Since 1996 Cindy has volunteered with A Rocha in Portugal, on the Canadian Board of Directors, as a newsletter editor, and as community group leader in Edmonton until she moved to BC 15 years ago and became A Rocha’s Northern BC Representative & Community Mobilizer. Cindy is a graduate of King’s University College with a BSc, and a Naturalist certificate from the Au Sable Institute in Michigan. She is currently based in the beautiful Bulkley Valley in Houston, BC, where she lives with her husband Dennis and their children.
I attended Au Sable in 1993 and started dreaming about opening a Canadian Christian environmental school. It was why I became involved in A Rocha. In 2015 several of us had the idea to open a fish hatchery and nature centre and the community got excited.
She wakes up. She knows she is ready. Ready for her big day. The sun has never been brighter. The sky has never been bluer. This is the day she’s been waiting for all her life. This is the day she has been working so hard to get everything ready for.
We live in a moment of history in which our way of living is characterized by shrill advertising, rampant over-consumption and wanton waste – all with disastrous consequences for the ecological communities we are part of and upon which we depend on for our very survival. And yet, there is an alternative narrative.
We join the many thousands of others who are grieving the loss of Eugene Peterson, who was a dearly-loved teacher and guide to so many of us in the A Rocha family around the world.
“Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” has been helpful in adopting wiser ways to consume. For Christians, however, living more sustainably has to be understood in terms of our relationship to the creator God as well. I want to suggest a new motto: “Relish, Redeem, Rest”.
I was woken by a bright flash and a deafening bang, despite my earplugs and eye-mask. Was it a bomb? No, this was Typhoon Mangkhut (locally called Ompong), the biggest storm recorded in the world so far this year.
Our demand for natural resources depends on how much stuff we consume, multiplied by how many of us there are. Readers of this blog will be no strangers to the myriad ways in which we are damaging God’s creation. Human population is discussed much less; it’s a political “hot potato” which conservation organisations, development agencies and churches tend to steer clear of.
This summer, after 10 years as an international trustee, I retired from the board of A Rocha. How is it that the son of an immigrant fisherman from Japan came to be involved with creation care?
By ‘plastic theology’ I don’t mean theology that is cheap, disposable and tacky! I want to reflect on the spiritual power and importance of something that has only been around for a very short time yet has become all-pervasive and all of us have become dependent upon.
Sometimes the Christian Gospel is described as a universal message that speaks to all cultures. I profoundly disagree! The Gospel is not a set of abstract philosophical concepts that are […]
