Rev. Ann Jacob, a member of the World Council of Churches Central Committee, is part of the Eastern Pennsylvania Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church. She served as a pastor in the Pacific Northwest Conference, and is now attending law school. She joined Richenda representing UMCJM for a conversation about climate justice and peacemaking, and offered an invitation to seek joy in God, and humanity in one another.
Ann also recommended two important publications calling for climate action from World Council of Churches:
Ecumenical Decade on Climate Justice Action
Hope for Children for Climate Justice
This article is a transcription from a video-conversation recorded as a resource for the Speak Up For Climate Action Training offered to the United Methodist Bishops. The transcript has minor edits for clarity.
RICHENDA:
Okay, welcome to those who have clicked this video. I’m really glad you’re here. This is the kind of conversation that I want people to hear. I want people to know that there is so much going on in the faith community around issues like climate. And, on the occasion of a training for the Council of Bishops of The United Methodist Church, I really felt like one of the voices we needed to hear from is Ann Jacob’s voice. Ann Jacob is of course a member of the United Methodist Church, and she does so many other things that I’m going to turn it over to her and let her introduce herself. Ann, you want to tell us who you are, and a little about yourself?
ANN:
Absolutely. My name is Ann Jacob. I am from the Eastern Pennsylvania Annual Conference, that’s my home conference and where I grew up. I currently am in the Pacific Northwest Annual Conference based in Seattle. I served a United Methodist church north of Seattle, Edmonds United Methodist Church, for four years and have since then been called to a different form of ministry in the law. I’m now in law school as a third-year student, and I am almost finished my degree.
I also serve on the World Council of Churches (WCC) as a member of the Central Committee, which is the body that governs the World Council of Churches. It’s an eight-year term, and I’m in my fourth year, with four years to go. I was a delegate to the 2016 General Conference and have been really active in both local conference, jurisdictional, and General Conference work.
I am really passionate about the intersection of various social justice issues. The climate crisis of course stands at a huge intersection of many of the issues that face our world and communities. I’m really excited to have this conversation and also curious about the ways that we as individuals and congregations and faith leaders can steward the responsibility of addressing our climate crisis.
Thank you for having me. I’m very grateful for both folks who are curious to learn more and those who continue leading on this.
RICHENDA:
Thank you. You work both in the local church and at the international level. That kind of breadth gives you, I think, an overview perspective of some of the big issues that we have to grapple with as we look at the challenges that climate change is presenting, but also how big issues come down to the ground to real people in countries and communities all over the world. Faith communities all over the world that are also at the center of this. Can you can you tell me a little bit about why ecumenical work is so important? What do you see as a real gift from ecumenism, both on the ground locally, but also as we all together grapple with really big issues.
ANN:
I think the ecumenical movement and ecumenism in general is a gift. Each individual congregation can do really valuable work, yet it can be a drop in the bucket. I think together we can really change systems, and the ecumenical movement is really committed to this. In June of 2025, the Central Committee, which is comprised of various member churches and representatives from various member churches, came together to declare an Ecumenical Decade on Climate Justice Action. That speaks to this commitment that the ecumenical community has to climate action and climate justice. But I think the reason the ecumenical community’s commitment to this is important, and why ecumenism is important in this, is that it brings various churches around the world working together to solve this problem hand-in-hand. That makes it all the more possible for us to address this crisis together.
If the United States acts alone, or if the Marshall Islands acts alone, that doesn’t solve the entirety of our problem. Working together both across various denominations and traditions but also across political groups and across countries, I think, makes it so that we can actually address this crisis robustly, and not with one action happening here and a different impact over there. I think that’s why the ecumenical movement’s commitment to this is really important, and we are part of that. The United Methodist Church has been a part of the World Council of Churches from the very beginning. So our commitment as Methodists within the ecumenical movement is also incredibly robust.
RICHENDA:
When you think about it, many of us participate in clergy circles, and church councils, and the Council of Churches that is in our local areas. This then grows outward from there, just like the United Methodist Church is global, but there are Districts and Conferences, you begin to see representation and voice spreading out so that we can hear each other a lot better.
The World Council of Churches has produced a number of reports. One more recently is called Hope for Children for Climate Justice. And this report specifically addresses what is going on for young people. As in, “What are some of the risks? What are some of the hopes?” Can you talk a little bit more about the report and what it means to you?
