Peter and Miranda moved to Portugal in 1983 to establish and run A Rocha’s first field study centre. Together with their four children they lived at the centre for twelve years until 1995 when the work was given over to national leadership. They then moved to establish A Rocha France’s first centre near Arles, and lived there until 2010, providing coordination and giving leadership to the rapidly growing global movement. They are now back in the UK from where they work to support the A Rocha family around the world while being closer to their own, and not least their grandchildren. Their story is told in Under the Bright Wings (1993) and Kingfisher’s Fire (2008).
John Stott wasn’t interested in being liked or admired, or in winning arguments for the sake of it. He was interested in knowing Christ and making him known, in his lordship over all creation, and in the truth of the biblical record.
I watched ‘Life of Pi’ last week, taking a break from working on a PhD which includes looking at the relevance of the book of Job for wildlife conservation. As I watched the film I noticed some parallels.
Happy New Year!? What will 2013 hold? More hurricanes, droughts, floods, crop-failures, wildlife extinctions, urban-drift, and desperate people attempting to escape poverty. Not to mention global economic gloom. Perhaps the scarcest commodity of all is hope. What hope can Christians have for the future of the earth, or of our own species?
One month ago, sixty people from six continents gathered in Jamaica to pray, listen, reflect and call for action. The Lausanne Consultation on Creation Care and the Gospel, co-sponsored by the World Evangelical Alliance, was based on the belief that creation care is a gospel issue within the Lordship of Christ, and also that today there is a vital urgency about our task.
In late July 2011, the church lost a great statesman, and A Rocha lost a great friend. News of John Stott’s death reached us just as we were setting off for Strumble Head in Pembrokeshire to watch seabirds, walk the cliffs and scan the skies for Peregrines. John’s beloved cottage, The Hookses, lay just a few miles to the south. Fitting, somehow.
Where do you feel most at home? Is it a place filled with childhood memories, or is it where you live now? Is it in a beautiful landscape, or amongst people you love and trust? Is it safely locked behind the door of your house? Or are you longing for eternity – to be ‘at home’ with Christ?
At a recent conference in the USA, author and Professor Kathleen Dean Moore invited the audience to “give up hope” for the environment. At one end of the hope extreme, she said, is “hopelessness”: nothing we do will matter; at the other end is “uninformed hope”: everything will turn out all right. I agree that neither hopelessness nor uninformed hope is of any value. I stop short, however, of discarding hope.
I’ve grown up with the future according to Hollywood: visions of a scary, dystopian future with a world devastated and destroyed. It’s not surprising that popular Christian literature has followed suit. For years I assumed the central assumption was true: that this world would be destroyed completely when Christ returned in judgment. But as I started reading the Bible myself, my questions grew.
“The ‘what can nature do for us’ approach has made it increasingly difficult for conservationists to protect the most threatened species on the planet. We have an important moral and ethical decision to make: Do these species have a right to survive or do we have a right to drive them to extinction?”
When I preach for A Rocha, the hymn ‘How great Thou art’ is often chosen. It’s often voted amongst all-time favourites, and verse two makes it an obvious choice for the Christian conservationist. Yet, whilst I love the tune and many of the lyrics, my heart sinks every time I hear the last verse…
