6) Develop regional learning and action plans in coordination with their own communities that will account for the common but differentiated responsibilities of each episcopal area and provide institutional support and infrastructure to empower leaders, facilitate local creation justice actions, and amplify grassroots movements.
We ask the bishops to lead us through this dangerous time. Local churches in every district seek guidance, support, and words of comfort and encouragement from their church leaders, from those with the most power to speak, be heard, and act.
We ask the bishops to prioritize providing the infrastructure, connections, and resources to facilitate grassroots actions for creation/climate justice at every level of the church. A starting point would be to institute the following practical decisions made by the 2024 General Conference: 1) Create Green Teams in churches, districts, and conferences, and 2) Establish conference Caretakers of God’s Creation Coordinators.
We call for the COB’s support for leaders engaged in the work of creating the organization, connection, and infrastructure to help United Methodists take actions for creation justice.
Churches and their communities need hope, institutional support, and strategic mobilization for preparedness, resilience, and rapid de-carbonization. This calls for leadership and action supporting an immediate phase out of fossil fuels and a just transition toward conservation and clean energy, with special attention to preventing further harm to the most vulnerable.
There are three primary categories for climate action: relief, adaptation, and mitigation. Relief is immediate disaster relief and restoration after a weather-related disaster. Adaptation is reducing the risk of harm from increasing climate impacts by adjusting conditions to increase resilience. Mitigation is long-term reduction of the burden of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that cause global heating. Sometimes adaptation and mitigation overlap. When employed to scale, some actions can increase resilience while also curbing emissions in high-polluting sectors of the global economy. The key is that these organized efforts take working together.
Relief: The infrastructure of the United Methodist Church is in place and is effective in providing disaster relief through local churches, annual conferences, and the general agencies, including to communities impacted by weather-related disasters. It is important that people in our churches understand that climate change is impacting the frequency, intensity, and cost of weather-related disasters, so that they can prepare for and address this issue. In a stable climate, the term “disaster” refers to sudden destructive harm and “disaster relief” is undertaken to relieve, restore, make whole, renew, and heal that harm. Because fossil fuel emissions have destabilized the climate, disasters are now an ongoing occurrence.
The best way to address climate emergencies is proactive actions to avoid them entirely. Building resilient infrastructure to anticipate the climate consequences will save resources for relief in those extreme cases where the planning is not enough.
Adaptation/Building Resilience: There are countless actions we can take to adapt to advancing climate change, cut personal or local carbon emissions, green our lives and our churches, and build resilience in our personal lives, churches, and communities. Several actions along these lines were passed at the 2024 General Conference, including 1) Implement sustainable practices in managing church properties as a recognition of their sacredness, and 2) Implement sustainable practices at Annual Conferences. Dozens more are suggested in our United Methodist Book of Discipline and Book of Resolutions.
Some churches have become Resilience Hubs to help community members prepare for or recover from disasters. Actions of adaptation and resilience contribute to the cultural and practical shift toward a hoped-for clean energy future. They are also a witness and an embodied challenge to the fossil-fuel powered global economic system based on colonialization, hierarchy, political corruption, unjust wealth, and war.
- Mitigation:
Through episcopal support and example, church institutions and church members will more likely follow through with climate and energy resolutions that focus on mitigation within our institutions, including commitments to reduce emissions to 45 percent by 2030 (based on 2010 levels) and to NetZero by 2050. This will require audits of energy use including facility use, land use, personnel, transportation, operations, materials, sourcing, as well as audits of our investment portfolios, at every level of the church. It will require planning by church agencies, jurisdictions, conferences, and local churches to prioritize actions and program construction and equipment replacement as appropriate to reduce emissions. It will necessitate decisions on how to accomplish our ministries and missions while conserving material resources and setting an example for our congregations and members. It will require divestment from fossil fuel corporations in all our portfolios. Such practices will witness to our commitment to mitigation, lessen our church’s temperature-raising emissions, and engage church members in small acts of mitigation.
However, with average global temperatures rising so precipitously, the only way to succeed in efforts to mitigate global emissions and reverse the current trajectory of rising temperatures is to build a movement strong enough to change the global economic and political system that perpetuates climate change and so many other harms by putting money and worldly power ahead of the wellbeing of people and the earth. The COB’s institutional support for developing infrastructure to facilitate creation justice ministries will magnify our ability to coordinate grassroots efforts, build partnerships, and contribute to building this movement.
FossilFreeUMC 