art; and more.
Read the full article here
| |
|
God's Promise and Creation
A Reflection by Margot Monson, EcoFaith Summit 2023 Keynote Speaker
| |
|
I see God’s promise as the gifts entrusted to us in the many marvelous life forms of Creation.
Plants and animals evolved together, need each other, and we need them.
Bats search for nectar for themselves and their young, hummingbirds take nectar for energy while they catch proteinaceous insects to feed to their young, and most plants need pollinating insects in order to produce viable seeds...
Yet these beautiful forms so wonderfully made, and all the lives that have evolved together, will continue to sustain us only if we make our own promises to protect and nurture these amazing gifts. This is the challenge that I ask of myself.
Read the full reflection here
| |
|
Earth Day is on April 22nd this year. Participate in Earth Day events in your community!
Check out a preaching reflection for Earth Day written by Rev. Emily Meyer of the Ministry Lab!
Looking for other ideas? Minnesota Interfaith Power and Light (MNIPL) has a four-part page here with systemic, relational, practical ideas and more!
| |
New! Celebrate Pollinator Sunday on June 2 ~ Put in a ‘Plug’ for Pollinators and Monarchs | |
The NE-MN Synod and its EcoFaith Network invite congregations have designated June 2, the first “Green Sunday” of the Season after Pentecost, as Pollinator Sunday. Resources for celebrating will be available next month for congregations throughout the Midwest, including a litany and hymn suggestions for worship, a preaching reflection, an informative bulletin insert, guidelines for becoming a pollinator sanctuary, and an outdoor blessing for a new or existing pollinator plot. | |
Your Congregation can Become a Pollinator Sanctuary Too! | |
Invitation to NE-MN Congregations to Become 2024 EcoFaith Congregation Partners | |
|
Green blades of care and concern for the creation are arising in congregations throughout our synod and beyond!
Thank you to our EcoFaith Network 2024 Partner Congregations for your prayers, financial support and ministries, as we live out God’s call together to be stewards of the earth for the sake of the whole creation.
Calvary, Mora
Concordia, Duluth
Gloria Dei, Duluth
Lutheran Church of the Cross, Nisswa
St. Andrews, Grand Rapids
Trinity, Cass Lake
We invited your congregation to join them! Help us nurture the green blades rising movement of creation care by becoming an EcoFaith Network Partner Congregation in 2024 with a financial contribution of any amount.
Find partner congregation forms here
Thank you to our 2023 EcoFaith Partner Congregations
| |
|
This Month's Green Tips
Here are Laura Raedeke's Green Tips from Lutheran Church of the Cross, Nisswa
Wetlands, Aquifers, Rivers, Lakes and Oceans: What's In Our Water?
| |
Worshipping with the Whole Creation | |
Green Blades Preaching Roundtable | |
|
The Green Blades Preaching Roundtable weekly reflections by a variety of preaching writers on the ecological implications of each Sunday’s lectionary.
The Roundtable editor, Kristin Foster has some remaining openings for writers in 2024 and would welcome new and returning writers for these Sundays. Please email her if interested at revkristinfoster@gmail.com.
| |
|
Second Sunday of Easter
April 7, 2024
Gary Hedding, Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin
Acts 4:32-35
Psalm 133
1 John 1:1-2:2
John 20:19-31
I am delighted by these Easter texts. What delights me and encourages me is their refusal to allow the resurrection of Jesus to be relegated to some kind of “spiritual” experience that took place in the hearts and minds of Jesus’ disciples. These texts emphasize the embodiment of the resurrection and what naturally follows from that embodiment. What follows, in these texts, is relationship with God through the embodied fellowship of the redeemed world and its people.
Read the full reflection here
| |
|
Third Sunday of Easter
April 14, 2024
Pastor Amanda Kossow, Cass Lake, Minnesota
Acts 3:12-19
Psalm 4
1 John 3:1-7
Luke 24:36b-48
In the gospel, I am drawn to a very earthy action. “Touch me and see.” Quite an intimate invitation. Well, actually more than an invitation. Jesus doesn’t just appear, scars and all, as visible proof of his resurrection. He bids them to touch. To awaken the nerve receptors within their own flesh, and thereby not only feel the truth of both crucifixion and resurrection, but to connect with him, on multiple levels. Luke doesn’t tell us whether or not the terrified disciples actually did so, but it got me to questioning: would I have reached out my fingertips? Or would I have been averse to experiencing the unspoken truths? How often, if at all, are we willing, when given permission, to touch the scars, or wounds, of another life?
