Quote To Ponder: Missionaries to the Creation? Chris Wright

Below is a quotation from evangelical Christopher J.H. Wright (who I am told is taking up the mantle of John Stott in the UK) in The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative. This was a challenging book that gave me a larger framework for understanding what it means to be a missional Christian. For a long time, I have been convinced that ecology should matter to Christ-followers. But when I read our “quote to ponder” for the first time, it truly pushed how far I was willing to take my theology of ‘going green.’ According to Wright, in our message and movement of reflecting the good news in mission; serving creation is a type of missionary endeavor (not to downplay the importance of our mission to humanity who need to know the restorative love of Jesus).

What are your thoughts on this quote? Do you think that creation care is a form of Christian missions or is this an ‘ethics’ issue? Are you ready to become a “missionary to creation?”

Holistic mission, then, is not truly holistic if it includes only human beings (even if it includes them holistically!) and excludes the rest of the creation for whose reconciliation Christ shed his blood (Col 1:20). Those Christians show they have responded to God’s call to serve him through serving his nonhuman creatures in ecological projects are engaged in a specialized form of mission that has its rightful place within the broad framework of all that God’s mission has as its goal. [Chris Wright, the Mission of God, 416]