The Blessed Earth Seminary Stewardship Alliance has as its main goal moving the church to a position of moral leadership on environmental sustainability by educating, inspiring, and empowering the next generation of church leaders. As the name implies, the Seminary Stewardship Alliance is a partnership for a collaborative project between seminaries for the purpose of preparing future church leaders to be catalysts for positive change around issues of environmental sustainability. By focusing on seminary students, we can indirectly influence the thousands of parishioners that each graduating pastor will impact in the course of their ministry. Through the alliance of seminary partners, Blessed Earth seeks to return creation care to the center of Church values, practices, and prayers.

Objectives

1. To launch the Seminary Stewardship Alliance with 8 to 12 significant seminaries as founding members.
2. By the end of 5 years, establish partnerships with at least 50 seminaries, who influence thousands of students per year.
3. To convene an annual gathering of participants and supporters, with tracks tailored for students, professors, administrators, pastoral leaders, and interested lay people.
4. To serve as a catalyst for the development of the key theological content, including new and expanded seminary level courses, which provide the Christian rationale for creation care as central to discipleship.
5. To support partner seminaries in modeling good stewardship and sustainability practices on their campuses and incorporating state-of-the-art green construction in new and remodeled buildings.

Method

Initially, the biggest contribution to the success of the Seminary Stewardship Alliance rests with the identification and securing of the right set of founding partners. The long term success of the alliance will rest upon leveraging the initial set of leaders into broader participation by seminaries across denominational and traditional boundaries. Factors for longer term success include partnering with seminaries that reach a significant number of future leaders and making sure there is strong leadership participation at the local level.

In the middle 1960’s, a campaign conducted by the YMCA had the slogan, “There is safety in numbers and more fun, too!” The campaign aimed to make swimming a safer activity by encouraging swimmers to recognize the inherent safety of being part of a group rather than a “lone ranger.” Similarly, a key component of alliance success involves providing a forum for gathering partners and supporters to network, motivate, and inspire each other. In Year 1, founding seminary presidents will convene for a weekend of collaboration, relationship building, and inspiration. In subsequent years, the annual gathering will expand to include leaders, professors, students, pastoral leaders, alumni, and lay persons.

To integrate creation care across the disciplines of seminary education, we will work with professors of a wide range of seminary courses, motivating and incentivizing them to incorporate creation care themes into their existing courses. Bible courses should have a module that addresses care of the planet from a scriptural perspective; church history courses should include teaching on how these themes have been present in the work of the church fathers and mothers; discipleship and missions courses should equip future pastors to teach and engage missions work from this perspective; and homiletics courses should prepare future pastors to preach to their congregations on their obligations to care for the earth. The Seminary Stewardship Alliance will work proactively with each seminary partner to insure these themes are included on a more global basis within the curriculum, including developing key theological resources through partnership with influential theologians.

Creation care theology must not only be taught; it must be modeled. The Seminary Stewardship Alliance will advise, resource, and encourage partner seminaries and, subsequently, churches led by the new graduates of those seminaries, to incorporate good stewardship and sustainability practices. The Alliance will develop relationships in the green architecture and construction fields to assure that these resources are available to seminaries and churches who undertake building and renovation projects.

These efforts all require resources. Blessed Earth will aggressively work along side partner seminaries to secure resources for students, course work, endowed chairs, and environmentally-responsible construction, travel, and communications.

Partners

We are actively seeking to expand our base of seminary partners. Our goal is to demonstrate that creation care is not the concern of a single denomination within the broader Christian tradition. Indeed, living sustainably, seeking to exercise appropriate stewardship strategies, and modeling care for the earth in all we do is not something we “add on” to being a follower of Jesus. Instead, it is what following Jesus looks like in relieving our responsibilities to be care-takers of God’s creation. We seek partner seminaries from within all the major strands of the Christian tradition.

Blessed Earth intends to operate in ways that help our partner seminaries to be seen as the moral leaders on creation care matters. We will support our common goals while making sure that partner seminaries are the beneficiaries of our outreach and public relations efforts, thereby encouraging potential seminary students to attend partner institutions. Together, we will work to educate, empower, and model for our Christian sisters and brothers sustainable living, and through that, respond to one of humanity’s most significant challenges: the preservation of our planet.