If Christians can support climate action on ordinary moral grounds, why do priests, pastors and ministers bring climate change into sermons, prayers, hymns and liturgies at all? Why not leave climate policy to scientists, governments, journalists and citizens, and allow public worship to concentrate on more obviously theological concerns?
The answer lies in the nature of worship. Christian worship is not primarily a mechanism for communicating information or securing political outcomes. It forms imagination, affection, memory, desire and character through sustained attention to Scripture, prayer, sacrament and the story of God’s purposes. The strongest reason for engaging ecological themes in worship is therefore not that Christians need religious justification for climate policy, but that worship can form people who inhabit creation with gratitude, humility, restraint and love.
Creation is a gift
The deepest theological starting point is creation itself. Before creation is endangered, it is given by God. Before it becomes an ethical responsibility, it is a source of limitless wonder and grace. Before Christians ask what they must do for the earth, they recognise themselves as finite and fragile creatures within it.
The biblical imagination is saturated with this prior affirmation. Genesis repeatedly declares creation good. The Psalms summon seas, mountains, animals, weather and celestial bodies into praise. Psalm 104 delights in springs, trees, birds, wild animals, food, mountains and the rhythms of day and night. Job directs attention toward creatures that exceed human usefulness and control. Jesus notices seeds, birds, lilies, vineyards, rain and harvests.
These texts matter not because they can be converted directly into climate policy, but because they teach Christians what kind of world they inhabit. Scripture trains believers to perceive creation as gift rather than possession, to recognise limits on human sovereignty, and to understand material life as belonging within God’s purposes. Ethical action begins when this biblical vision reshapes what Christians notice, value and love.
Christian regard for the material world also rests on the incarnation. In confessing that the Word became flesh, Christianity affirms embodiment and material existence as arenas of divine action rather than obstacles to spiritual life. The sacraments reinforce this material grammar through water, bread, wine, oil and other created realities. Christian worship is irreducibly and irrepressibly embodied.
The familiar biblical language of stewardship is useful because it emphasises responsibility and accountability. Yet it may also imply that humans stand above creation as managers of an external resource. A richer theology begins at the point of humble creatureliness. We are embodied, dependent, mortal and ecologically embedded. We do not merely care for creation from the outside; we live within it and depend upon its continuing flourishing.
Much contemporary ecological Christianity speaks a vocabulary of danger: extinction, degradation, emissions, warming, pollution and catastrophe. These realities matter. But if they become the principal language through which churches encounter the natural world, Christian imagination can become strangely impoverished. Nature becomes a collection of problems.
Christian liturgy should resist this reduction. Rain should sometimes appear in worship simply because rain is wonderful. A river need not first be polluted before Christians praise God for water. Birds possess theological significance even when they are not endangered. Trees are not valuable merely because they sequester carbon, soil is more than an agricultural resource, and wilderness is more than biodiversity habitat. Creation possesses a goodness that precedes its usefulness to humanity.
Attention before action
Ecological formation should therefore begin not with anxiety but with attention. Christians might learn again to notice seasons, weather, plants, animals, landscapes and food. They might recover practices of thanksgiving, Sabbath, blessing and restraint. Churches might allow the natural imagery already embedded within Scripture and sacrament to regain its force: water in baptism, bread and wine at the Eucharist, gardens, vineyards, wilderness and rivers.
Biblical attention of this kind is not passive contemplation. To perceive creation differently is eventually to act differently. Gratitude can challenge waste; Sabbath can challenge limitless production; neighbour-love can challenge indifference to harms displaced onto others; prophetic justice can challenge arrangements that protect the powerful at the expense of the vulnerable. Reflection upon Scripture should therefore lead toward ethical practice.
The practice of thoughtful and informed biblical reflection is especially important. The task of preaching is not merely to attach Christian language to conclusions reached elsewhere. It is to allow biblical texts to question the assumptions, habits and loyalties of the congregation. Scripture should rigorously interrogate contemporary issues and the Church alike.
This emphasis also guards against excessive anthropocentrism within environmental activism. If creation is presented principally as something humans have damaged and must now save, humanity remains the central actor. Christian theology makes a more radical claim: the world belongs to God, and humans are creatures among fellow creatures, possessing distinctive responsibilities within the created order but not possessing ultimate sovereignty.
Climate action then acquires a more appropriate theological location. Christians care for damaged ecosystems not because environmental crisis has made creation newly important, but because they have first learned to receive creation with gratitude.
The task is to form Christians, not supporters
At its best, ecological worship concerns formation rather than mobilisation. It trains Christians to perceive the world differently, and biblical preaching is central to that formation. The task of preaching is not merely to confirm positions congregants already hold, but to expose them repeatedly to the range and depth of Scripture and to ask what faithful obedience might require in present circumstances.
That process should lead to constructive action. Scripture that condemns injustice but never changes Christian behaviour has not been fully heard. Worship that celebrates creation without affecting consumption, generosity, political responsibility or institutional practice risks becoming aesthetic rather than ethical. Biblical reflection reaches its proper end when it forms communities willing to embody what they confess.
Yet mobilisation does seek particular practical and measurable outcomes, such as signing a petition, supporting legislation, opposing a development, joining a demonstration or endorsing a treaty. Churches may legitimately participate in such activities, but worship becomes problematic when congregants are moved without adequate argument from the affirmation that creation should be cherished to the conclusion that Christians must support one specific political remedy.
Some may object that the scale and urgency of climate change justify unusually prominent treatment in worship. There is force in that argument. Serious threats may properly receive sustained attention, especially where vulnerable communities face significant harm. But urgency does not erase the distinction between doctrine, moral formation and particular policy judgments, nor does it relieve the Church of the responsibility to maintain proportion within its preaching.