ANN:
Absolutely. I want to start with this quote that is attributed to Dietrich Bonhaofer. I’m paraphrasing, but he says that, if you see someone driving towards a crowd and you do nothing, you just stand by as a bystander, then, as a person of faith, you can’t just after the fact say, well, I’m going to console those who are grieving and tend to the wounded. You have to be compelled to actually take the steering wheel away from the person driving toward the crowd and stop it from happening.
The Hope for Children document that the World Council of Churches has created is an incredible resource. It’s a 52-page document [available in multiple languages]. It has a four page summary, if folks want to read that instead. But it goes over the strategic goals and the kind of pointed way that the World Council of Churches is approaching climate litigation. Litigation is a way of addressing the problem as to how the future of children and young people is being stolen from them. It speaks to the way that fossil fuels are polluting the climate and the way that financial institutions and industry and governments are complicit in it.
Litigation is a way of addressing the problem as to how the future of children and young people is being stolen from them. It speaks to the way that fossil fuels are polluting the climate and the way that financial institutions and industry and governments are complicit in it.
[Those who are addressing the problem through litigation,] they’ve had significant victories in the United States and around the world. The Hope for Children PDF goes over the entirety of that process and the strategic goal of the WCC. I really commend you to read it. There are several staff members in the World Council of Churches who are attorneys by training who have spearheaded this movement. It started in the early 2020s.
In 2023, they actually wrote to the International Criminal Tribunals and the International Criminal Court (ICC) challenging the Rome Statute and asking the court to rule in a way that would recognize Article 7 of the Rome Statute to include, when it says crimes against humanity, to include the climate crisis and the pollution of the climate and of Earth as a crime against humanity. This is still pending, but if the ICC rules in a way that is in line with what the WCC has asked, it would potentially open the door for a lot of litigation. Many transnational companies pollute the earth without consequence. The Hope for Children document really outlines our call as Christians to have, not just a theological reflection, and not just individual acts, but participate in systemic acts towards tackling the climate crisis.
RICHENDA:
Yeah. So this idea that there should be legal consequences. Right now there aren’t legal consequences to go into a community and destroy the water sources, many times there aren’t any legal consequences. I know activists will spend a lot of time trying to get assessments done to show the damage potentially to the air and water because once that damage happens, going back is a real issue and people die. Ecocide is another legal word that’s been used to name and recognize the damage as widescale. It’s not small anymore we have whole forests, boreal forests burning, the rainforest rivers are drying up, rivers in Africa that used to sustain communities with fish and play and joy are dried up and gone and there’s no consequences more broadly for these actions. It is the vulnerable who suffer, like the children, and the conversation around this—”what do we hope for children?”—brings me back to your story. Not everybody thinks in terms of, well I’ll go to law school, and, I will work on getting some consequences and some guard rails put up, right? So that polluters can’t do that. Can you tell me a little of your story? What came from within you inspire you to pursue this work and where you are now?
ANN:
I went to Yale Divinity School and I got a Master of Divinity like many people going into ministry. I was really formed by a pedagogy of decolonizing work, of listening to those who have been wounded, and by studying moral injury and the ways in which systems of harm can really form generations of people. From there I was invited to serve a church just north of Seattle and really felt a lot of joy in serving with a community that was really passionate about social justice, and not in a ‘hear it on Sunday, forget it for the next six days’ kind of way, but really praying with their hands and feet and heart.
There was a refugee ministry in that church that helped resettle over 40 people from Afghanistan and Ukraine. There was an immigration ministry that helped get people out of detention. In my time there, there were 28 people who were released who were released from the Tacoma Detention Center, which houses over 1,600 undocumented people. The church was housing those folks and connecting them with family members and helping connect them with wraparound services.
There was also an environmental ministry that was really seeking to understand how the church and the community and individual congregants could work for climate justice through ways like having die ins—to have bodies in a common space so that people could see the literal impact not just on their community members, but all over the world—[to see] the folks who lose their lives every year because of the climate crisis. I was really inspired by this congregation and their actions. I really felt like I was preaching to the choir. I would arrive every Sunday. We would worship together meaningfully for three services.
