For Youth Leaders |
Engaging with youth in eco-justice is fun, fulfilling, and meaningful. It may also include moments of frustration, anxiety, and despair as together you wrestle with the hard environmental facts of life. However, using concrete activities and projects, and solution-oriented discussions, you and the youth will feel empowered and excited.
Tips
- Explain environmental problems but don’t dwell on them. Focus instead on how we can address the problems with our changed attitudes, behaviors, and outreach efforts (public policy, corporate responsibility). Don’t forget to remind them that as Christians, we live in faith and hope!
- Validate their concerns and anxieties (personal and global) but help them see positive solutions and alternatives.
- Enjoy their inherent yearning, their spiritual wrestling, and their ideas for solutions.
- Make it fun! Even though some issues such as global warming are daunting, use games, quizzes, prizes, and outdoor adventures to bring levity. Consider actions and service activities that will help them feel empowered.
- Make it relevant! Know the age group and attention span to decide what activities seem most appropriate. Youth need time to connect with the outdoors, to empathize with God’s Creation by experiencing it, to learn about our faith responses to environmental concerns, and to discuss issues and solutions. Service learning activities are effective ways of exposing youth to environmental problems and empowering them to hear a call to respond. Find environmental concerns in your bio-region to relate wider environmental concerns to the immediate surroundings, to local areas that the youth know.
- Involve the senses: go outdoors and plan activities that use touch, smell, sight, taste and sound.
- Involve various learning styles: be sure to plan time for movement, art, games, presentation, and discussion.
- Use examples from Creation to talk about God: consider explaining that our concept of the Trinity might be likened to H20, which is the same element whether gas, liquid, or solid. Or, that our church family might be like the roots of a tree that go deep into rich soil so the branches can spread widely into the sky. Find ways to connect Creation into your ongoing youth group prayers, Bible studies, and theological discussions.
Inspiration
It’s no accident that Jesus withdrew into the wilderness to pray or that Saint Francis found solace among the animals in the garden. Many Christians come to know God more fully through experiencing creation. And it’s no surprise that stories involving the natural world, like Noah’s Ark and the story of creation in Genesis, show up again and again in children’s Biblical collections. These stories reveal God’s glory and power in a way that makes sense to young people, and they offer an open door into Christian teachings as a whole.
An Eco-Justice ministry, particularly one that takes the youth group outside, can help inspire youth by connecting them with God through creation. Getting outside to directly observe and experience the Lord’s good works can reach young people in a way that hearing stories of God’s love read from the pulpit may not.
Protection, Love, and Healing
Eco-Justice ministries also offer us a chance to express our love for one another. In a world broken by poverty, greed, and pollution, we are called to seek justice for each other and all of creation. Caring for and providing leadership to youth also means being concerned for their health and the future of the world – and acting on it. As author and environmental scientist David Ore puts it:
- No society that loved its children would lace their food, air, water, and soil with thousands of chemicals whose total effect cannot be known.
- No society that loved its children would teach them to recognize over 1000 corporate logos but fewer than a dozen plants and animals native to their home places.
- No society that loved its children would divorce them so completely from contact with soils, forests, streams, and wildlife
- No society that loved its children would knowingly run even a small risk of future climatic disaster.
- No society that loved its children would leave behind a legacy of ugliness and biotic impoverishment.
Click Here to read the rest of David Ore’s fantastic essay, “Loving Children: A Design Problem” What better way to begin working with God to seek justice and heal creation than to involve our children, who will live with the earthly consequences of our action – or inaction – long after we are gone? Please, consider working with your children and the youth of your church to start an Eco-Justice Ministry. No step in the right direction is too small. Peruse this website designed for youth leaders or visit the National Council of Churches Eco-Justice Programs page for more ideas.
Fundraisers/Awareness-Raisers:
- Engage your youth in curbing global warming. Study global warming and sell Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs in your congregation.
- Study fair trade, organic coffee and its impacts on people and the environment—and use Equal Exchange coffee for your youth group fundraising project. http://www.equalexchange.com/ifPDF/if.fundraising.9.04.pdf
- Encourage youth to sell native plants in your congregation to raise awareness about the importance of these plants and the threats of invasive species.