One only has to visit to Boise, Idaho, to see why the Vineyard’s environmental stewardship movement has taken root there. If you think “potatoes” when you think Boisethink again. Rather, think “high desert paradise”, because it is a sermon for the senses on the glory of God.
This is where the Boise Vineyard is flourishing. In a growing metro area, the church campus is itself an oasis, hosting both a community garden and a compassion ministry warehouse. Outside the church is parked a recyclables truck with the church’s logo on it. Because many of Boise’s developing suburbs weren’t yet offering curbside recycling, the Boise Vineyard told its people to bring their recyclable trash to church, and they’d take care of it. It didn’t take long before there was so much volume that they needed their own truck for recycling.
Inside the church one walks past the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. into a cloistered prayer garden, and one can pause by an outdoor fountain surrounded by bricks engraved with the names of babies dedicated in the church, golden anniversary couples, and founding church plant team members. (Many of those founding team members are still around, seventeen years and two thousand people later.)
At the center of all this activity is Pastor Tri Robinson. We sat in office to talk around a coffee table inset with a map of the “River of No Return Wilderness” in the nearby national forest.
Environmental stewardship ministry is not your average evangelical concern. What launched you into it?
At a wedding reception a few years ago I was cornered by this hippie woman. She asked if I was the pastor. I could tell by the tone of her voice and the look in her eye that I probably didn’t want to be, but I confessed that I was. She said, “This wedding reception should be a crime. I’ve never seen so much going to waste with no recycling available anywhere!” I knew she was right. And that exchange really got me thinking. I have a personal background in ecology. I taught science, biology and ecology for twelve years as a teacher at the secondary school level.
Another factor was a conversation that I had with my two kids before the 2000 national election. They were really struggling with the life versus the environment issue, and I realized that it was an issue for their generation.
Part of the difficulty for me was coming to faith in the midst of the Jesus movement, which emphasized the “end times” with a message that said, Jesus is coming back soon, and the earth is just going to burn up anyway, so why care about it? Let’s just bring people to Jesus.” So I was pursuing ministry with those kinds of messages in the background. But I never lost my love for the mountains. And most of my most profound experiences of God have occurred in the wilderness.
In various experiences as well as in prayer I increasingly felt more and more challenged to address this issue. I would pray, “Lord, you’ve got to lead me through this because I know it is a super-volatile, controversial issue. I know that the evangelical church perceives it as part of a liberal agenda, and I want to be used to break that paradigm.”
I understand the book title has a dual meaning in the word “save.” Can you spell that out?
Our publisher gave the book its title, and at first I didn’t get it. But he titled the book after listening to me for all those hours. The book is all about salvation. It’s about the church taking seriously its commission to go out and to be unifier as we take on this responsibility to save the creation.
Interestingly, since the book was published a barrier between the churched and the unchurched has been overcome like nothing I’ve ever experienced in my life. I’ve met people now who have seen the church as irrelevant, and they want to have these conversations because in our community the Vineyard in Boise has become one of the major environmental forces.
Can you give us some examples?
One of the things we did early on was put together a recycling task force within the church and, because we were not very good at recycling, started a ministry called “Tithe of Trash”. We encouraged people who didn’t have good recycling in their own neighborhood to bring their trash to the church on Sundays. Our task force would to take that to a recycling company at the end of the week. What we found out, however, that the company was actually taking the plastic and burning it, which is even worse for the environment! So we quit doing that and went to our local department instead, who said they’d pick up the recycling but charge us $100 a month to do it. So we are now going to the mayor. We have been at this for a year and a half, now, so we have some credibility and a voice. It will probably hit the media, too, that there is actually a church that’s upset about the recycling program in the city!
A lot of pastors are afraid to do this for fear that they will damage their church, but we have found that it’s actually caused us to grow. We have attracted people to the church as a result of what we are doing and saying.
Also, we have sent over a hundred people to work down at the Katrina disaster and we funded much of it through recycled cell phones. We went door to door here in Boise collecting unneeded cell phones for that purpose. Even government agencies started bringing their cell phones to us. Historically folks have not seen the church do things that are good for the community, at least in terms of social projects, so this is getting some notice.
We have also something called the “School of Social Action” as part of our Vineyard College of Mission here at the church. We are marrying the environmental work we are doing with our missions program. Historically we didn’t have a problem taking medicine out to the mission field. Now we are going to go clean up the water that causes the disease in the first place. So we’re trying to take this kind of concern beyond our own community and state here into the rest of the world.
The Boise Vineyard recently hosted an environmental conference. Can you tell us more about that?
There has been Christian environmental work going on for years, including people like Dr. Calvin DeWitt, a man who has been teaching at the university level for over forty years, and Peter Illyn, the founder of Restoring Eden. The problem for those guys is that they have never had a big voice outside of college campuses. So this conference was huge, not only because Bert Waggoner was present, but also in that it brought these environmental efforts to the local church. The effects from this can be really big. Not only is it a theological fact that God’s people are commissioned to care for creation, churches are also the ones with mass participation in volunteer systems. We can actually go out into our communities, and bring it into our missions programs.
What we’ve got to do, though, is make it a normal biblical value. I think about James Dobson and what he did for valuing the family. In the 1960s, valuing the family was not a strong point of the Jesus Movement. That was something he brought. And now we need to do the same for creation’s care.
Anything else you’d like to highlight about what is going on in Boise?
