Eco congregations have a special role to play in responding to climate change. They must work on the practical challenges to reduce our carbon footprints but they must not lose sight of the spiritual dimension. This is of the greatest importance: we need a spiritual response to challenge the materialist culture in which we live and the idolatry of consumerism.
That was the message of Alastair McIntosh, who delivered the keynote address at Eco Congregation Scotland’s 3rd annual gathering, which was held in Stirling in March.
“Eco congregations can cultivate the spirituality that helps to fill the gap in our lives,” he said. “Eco congregations may feel that their achievements are modest in practical terms but they can be God inspired in aspiration. This work lays the spiritual ground to live in peace with the earth and with each other. This in turn will rekindle the inner life and its fulfilment.”
McIntosh said that we were all complicit in the idolatry of consumerism: “We plunder the earth’s resources in order to sustain our high level of consumption and at the same time condemn a large portion of the world’s population to poverty. We continue to exploit nature and people in other parts of the world.
“This is sustained by a consumer economy and political system that panders to our greed and avarice. Retail therapy may offer us a short term high but it creates more craving and fails to offer any real depth of satisfaction. We become individual consumers and lose our sense of community and ability to feel for others. This greed leads to violence, both against the earth and against each others: to sustain our current level of consumption we need to plunder the resources of others.
“We need to challenge the illusions by which we live, to disillusion ourselves of the idolatry of consumerism and to face up to its consequences. We are like the Israelites who failed to listen to Jeremiah and his warning of Babylonian captivity.”
McIntosh said that, “The great work of people of faith must be to deepen spirituality”. He said, “Our work must therefore be applied partly in the outer life of practical action, but also in the inner realm of spirituality. The practical side is, really, the small work; the spiritual, the great work, on which the practical ultimately depends. “Seek ye first the Kingdom…” This is what, in my view, ought to distinguish a faith-based approach to social and environmental justice from a secular approach. It is our task to expose how consumerism is a form of idolatry because it puts material acquisition before God. We must be participants in seeking with one another promised “life abundant” – not by accumulating “stuff” or raking in the money, but through spiritual quickening (John 10:10). Such is the good news in troubled times.”
He said, “We need to unhook from our addictions to consumerism, and remove legitimacy from the idea that to show off with material things is worthy of respect. We have become addicted to consumer idolatry (because that is what all idolatries do) and now we must seek profound healing. The emptiness our society faces without consumerism and all that goes with it to hide the pain is so great that only God can fill the hole. That’s why it is spiritual work.
“Just as an individual who suffers may seek psychotherapy, so collectively we must address the state we’re in. The churches, if they dare to play the prophetic role to which they are called, have deep paths of discipleship to walk here …. None of us can be sure what the future is going to bring, but we can all seek to strengthen resilience in community with one another to face come-what-may in the come-to-pass. If the politicians can have their Resilience Room, I’d like to see our churches acting more like Resilience Centres from which we seek the grace that strengthens the spirit and reconstitutes the human condition.”
In his book, Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition (Birlinn), Alastair McIntosh suggests that there is a need to look for a kind of ‘cultural psychotherapy’ and outlines a 12-step programme to tackle the roots of climate change.