Read the full reflection here
| |
|
Fourth Sunday of Easter
Earth Day
April 21, 2024
Rev. Emily Meyer, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Acts 4:5-12
Psalm 23
1 John 3:16-24
John 10:11-18
Acts 4 is concerned with ‘salvation’. Looking into the etymology of the term bears a lot of fruit: ‘salve’, ‘salver’, ‘ointment/anointing’, ‘safeguard’; the Spanish noun salvar, which means, ‘to save/render safe’, is especially intriguing: what does salvation mean to us in 2024? Is ‘the resurrection of the dead’ the same promise to contemporary souls as it was to those to whom Peter and John were preaching? For those among us who may identify as ‘predator’, is it possible that in our ‘salvation’, we ourselves are ‘rendered safe’?
Read the full reflection here
| |
|
Fifth Sunday of Easter
April 28, 2024
Gary Hedding, Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin
Acts 8:26-40
Psalm 22:25-31
1 John 4:7-21
John 15:1-8
The texts for this Sunday are somewhat diverse, but all cluster around the revelation of a God that, in the victory of the resurrection, uses God’s love and power to redeem, restore, revive, and save the world. It is God declaring that whatever brokenness is in the world has been overcome and overruled by the wholeness and rightness of God’s refusal to be sent away by Jesus’ death. Rather the creation is swamped with the dedication and adoring love that Jesus’ resurrection means for the world.
Read the full reflection here
| |
|
Connections with Creation
April
April 7 – Second Sunday of Easter
The climate crisis is a mirror; it accuses us and shows us our sin. The climate crisis is a result of the overconsumption of goods and fossil fuels by people in the Global North, yet it is people in the Global South who feel the effects of our overconsumption most acutely. Today’s texts hold a mirror to our universal siblinghood in Christ and offer a joyous vision of life in a redeemed world. The believers of Acts are of “one heart and soul” (4:32), 1 John celebrates that “we have fellowship with one another” (1:7), and the psalmist extols believers “[living] together in unity” (Ps. 133:1). What kinds of ecological impacts would it have if we, the body of Christ, ordered our lives to this vision?
Read all Connections with Creation for April and May
| |
|
EcoFaith Book of the Month
The Covenant of Water
by Abraham Verghese
Review by Fred Quivik, Saint Paul Area Care of Creation
Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water is a gorgeous tale of a world filled with hardship, heartbreak, and tragedy fully embraced by love. The novel follows the lives of three generations of a family in India from 1900 to 1977. They live in what is now the state of Kerala, along the southwest coast of India, where the community of Saint Thomas Christians live. The Saint Thomas Christians date their faith back to when their ancestors were evangelized by Thomas the Apostle (Doubting Thomas), who in the first century would have followed the Spice Route by sea from the Mediterranean world to the coast of India. It is the faith of those Christians that drives story as we follow characters striving to live in the world God imagines for them. That faith shapes the ways many of the characters in the family interact with each other, with their neighbors, with other fellow creatures, and with the natural world.
Read the full review here
| |
|
Through the College of St. Scholastica, Pastor Dave Carlson of Gloria Dei in Duluth facilitates two monthly book discussion groups, to which all are welcome:
- Earth Harmony, Thursday, April 11 - Meeting 8:00-9:00 a.m. in person at Chester Creek Cafe in Duluth. This month, each participant is bringing a children's book or two related to "earth harmony" to share with the group.
-
Religion & Science, Wednesday, April 17 - The Three Ages of Water: Prehistoric Past, Imperiled Present, and a Hope for the Future, by Peter Gleick (2023). Meeting 8:00-9:00 a.m. via Zoom. Contact Pastor Carlson for the link or for more information, pastor@gloriadeiduluth.org
| |
|
Check out the Green Lectionary Podcast!
Creation Justice Ministries produces a podcast that it describes as "a conversation on scripture with a creation justice lens." Check it out here!
| |
|
Trying to figure out how Faith and Science work together every week?
Listen to The Faith and Science Podcast, following the Revised Common Lectionary each week and try to answer that question. It can be found at wherever podcasts are found or at
https://thefaithandsciencepodcast.podbean.com/
| |
Read. Watch. Listen. Share! | |
The EcoFaith Network NEMN Synod
Living out God's call to be stewards of the earth for the sake of the whole creation.
| |
SPAS Care of Creation
We are called to care for God's creation as a central part of our Christian faith and identity.
| | | | |
