Earthkeeping in the ELCA

The ELCA’s Office for Environmental Stewardship and Hunger Education provides a wide variety of congregational earthkeeping resources, including study materials, resource guides, environmental audit materials, fact and tip sheets, and advice. The Office for Environmental Stewardship and Hunger Education is located at the churchwide offices in Chicago. A part of the Division for Church and Society, its mission is to 1) provide resources and programs in environmental stewardship and underlying causes of hunger; and 2) to create earthkeeping models with congregations, ELCA Outdoor Ministries, colleges, universities, seminaries, social ministry organizations, and other church-related facilities.

ELCA congregations may participate in the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program, which makes funds available for churches and other institutions that wish to replace their existing lighting with energy-efficient lights. Environmental Stewardship and Hunger Education Office staff can provide information about this program.

The Environmental Stewardship and Hunger Education Office provides grants and advice to congregations and organizations that wish to start container gardens and in-ground gardens. The staff, with other ELCA churchwide office employees, also spends volunteer time maintaining a container garden on the roof of the ELCA churchwide office parking garage. In 1997, the Environmental Stewardship and Hunger Education Office supported four rooftop container gardens, ten ground-level container gardens, and one in-ground garden.

In congregation-supported agriculture, church members purchase shares of a farm and receive a portion of the produce grown on that farm. This innovative arrangement allows CSA participants and the farmer to share the risks, benefits, and joys of being more directly involved in the food-production process. The Environmental Stewardship and Hunger Education Office funded the publication of To Till It and Keep It, a book by Wisconsin CSA farmer Dan Guenthner which explains CSA’s and their benefits.

The Environmental Stewardship and Hunger Education Office provides small grants in support of a number of earthkeeping projects such as gardens, educational materials, and a variety of other initiatives. Contact office staff for details.

In 1994, Chicago's 25-year-old Augustana Lutheran Church conducted a lighting audit and identified inefficient incandescent bulbs in the sanctuary, outdoors, and in the exit signs. With the help of funds from the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Green Lights program, incandescent bulbs were replaced with more efficient compact fluorescent lights. The replacement included some 24-hour lights, mandated by fire and safety regulations, as well as other high wattage lamps. The approximate savings in electrical bills was about $100 per month. This first phase of the renovation is expected to pay itself within about six years from the time of renovation. A second, more complicated phase includes installing a motion sensor and switching to efficient electronic ballasts. Based on Augustana’s positive experience, the Metro Chicago Synod of the ELCA established a revolving loan fund so that congregations can borrow money for lighting upgrades and pay the synod back as they realize savings.

Common Harvest Farm in Osceola, Wisconsin, near Minneapolis, Minnesota, is a CSA (congregation-supported agriculture) subscription farm founded and operated by Dan Guenthner. For the past eight years, Dan has been farming about five acres of land, supported by 200 shareholders, mainly church members in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. Dan, unlike many small-scale farmers, has been able to support his family of five without any problem because of this community and congregation support, which provides him with an annual upfront capital of $320 per share or $64,000. This results in an annual income of about $45,000. In spite of heavy rain and drought over the past five years, Dan was able to serve his shareholders to their satisfaction, while using sustainable practices to protect his farmland. He also initiated a social program for single parents that provides them with fresh vegetables from the farm's surplus production.

A team of volunteers at the ELCA churchwide office spends their summer lunch hours growing vegetables on the rooftop of the parking garage. Starting in 1994 with just six containers, the garden expanded over the next four years to 91 containers with a total area of about 1,650 square feet. Fresh vegetables are grown without pesticides in many different types of low-cost containers, including plastic children's wading pools, used tires, feed sacks, and plastic cement mixing trays. In 1997, about 1,000 lbs. of vegetables were grown and donated to local food pantries. In addition to being a source of healthy food, the garden serves as a demonstration and training site for community organizations in Chicago wishing to start low-cost container gardens of their own.

In 1993, Gloria Luster, a retired city of Baltimore employee and master gardener, started the Power of Hope community garden in her neighborhood of Pimlico, in Baltimore, Maryland. The garden sits on a full city block of 14 abandoned lots, previously filled with garbage of all varieties. Almost seventy years old when she took on the project, Luster acquired the lease for the lots under Baltimore’s adopt-a-lot program, and eventually arranged for the delivery of 32 dumptruck-loads of leaf mulch, free from the city, to cover the lots. She recruited her neighbors and the patrons of the soup kitchen run by her church, St. John Evangelical Lutheran, to help spread the tons of mulch and work the garden. Now the lots, which used to be an eyesore and cost the city thousands of dollars each year to try to keep clean, produce vegetables of all kinds that are used by the soup kitchen and the neighbors. The neighborhood has benefited from the garden, as Gloria describes: "Now the folks from the neighborhood have started a street association. They are working on rehabbing the abandoned housing that rings the garden. For the garden’s opening ceremony, the street--filled with broken glass and everything else--was cleaned up. That was a year ago, and it’s stayed clean since." The neighbors themselves have benefited, as well, according to Gloria: "We raise more than vegetables. We raise people’s self-esteem."