After my third year, I felt very unsettled. It was also the part of my ministry was during the pandemic. I was really unsettled that there was a need for legal work. I kept asking the pro bono attorneys we were meeting with what else they needed, if they needed more housing for undocumented people, if they needed more money for undocumented people to get their bond payments processed. And they said, “No, we just need more attorneys. We don’t have enough attorneys doing this work.”
I realized that I had a degree, but it just wasn’t the right degree to do paperwork. It was frustrating to realize that as clergy, as pastors, sometimes we’re able to accompany people and hear their stories and pray with them and serve as a person who bears witness to their lives. And I realized that in some instances of the law, it’s just not enough. You need to also be able to write a brief and you also need to be able to show up in court. I think part of being an attorney is also being a pastor because I’ve realized that listening to someone’s story deeply and being able to capture that in a brief is actually being able to accompany them. Having the soft pastoral skills to greet them is also much of what I did before.
But in between in leaving ministry and the local church setting and of finding a different vocational call, that combines, I think, both the accompanying and bearing witness part with law and studying it. In between these two things I’ve had the opportunity to serve with the World Council of Churches and learn so much about the work of climate litigation. It wasn’t an area that I knew of while I was serving as a pastor, but in serving on the World Council of Churches have realized the need for climate litigators.
The way that folks at the World Council of Churches have framed climate litigation is really challenging the notion of who gets to pollute and who are the inheritors of the earth….
[Climate litigation] is an evolving area of law. It hasn’t been thought of before as an area of law, but there are a lot of people who study environmental law and think of it more in the sense of pollution and water rights and access to clean air and things like that, following regulations. But the way that folks at the World Council of Churches have framed climate litigation is really challenging the notion of who gets to pollute and who are the inheritors of the earth and who are the stewards of the earth. I’ve been really moved by that. And so part of my journey has been really open to listening. Not necessarily to my plan for life, because I feel like whenever we make a plan, God laughs. But really listening to where I feel like I can be of service. And listening to a still voice within me, as Howard Thurman would say, of where my own passion and creativity meet the world’s need.
I think at this intersection of climate litigation and immigration work, I have been really moved and find a lot of joy. So, I can speak probably to more to this, but thank you for asking.
RICHENDA:
Yeah. I mean, as a pastor, climate litigation isn’t where I have gone, right? So, I’m from Oregon. In Oregon, Our Children’s Trust was a [legal] effort to ensure that young people have the same access to resources to life, to living—and aren’t condemned to get cancer—that every other generation has enjoyed. So that started in Eugene, Oregon, [Juliana vs US] and I followed that and I was so impressed by the young people and the effort and the work, and that work continues. They were able to do some really great work in Montana [Held vs Montana] and I would say, what does someone like me—who isn’t in law school and hasn’t necessarily got the breadth with what it means to file a lawsuit or what objectives can be obtained—what can we do me and others like me, the clergy and conferences and districts of the United Methodist Church, to support the real systemic change that sometimes a lawsuit requires?
ANN:
I think the kids in Montana are so spectacular. Heroes, to me, and remarkably brave because they challenged their state constitution and they challenged the law to say, we have a right here to a future. I would even encourage local churches and youth groups and leaders within faith communities to look at what their state constitutions say. Are there provisions that can be added to your state constitution? While the US federal constitution is harder to change, because you have so many states that need to ratify it, state constitutions are much easier to change and states have changed their constitutions. Minnesota has changed their constitution recently. And so I would really commend young people to advocate, lobby, talk to their representatives, and if their state doesn’t have a provision like Montana has, seek to add one because then you can act, you can actually take on a case and litigate it.
The other thing I would say is that there are efforts across the country to enforce regulations that have been rolled back and to get them into place again. The current administration has rolled back a lot of executive orders and environmental protection regulations around how we are to care for the land and the air and water. I think we have a social responsibility to protect our creation. I would encourage local churches and conferences to advocate for that. Here in the Northwest we have very regularly advocated for that. There’s a time in the Spring where we go down to Olympia and advocate for environmental protections. I would say if there isn’t such a day in your conference, create one. If there isn’t such an advocacy stream, be the one who initiates it.
