Churches Hear Call of Creation

How a congregation in Baltimore started caring for an urban forest while another in Grand Rapids started counting dragonflies, damselflies, and white heelsplitter mussels.

Calling is a funny thing.

When Michael Martin accepted the pastor position at Stillmeadow Community Fellowship, he expected he’d preach, pray, counsel, marry, bury, baptize, and otherwise shepherd the flock at the Evangelical Free Church in Baltimore.

He didn’t plan on becoming an urban forest keeper.

“It took a minute,” he said, laughing at the evolution of his ministry.

Gary Koning knows how that goes. What started as a pretty typical stream clean-up effort has completely altered his congregation at Trinity Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

“From one thing it has grown to another and another,” said Koning, now an expert on watershed macroinvertebrates.

The two men don’t know each other and don’t have any common connections. But in their separate churches, and their separate callings, they both found that being faithful in ministry meant taking care of nature. Christ’s call to “feed my sheep” required tending the patch of earth where their churches were standing. While not every congregation, or every Christian, has a literal garden to tend, Martin and Koning’s ministries offer examples of what the sometimes-abstract concept of “creation care” can look like taken seriously.

Amid the pandemic, social upheaval, and generational shifts in church membership, both pastors have seen how the special relationship between God and nature, a communion reflected throughout Scripture, has given new life to their congregations.

Martin couldn’t even see the 10 acres of woods next to the Evangelical Free Church when he came to Baltimore. Well, he could see them. But in a more important way, he couldn’t.

“It was just ‘da ...