The Lutheran Office for Governmental Affairs (LOGA) is located in Washington, DC. Its staff monitors legislative activity in Congress, makes the ELCA’s position known to legislators, informs church members about current legislation, and suggests advocacy actions to be taken by church members. LOGA staff keep church members informed via briefings at meetings of many levels of church governance, as well as through a periodic newsletter and action alert notices. LOGA staff may contact congressional legislators and staffers, as well as administration personnel; they may also present testimony to congressional committees. In addition, LOGA participates in interdenominational, interfaith, and inter-organizational coalitions. LOGA also works in partnership with 19 ELCA state public policy advocacy offices, as well as with other Lutheran and interfaith partners in public policy advocacy ministries in several states.

Now a ministry of the Division for Church and Society of the ELCA, LOGA continues a long tradition of formal Lutheran presence in the nation’s capitol. The office has been in existence in some form since 1945, when it was formed by the eight member churches of the National Lutheran Church Council. These churches later merged to form the American Lutheran Church (ALC) and the Lutheran Church in America (LCA), which in turn eventually became part of the ELCA.

LOGA’s involvement with specific issues is based on social statements of the ELCA or of the ELCA’s predecessor churches when those statements are in agreement. Through participation in the church’s Inter-unit Staff Team on Advocacy, LOGA staff help to prioritize issues for the church’s public policy activity. This team develops the ELCA Advocacy Plan for review by the Church Council, the body that sets the direction for churchwide advocacy efforts over the coming two-year period.

LOGA staff consider monitoring and speaking out about environmental issues to be an important part of their mission. During most years in the 1990's, LOGA had staff available to track environmental legislation in addition to the many other issues it follows. This was made possible by LOGA’s partnership with interns from Lutheran Volunteer Corps. Environmental issues they have addressed include: use of dioxin-producing chemicals in papermaking, disposal of nuclear waste, wetlands and endangered species preservation, wilderness development, children's environmental protection, clean air standards, and environmental damage due to mining.

The Lutheran Office for World Community, located in New York City, represents the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) at the United Nations (UN). LOWC staff monitor UN activities. The information gathered helps the LWF and the ELCA determine their humanitarian aid response, as well as their public policy statements. LOWC staff communicate ELCA and LWF positions and concerns to UN staff and governmental representatives; they also work through coalitions with other churches and non-governmental organizations.

The LWF is a communion of 114 Lutheran churches, representing some 55 million Lutherans around the globe. LWF is a non-governmental organization officially recognized by the UN's Economic and Social Council, and is engaged in interfaith dialogue and study, mission exchange and development, humanitarian aid, social service and development, defense of human rights, and efforts to address social and economic injustice. LOWC is an in-kind contribution which the ELCA makes to the Lutheran World Federation by maintaining a presence at the United Nations headquarters.

LOWC was founded in 1973, and was maintained by the ELCA’s predecessor churches prior to the formation of the ELCA. It originally worked primarily on behalf of independence for Namibia, which was achieved in 1990. It is currently a ministry of the ELCA’s Division for Church and Society. The work of LOWC grows out of Lutheran support for the principles embodied in the United Nations Charter: peace, fundamental human rights, justice and respect for international law, social progress and better standards of life for all.

LOWC follows events in a rather wide range of geographical areas and topics, and the office’s agenda fluctuates with the international one to a large degree. For this reason, environmental issues comprise only a small part of the varied UN agenda that LOWC staff monitor and address. Despite the fact that LOWC does not have the capacity to devote full-time staff exclusively to environmental issues, LOWC does provide an important international voice and presence that can keep the church informed and represent the church’s position on international environmental issues.

The Corporate Social Responsibility Program is located at the Lutheran Office for Governmental Affairs office, in Washington, DC. It seeks to promote peace, economic justice, and stewardship of the earth and its human and physical resources through dialogue with corporations in which the ELCA and its related organizations hold investments. This dialogue may take place via shareholder resolutions, conversations with corporate managers, conferences it sponsors, or through the work of the ecumenical Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), in which the ELCA participates. The ICCR encourages major corporations to work with communities through facility location, employment, contracting, marketing, consumer services, etc. The Office for Corporate Social Responsibility is a ministry of the Division for Church and Society.

In 1993, the Office for Corporate Social Responsibility began a particular social responsibility focus on questions of environmental protection and community renewal. Working with the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, the ELCA has been instrumental in encouraging corporations to institute major environmental protection measures. The issues have varied from adopting broad sets of environmental principles to specific recommendations on reduction of carbon dioxide emissions and protection of the ozone layer. The approach has been one that helps narrow the communication gap between corporations and environmental groups.

The Department for Studies of the Division for Church and Society oversees the development of the ELCA’s social statements. Social statements are documents on various issues, including abortion, the death penalty, racism, the church’s role in society, international issues, caring for the environment, and economics. These documents present official church policy on those issues. In order to be adopted as official social statements of the church, these documents must be passed by at least a two-thirds majority at one of the biennial churchwide assemblies.

