After the results of the 2024 elections, looking ahead doesn’t readily result in hope, which we normally expect from the future. Let’s look back instead to steady us now as we move forward into 2025, continuing to build on the Movement’s successes of 2024.
Several of our United Methodist Creation Justice Movement (UMCJM) newsletters during 2024 focused on getting creation justice into the thinking of policy-making bodies, including federal, state, and local legislators. Every month highlighted one or two Action Alerts, giving United Methodists understanding of the various legislations’ importance and giving us a way to address the issues.
Engaging decision makers is action, and action leads to hope.
In the months leading up to General Conference, our own United Methodist legislative body, several United Methodist Creation Justice Movement (UMCJM) Working Groups explained the needs and opportunities, established crucial partnerships, submitted resolutions, and distributed talking points and articles to support their passage. That work paid off with all but one resolution passing with more than 92% of the vote:
Church Land Use
Sustainable Conferencing
Green Teams
Net-zero
Caretaker of God’s Creation Coordinator
The one that is yet to pass was submitted by Fossil Free UMC and supported by the Movement. It is not dead but fell victim to a last-minute delay as General Conference slammed up against the deadline for adjournment. Work continues toward passage of that crucial legislation.
Seeing success after more than several years’ labor also leads to hope.
Always committed to the task of resourcing, UMCJM newsletters and the Movement Café created numerous materials to help United Methodists as individuals, congregations, and conferences understand and implement the resolutions on behalf of creation and justice. The General Conference Study Guide is one example.
With the impetus of success at General Conference, many annual conferences “moved the ball down the field,” passing and implementing resolutions specifically supporting the goals of creation justice in their context.
Building understanding and coalitions to continue the effort leads to hope.
Additionally, all the work around General Conference and annual conferences was wrapped around and undergirded with worship. The Movement’s Worship Team also created materials for the 2024 Season of Creation that included sermon ideas, times for children, hymn suggestions, prayers, Communion liturgy, and visuals. The Movement Café introduced those and issued an invitation to help create worship materials for Eastertide 2025.
Remembering WHOSE we are and WHY we do this work leads to hope.
The November issue of the UMCJM Newsletter looked back at several UM institutions of theological education, highlighting the ways they are preparing and engaging students specifically for and in the work of creation care and climate justice. These students will go on to teach, lead, and engage others in acts of faithful stewardship for years to come. The ripples begun now will continue.
Time in the past and present spent preparing for a better future leads to hope.
December’s newsletter “brings an invitation to experience this season of Christ coming into our broken world with a promise of healing and a way for us all to be part of God’s divine plan. Sometimes, it’s easy for us to get discouraged at the slow process of creation justice or the forces arrayed against this life-support system we call Earth…. The world may still be filled with evil and destruction, but that is not the end of the story,” as Rev. Jonathan Brake reminds us.
As we move into a new year and look back, we can see some successes and some seeds planted that may take much longer to bear fruit. But we have this assurance from Scripture:
“We also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts” (Romans 5:3-5a).
Crys Zinkiewicz, a UM EarthKeeper, is a member of the United Methodist Creation Justice Movement Communications Team and author of the monthly UM Creation Justice Tips.