I think it seems very insurmountable sometimes to create change because we think, well, we’re just one person. I would say that there’s this African saying, that sometimes when we think we are really small, all we have to think of is a mosquito in a tent. And when we think about the impact that one mosquito can have in a tent, we realize that we are not small. One person can take an action that can have rippling effects. And so, I would just encourage you not to feel the enormity of that weight and just take one step, one action, whatever that may be, in your personal life, in your life, in your church, and in your community. If you are a leader within the church at the conference level or the jurisdictional level, to take one action. That one action will have an impact.
RICHENDA:
I think about the Rule of Life. People in churches, worship community, and among people of faith, Christians and prior, have thousands of years of tradition of living together in community and there are Rules. There are rules of life that you follow from Wesley also in Methodism. We think of the three simple rules, but there was more than that, right? How we were going to conduct ourselves, how we were going to agree to live together, how we were going to teach the children.
The Bible has some of these rules as well. Humans aren’t necessarily really great at living together without some sort of framework that acknowledges that there are things we shouldn’t be doing, and we need to look at how we can offer life moving forward. The constitution in the United States and other countries, I think, are a sort of secular effort to do that. An effort to create some rules that guide how we behave and who we are to each other.
The other thing that I had wanted to ask you about was that, you were just in South Korea [with the World Council of Churches for the 2026 International Peace Convocation]. The World Council of Churches focuses on peacemaking in addition to other things. Climate justice and peace have a relationship there. Can you talk a little bit about how important those things are to each other and what those impacts are?
ANN:
Yes. I think that there is this notion that some of these issues around social justice are individual. [Yet many realize] that they’re interconnected, and certainly climate and ecocide and peace are strongly connected. An example of this I want to highlight is what has happened in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific for about a dozen years from roughly 1948 to 1958. The United States dropped around, I think, 67 nuclear bombs on the Marshall Islands. That’s roughly equivalent to one and a half Hiroshima bombs every single day for 12 years. I mean, just an extraordinary amount of environmental damage.
The people of the Marshall Islands have for generations suffered cancer and other kinds of health-related ailments and illnesses and death. In South Korea, I was with other youth from the Pacific who have witnessed the trauma of this. I was also there with Palestinians living in both Palestine and Germany who spoke about the impact of war on their bodies, the bodies of their family members and land.
Our Palestinian siblings offered that there’s a lot of peacetalking in the world, but not a lot of peacemaking in the world. In the Bible we read, “blessed are the peacemakers,” not the peace talkers. We also sometimes have peace treaties or ceasefires. When [the US] ended the nuclear testing in the Pacific, the US government settled, I think, $2 billion worth of health-related and climate-related settlements and said, all things in the future are settled, and we will not pay anything more. And yet, we see in the Pacific that for generations people are experiencing the health consequences of that nuclear testing.
Many of you might know this, I’ve only learned this in the last week. There is a place in the Pacific called the Runit Dome. The Runit Dome is a place that the US government dropped nuclear bombs and created about a 33 foot diameter crater. Without asking the indigenous people in Runit, they moved a lot of the debris from the nuclear testing in Nevada in our own desert southwest. They moved all of that nuclear sand and debris and material to the Runit Dome. They basically deposited a bunch of nuclear material there and then covered it over with a cement a concrete dome. It looks a little bit like a UFO if you look at an aerial view of that island.
That dome now has been there for 50 years. There are some cracks in that dome and the groundwater seepage has nuclear radioactive material. The people of the Pacific, including the young people who were there in Korea, spoke to the realities of climate change and the islands of the Pacific with the sea level rising and higher tides. What happens when that dome is covered [with rising seawater]? Because the US government has kind of washed its hands of any responsibility. Who has the responsibility for fixing that dome now? Because certainly the Marshallese people don’t have the resources for it.
I think therein lies our culpability, and I say our and I mean those of us who are privileged to call ourselves American citizens, or live in the US. Because we fund a lot of war and we fund a lot of weaponry in the world, bombs and nuclear waste, and all of that has a real environmental consequence not just for the people of the Pacific, which can seem far away, but for all of us. Because it’s not as though the ocean doesn’t move. It’s not as though water doesn’t flow. And we have a real responsibility for that.
