American Evangelical Lobbies Creation Care in Australia
A high-profile American evangelical is in Australia this week to lobby for climate change legislation and to get evangelicals down South more active in the creation care movement.
The Rev. Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals is meeting with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on Monday as well as the opposition party's environment spokesman Greg Hunt.
Cizik, who was named by Time magazine as one of its 100 most influential people in 2008, has argued that climate change is a moral issue and evangelicals have a Biblical obligation to protect God's creation.
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"I say to my fellow evangelicals, when you die, God is not going ask you how old the earth is or whether or not he created it in six days or six billion years," Cizik said on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) radio on Monday.
"He is going to say, what did you do with what I created and we have to have an answer. We have to say we took care of it when it was hurting."
While Cizik has been widely applauded by both the secular and Christian world for getting evangelicals involved in the climate change discussion, his advocacy has not been without controversy and opposition.
A group of well-known and influential Christian right leaders last year wrote a letter to the NAE board seeking them to either restrain Cizik from speaking about global warming or press him to resign.
The dozens of conservative evangelical leaders argued that Cizik was misrepresenting the evangelical voice because some do not believe that global warming is real or mainly man-made.
In the end, the NAE board sided with Cizik and he continues to be an outspoken advocate of Christian involvement in the climate change issue.
Similar to the situation in the United States, not all Christians in Australia believe that climate change is real or caused primarily by human activities.
The Archbishop of Sydney George Pell, for one, has said he's a climate change skeptic.
However, the National Council of Churches in Australia is supporting Cizik's effort to promote the green evangelical movement in the country.
"I think more and more not just evangelicals but Christians throughout Australia are becoming concerned about these issues," said John Henderson, general secretary of the NCC in Australia on ABC radio.
Henderson said that his group plans to educate Christians in the next few years about what Christian teachings and practices says about the issue. Combining Christian teaching with science, the NCC hopes to get churches to agree on a common policy on the issue.
"If we can mobilize Christians around Australia towards better attitudes towards the environment and responsible energy use and the like, then that is going to go a long way to helping the whole community," Henderson said.