We just received a certificate of appreciation award from the National Forest Service last weekend, for some of our work clearing and restoring page trails in the park system. I was just asked by the Boise Zoo to sit on their board to determine how their conservation money should be spent. I was just contacted by the Idaho Conservation League, the biggest conservation group in the state of Idaho. They have never known what to do about the church, which has largely been antagonistic toward them. One of their representatives came in and he couldn’t believe that I would actually have an appointment with him. We just sat and talked for a long while.
Have you found a lot of support in this effort?
The media, interestingly, has been picking up on this. The Associated Press just did an article on us last weekend that went to all the major papers in the country. PBS shot a sixty-minute documentary featuring Boise Vineyard and its efforts. It aired October 11, 2006. We’ve been getting all kinds of emails since then. Most of the reactions from Christians have been to say, “Thank you for finally taking this issue on.” Lately I’ve been on both Christian and secular radio at least twice weekly speaking on the issue. The Boise Weekly, usually considered the most liberal paper in the state of Idaho, recently did a really positive article about our church, which is not their usual angle.
It’s amazing how it has bridged a gap to the unchurched. In twenty-five years of ministry I’ve never had opportunities like this before.
The only negative feedback I’ve received have been from conservative Christians. I had one conservative talk show host say that he thought this was a conspiracy to split the conservatives. And of course, there is a debate over Global Warming, which is not something I’ve made a stand on one way or the other. I think it’s too politicized right now. I say that the world is in trouble ecologically and environmentally, and that the church should seize the moment because humanity is suffering because of it. I think that no one can argue with the fact that things are warming up. Whether they are warming up because of natural cycles or man’s overuse of fossil fuels is irrelevant to me, because humanity is suffering, and so this needs to be addressed. Besides, I believe we are using too much fossil fuel anyway, so what is the big deal about trying to use less?
What can churches do that aren’t in a large wilderness area like Idaho?
I would say that there is always graffiti to clean up, and there is always recycling that needs to take place. The environment is in trouble, and it is going to take everyone’s creative effort. Folks in big metro areas have access to more cell phones than I do. You can generate money and income to go out and take on big conservation projects easier than I can. And there are still missions, wherever you are.
One of the things that we did when we started this was to provide education for people. We taught three classes: How to Leave the World a Better Place in Your Home, talking about how to make your home more efficient and more green’; How to Leave the World a Better Place in Your Community and in your State, with the latter talking about lobbying and politics and promoting legislative change; and one on How to Leave the World a Better Place in your Church. A lot of people attended those, both from inside and outside the church.
We really need to educate the upcoming generation. I’m thinking about writing another book titled something like Small Footprint, Big Handprint. The idea is that you render your life down to the things that will count, so that you make a smaller carbon footprint on the earth, leave less negative damage on it. By living more simply and rendering it down you have more impactthat’s the Big Handprint of God on the world around you. It’s a priorities issue and a lifestyle issue. It is hard to get believers to change mid-stride. It’s almost going back to the sixtieswe wanted to figure out how to have a bigger impact on the world. Somewhere along the line we forgot about that. But we’ve got to reprioritize our lives and downsize. We don’t need all this big stuffbig houses, big cars. They own us. Let’s get free.
How does this play out in your church?
We’ve always said that discipleship needs to have hands and feet immediately. After Nehemiah had seen the wall and met with his core group, and after he had sold the vision to the people in Nehemiah chapter 2, the people immediately said, “Let’s begin this good work.” I’ve always seen that this is absolutely key for a leader. You cannot say, “As Jesus said, As you have done this for the least of these, you have done it for Me.’ Therefore we should go feed the poor,” and then not provide easy access for people to go feed the poor. Otherwise that message is lost.
The biblical message has got to be kinetic. It’s got to have action and movement. So immediately when you sell this vision, the next week your bulletin should be on recycled paper. You should have recycle bins in your church. There should be signs and opportunities for people to get involved, classes to go to. In our case we had people go out and clean up the river that flows through our city or go out and do some trail work. We had team sign-ups for both those things right away. So there has to be an immediate response of the people, or the value just becomes theology without practice.
Before I ever said anything to the church, I met with a team of people who had been working in these fields. These were people who were already Christians, already in my church. I gathered them into a kind of undercover taskforce that met for about three months to help me come up with a strategy before I pulled the trigger on the church.
Is there anything you would say to those who would be skeptical about doing this out of a concern to avoid political agendas?
First of all, I kept politics out of it and I said that from the very beginning. I said “This is not a political agenda; this is a biblical agenda.” I believe we were commissioned in Genesis 9. Noah’s commission wasn’t just to end with himit was to go on for all generations. It was a commission to have dominion, which speaks of responsibility. It was a commission between God and his creation. We are just given stewardship over it. So this is a biblical agenda and we are going to approach it in that way. If that affects how you vote, so be it, but that’s not going to come from the pulpit.
People have to be convinced before stepping out.
We have a tendency as human beings to look at the global environmental condition and we get overwhelmed. We think it’s a lost cause. We think it’s so steeped in politics that it’s out of our control. But the one thing I would say is that when God came and spoke this commission to Noah, at some point in time Noah had to pick up a hatchet and cut down a gopher wood tree. He had to do something. And if that’s recycling aluminum cans or cell phones, if that’s starting to print your materials on recycled paper, if that’s encouraging your people to shop with cloth bags that you provide for them, whatever it is, God blesses small beginnings. Just do something.
Related Resources
www.vineyardboise.org
www.letstendthegarden.org
www.restoringeden.org
The Bill Moyers PBS Interview: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/moyersonamerica/green/index.html
“These creatures minister to our needs every day: without them we could not live; and through them the human race greatly offends the Creator. We fail every day to appreciate so great a blessing by not praising as we should the Creator and Dispenser of all things.”
Francis of Assisi