The Uniting Church and climate change
The question posed in the title of this article is especially relevant to the Uniting Church in Australia, where ecological concern seems to fit naturally within the Church’s theological and institutional history. The Basis of Union speaks of Christ as “Head over all things” and of the Holy Spirit as the pledge and foretaste of the reconciliation and renewal whose end is “the whole creation.” That language provides a theological framework considerably larger than environmental activism. Salvation is understood within God’s purposes for creation as a whole rather than simply as the rescue of individual souls.
The Uniting Church’s Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational inheritances also include strong traditions of biblical preaching, education, welfare, social reform and public responsibility. Since union in 1977, the denomination has regularly understood discipleship as possessing social consequences. Environmental concern therefore enters a church already accustomed to asking how theological conviction should shape public life.
That inheritance should encourage neither withdrawal from urgent public questions nor reliance on advocacy slogans. Its stronger tradition is one in which Holy Scripture, bold theological reflection, the exercise of conscience and public responsibility belong together. The Church is at its best when ethical action grows from serious engagement with the biblical witness rather than when biblical language is added retrospectively to positions already settled elsewhere.
Yet this strength carries a temptation. Social causes can become markers of ecclesial identity, and churches can develop characteristic vocabularies through which members recognise the moral culture of their community. Terms such as “climate justice,” “care for creation,” “intergenerational justice” and “sustainability” may express serious convictions, but they may also function sociologically as signals of belonging.
That possibility does not make those convictions false. It simply means that churches should critically examine their praxis. Conservative Christians can sacralise nationalism, markets or conventional social arrangements; progressive Christians can likewise sacralise preferred movements for social change. In both cases Christians risk confusing the gospel with the convictions of the social constituency in which they feel most at home.
The test of genuinely prophetic preaching is therefore not whether it sounds politically radical. Prophetic speech should arise from Scripture deeply enough to challenge idolatry, exploitation and self-deception wherever they appear. If environmental preaching consistently confirms what a congregation already believes while rarely questioning its own consumption, affluence, travel, investment practices or expectations of comfort, its prophetic character deserves scrutiny.
Moreover, repentance must include the Church itself. Christian reflection on climate change should examine consumption, waste, travel, investment, energy use, food choices and habitual expectations of convenience and abundance. Individual action cannot substitute for structural reform, but neither should structural analysis exempt Christians from personal responsibility.
Beyond the advocacy calendar
There is also a broader question of proportion. If climate change deserves sustained attention in worship, why not housing affordability, gambling, artificial intelligence, loneliness, domestic violence, migration, public debt or employment insecurity?
Churches need not treat every issue equally. Some concerns possess unusual urgency, affect especially vulnerable people or connect directly with biblical texts appointed for worship. Nevertheless, churches need some theological principle governing selection. Otherwise the public issues receiving regular liturgical attention may simply reflect the priorities of denominational staff, advocacy networks or politically engaged clergy.
The lectionary provides a helpful discipline. Rather than continually searching Scripture for texts supporting established campaigns, preachers may allow Scripture’s own range of concerns to determine the Church’s attention from week to week and from season to season. Creation should certainly appear, but so should forgiveness, holiness, greed, reconciliation, judgement, compassion, poverty, idolatry, vocation, resurrection and eschatological hope.
This does not mean urgent contemporary issues should be avoided when they arise naturally from the biblical text. On the contrary, faithful preaching should ask what ancient Scripture demands of contemporary disciples. The discipline lies in allowing the text to interrogate the issue and the congregation, rather than forcing the text to endorse a predetermined campaign. The pulpit should enlarge Christian vision rather than merely reproduce the themes indicated on an advocacy calendar.
Joy, lament and hope
Joy is one of the most neglected resources in Christian ecological thought. A Church that teaches people to rejoice in rain, gardens, food, birds, rivers, landscapes, changing seasons and bodily life may cultivate a deeper attachment to creation than one that speaks principally through warnings of environmental collapse. Joy is not an escape from responsibility. It may be one of its deepest sources. Gratitude teaches attention; attention nurtures love; and love creates reasons for restraint, protection and repair.
Lament nevertheless retains an important place. Communities affected by drought, fire, flood, species loss or damaged landscapes need forms of worship that name loss truthfully before God. Biblical lament refuses both denial and despair. It creates space in which grief can become prayer, confession can become repentance, and repentance can lead toward renewed action.
Christian ecological ethics should therefore resist both complacency and utopianism. Belief in God’s renewal of creation provides no excuse for environmental negligence, but neither should Christian preaching imply that the future of creation finally depends upon the success of human political campaigns. Christians act energetically while relinquishing fantasies of ultimate control.
Arguably, the strongest reason for bringing ecological themes into Christian worship is therefore not that Scripture supplies climate policy. It is that Scripture and worship together form people capable of recognising moral responsibility and acting upon it with gratitude, humility, restraint, justice, love and hope. For the Uniting Church, this fits naturally within its confession that God’s purposes embrace the reconciliation and renewal of the whole creation. But because that vision is theological, it should remain larger than climate advocacy alone.
Christian worship should not become an instrument of political mobilisation. It should do something deeper: immerse Christians in Scripture, deeply form their moral imagination, and send them into the world on mission, prepared to act faithfully and valiantly when urgent public issues demand a moral or theological response.
Rev Dr Rod Benson is General Secretary of the NSW Ecumenical Council and a minister of the Uniting Church in Australia serving at North Rocks Community Church in Sydney.
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