From Dean Ohlman on June 26, 2011

So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground” (Genesis 1:27-28).

This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, when the LORD God made the earth and the heavens. Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth and no plant had yet sprung up, for the LORD God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no one to work the ground. . . . The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it (Genesis 2:5-6, 15)

If you view the “About” page, you will find these website and Facebook mission statements:

WonderOfCreation.org (WOC) is a website that seeks to explore the majesty of God’s creation and celebrate its beauty and wonder. Through creation, God’s invisible qualities—His eternal power and divine nature—are clearly seen and serve as a motivation for our worship and for acknowledging our responsibility to be good stewards (caretakers) of His good creation (Romans 1:20).

The WonderOfCreation.org Facebook mission statement is similar and shorter: “To showcase the wonder of Creation, to encourage trust in the wisdom and power of our Creator, and to inspire a desire to care for the natural world that He has entrusted to us.”

In keeping with those statements, I often use the phrase “creation care” when writing for this website. It’s a term whose currency parallels my own development as an advocate for good stewardship of the natural world—God’s gift of a wonderful and fruitful creation. In the past within the church when the pastor preached his annual “stewardship sermon,” it was typically at the urging of the deacons’ to preach to the congregation about digging deeper into the wallet so the staff can get paid and the property and buildings be properly maintained. [image source]

Later it became a broader call—to the stewardship of talent, time, and treasure (the perfect 3-point sermon!). Only in the past twenty years and only in some circles has stewardship of the natural world commonly been added to list. “Stewardship” is a good word, meaning in essence that we are not the owners of the gifts given to us by the Creator but are His servants (or stewards). And we are to use these gifts as individuals accountable to God.

However, because “stewardship” has for decades been applied primarily to money, those who saw the broader picture searched for a different and more inclusive term. One clever and catchy term suggested in the late seventies was “good earthkeeping,” playing, of course, on the popularity of Good Housekeeping magazine. A seminal book on our responsibility to care for creation was published under the title Earthkeeping in 1980, and a revised edition in 1990. It grew out of study by the Calvin [College] Center for Christian Scholarship. Its subtitle was Christian Stewardship of Natural Resources. If you follow the link to the later edition you can read about the issues that came up between 1980 and 1990 to bring about the change of the subtitle to Stewardship of Creation.

In 1989, motivated by the earlier book by Francis Schaeffer, Pollution and the Death of Man: The Christian View of Ecology, I founded (with significant help from friends and family) the Christian Nature Federation, which shortly began to preach the good earthkeeping message. About three years later I was invited to join the Christian Environmental Council, a group that provided guidance to the fledgling Evangelical Environmental Network. By the mid-nineties, mostly because of frequent use, the term “creation care” became the most common reference to our responsibility to take better care of what the Creator has given us.

An important implication of the term can be drawn from Schaeffer’s foundational book:

“On the basis of the fact that there is going to be total redemption in the future, not only of man but of all creation, the Christian who believes the Bible should be the man who—with God’s help and in the power of the Holy Spirit—is treating nature now in the direction of the way nature will be then. It will not now be perfect, but it must be substantial, or we have missed our calling. God’s calling to the Christian now, and to the Christian community, in the area of nature—just as it is in the area of personal Christian living in true spirituality—is that we should exhibit a substantial healing here and now, between man and nature and nature and itself, as far as Christians can bring it to pass” (pp. 68-9, Tyndale House Publishers).

Creation care, then, means that “the earth is the Lord’s,” and we are His stewards required, through empowerment by the Holy Spirit, to wisely protect and use the natural world in such a way as to ensure the life and health of all who occupy it: “All creatures here below.” This is simple to say, but hard to accomplish. Nonetheless, it is a major part of the human occupation—we who are “to work it and take care of it” (Genesis 2:15). A good overview of the creation care “movement” is found on Wikipedia under the title “Evangelical Environmentalism.” [The article speaks both of creation care as a Christian responsibility and of “conservatives” who take issue with that position, including one commentator who said, “God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, ‘Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.'”]

Ray Bohlin has written a great statement on “Christian Environmentalism” that is well worth reading. Theologian Alister McGrath has given us this definition—a good one to end with:

Christians see the world as God’s creation, which we are called upon to “tend.” This insight compels us to treat the natural world with respect, care and concern. The breath-catching sense of wonder that we experience on encountering nature at its best is itself the symbol or sign of the deep significance of creation, which, when rightly interpreted, invites us to appreciate, honour and respect it. This is not an idea invented to meet the needs of the moment, or a highly selective reading of a religious tradition designed to extract only those notions that happen to meet with contemporary cultural [approval]. It is simply an application of a fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith to the issues we now face.