The Division for Church in Society studies staff help to lead the ELCA through biblical-theological reflection and moral deliberation in the process of developing these statements. The process involves task forces, study, hearings, written feedback, drafting and redrafting. Congregational involvement is pivotal as issues are viewed through eyes of faith. It is a difficult, but empowering process.

In 1993, the ELCA adopted a social statement that deals with environmental issues, called Caring for Creation: Vision, Hope, and Justice. The statement acknowledges that there is an environmental crisis, describes how human sinfulness has caused it, presents the church’s vision of what our relationship to the environment should be, expresses our hope for God’s renewal of creation, and calls us to be committed to working toward a more just relationship with other people and the environment. It explains why caring for the environment is a theological issue, and commits the church to a number of actions aimed at creating a world more in keeping with God’s call to "till and keep" the earth. A more extensive explanation of the contents of Caring for Creation may be found in the chapter, "What Does the ELCA Say About the Environment?"

The ELCA Work Group on Science and Technology is a group of laity and clergy dedicated to expanding awareness and promoting conversation about the implications of science and technology for Christian faith and life. Issues members deal with include: biomedical ethics, creation and evolution, environmental stewardship, impacts of technology, science as a Christian vocation, worship in a scientific and technological age, and more. The Work Group provides materials such as resource packets for congregations on faith and science, worship and devotional materials, and a newsletter. The Work Group has also presented workshops on faith and science at various ELCA events, sponsored and participated in faith and science conferences, and represents the ELCA on the interdenominational Ecumenical Roundtable on Science, Religion, and the Church.

The Ecumenical Roundtable on Science, Religion, and the Church, organized in the mid-1980's, is made up of representatives from about a dozen member denominations in the United States and Canada. The Roundtable holds an annual conference and produces a bimonthly newsletter, "Covalence", both dedicated to exploring the relationship between science and theology.

Initially conceived at a 1987 international ecumenical conference on science and the church, the Work Group has been in existence since 1991. It is a part of the ELCA’s Division for Ministry. Work Group members are volunteers who live all over the country. A steering committee communicates by teleconference, and support staff for the Work Group is located at the ELCA churchwide offices in Chicago, IL.

Environmental issues are scientific issues as well as theological and ethical issues. Many of the topics that the Work Group and the Roundtable deal with have environmental implications; the Roundtable even devoted an issue of its newsletter to exploring "science, religion, and the environment". Both groups’ work in addressing the scientific aspects of the discussion on caring for the environment thus provide a valuable complement to the theology-, advocacy-, and practice-oriented work of other ELCA environmental ministries.

In addition to the work of the paid staff who participate in the various ELCA environmental ministries, there are many volunteer committees organized within particular synods and congregations. The committees, who may be comprised of clergy and lay people, are known by various names, but are united in that they do important, hands-on work--organizing events, leading study groups, giving presentations on earthkeeping, and much more. Contact your synod headquarters for information on whether such a committee exists in your region.

The outdoor ministries network of the ELCA is a part of the ministry of the Division for Congregational Ministries. This network is comprised of approximately 145 programs or sites in the United States and Puerto Rico. The network serves all ages and offers programs and facilities that are both year-round and seasonal. Most operate as independent nonprofit corporations affiliated with the ELCA, some are owned by a synod or individual congregation, and a few are affiliated with the Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod or other church bodies.

Earthkeeping-related Activities

According to its mission statement, the ELCA Outdoor Ministries Program is "committed to affirm and experience our interrelationship with all of God’s creation in an intentional Christian community. Outdoor ministries encourage spiritual growth for the whole person by providing encounter with scripture, the experience and care of the environment, witness of staff, and opportunities for worship, re-creation, and development of relationships." Participants in this extensive network of camp and retreat centers have the opportunity to learn more about the workings of God’s creation and experience its beauty firsthand.

The ELCA is one of 34 church bodies that participate in the National Council of Churches (NCC), an organization that works to promote unity among this country’s Christian churches. The NCC is located in New York City. The Eco-Justice Working Group, started in 1983, is one of the many ministries of the NCC. Its function is to provide resources for environmental education and action to its member churches. The ELCA is an active participant in the work of the Eco-Justice Working Group, which includes the following projects: an environmental justice covenant congregation program; numerous study materials; a black church environmental justice program; a newsletter, "Environmental Justice Notes"; a resource distribution center that makes available environmental justice resource materials produced by the NCC and by member churches; a network of environmental justice coordinators from member denominations; and participation as one of four member groups in the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE) (see description, this section).

Through its participation in the National Council of Churches (see description, this section), the ELCA also contributes to the work of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE). The NRPE is located in New York City, and was established in 1993. It is an interfaith organization comprised of four member groups: the National Council of Churches, the US Catholic Conference, the Evangelical Environmental Network and the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life. The group is committed to "being ourselves, together", has a common goal: "to integrate commitment to global sustainability and environmental justice permanently into all aspects of religious life." NRPE serves as a resource for networking and communication among member groups. Its website provides a calendar of eco-justice events, a searchable list of newspaper headlines, a discussion group, and links to a large number of eco-justice-related websites.

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