I realize that the idea of nuclear testing can feel so incredibly foreign and so incredibly distant for many of us. I’m a millennial. For many of us who haven’t grown up in the Cold War or don’t have even an awareness of what that might have been like. Yet, it’s a very real lived reality for so many people, I have learned.
So one thing I would suggest is we have a responsibility to listen deeply. When I think of decolonizing peace, I have learned that a decolonized peace is one that doesn’t ask, or say to those who are wounded, “it is now peaceful.” Rather, it asks those who are wounded and who are oppressed how we may accompany them, and what it is they need.
In the climate crisis context, it’s really easy from a North American perspective for us to insist that there are certain goals that every country meets or insist that there are certain things that the entire world should agree on. But I think that from my own context of living in North America, I am constantly listening to voices outside of my context to inform how can we work together.
I think this is actually where ecumenism is a real gift and it’s because it includes people all over the world. I think this is also where the United Methodist Church is a gift because we are a global church and we can listen to our siblings in various African countries, in various Asian countries, in various European countries and listen to the World Methodist family. We can listen to the Methodist family, the Wesleyan family in South America and the Caribbean, and find ways to build those partnerships so we can hear authentic stories of how the climate crisis is impacting them and how peace can actually address some of what they are experiencing.
I have learned that peacemaking will take a long time. But if we are taught in our congregations how to practice that peace from a posture of listening and curiosity, and a real sense that we are in fact stewards of one another and creation, then I think there’s a chance that we actually address this.
RICHENDA:
I agree that we have to learn a practice of it, right? In looking at the harms, how do you peaceably respond when you have a dried river and no fish and no food on the table? And now you have a climate refugee, someone who has to move with limited resources. You must move somewhere else where there will be food and an opportunity for life and livelihood. Sometimes that means a wide movement across continents, and other times it’s literally to the next village with a hope that the permafrost isn’t melting there and that your neighbors will take you in and be kind and see you as an asset to their own lives.
As we talk about like the gift of The United Methodist Church being world-wide, and we talk about the importance of these conversations, can as we speak maybe for a minute directly to the bishops of The United Methodist Church? Is there something that you want to really share in some way? That they could be listeners and you can be heard in what you’ve seen or ways that you might encourage them or, I want to just make that open to you to respond to that question in the way that’s right for you.
ANN:
I think from a real place of humility, because—take this with a mountain of salt. There are three things that come to mind.
First, I think anyone in a position of authority, be it a pastor or a district superintendent or a bishop, but especially a bishop, I think there is a real challenge with the amount of data and amount of information there is about the climate crisis. I honor the sometimes exasperated nature with which it feels like we just don’t know enough, and it can feel overwhelming. So I recognize that and I think in spite of that, as a faith leader you have a responsibility to address the real crisis of our time. It [the climate crisis] is interconnected with every aspect of each congregation’s life, each congregant’s life, each faith member in a community all over the world. To be somebody who’s able to speak to that is essential. So the first thing is, do not abdicate your authority around that. Please, please have a willingness to speak out and encourage your congregations to study and speak out as well.
Anyone in a position of authority, be it a pastor or a district superintendent or a bishop…as a faith leader you have a responsibility to address the real crisis of our time. …do not abdicate your authority around that.
The second thing is bishops hold a unique position as representatives of the church to speak to political actors and civil actors, to lend their voice and support on behalf of the church to legislative efforts to combat the climate crisis. Be it in the United States or abroad at the UN. I would encourage you to use your voice in those spaces because civil society’s and religious society’s advocacy matters a great deal in combating the climate crisis.
Third is—I’m thinking of a very specific example of the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference trying to lend itself to be a healthy space. In the early 2000s, the way they did that was by measuring steps. Pastors had step counters and then there was a challenge. It was a really great way of encouraging healthy lifestyles.
In a similar way, I would challenge each bishop to create a meaningful way of cultivating community among clergy and Christian community to combat the climate crisis. Maybe it’s empowering a youth group to come up with an innovative idea in their community. Maybe it’s encouraging pastors to preach on climate and creation and then sharing those sermons as resources for fellow clergy so that they would be inspired to have a resource and think of how to create a service around that.
But it doesn’t have to be depressing. It can be fun. If you think of fun ways to energize conferences and communities, it is possible that each of them will have a transformation of their heart. In ecumenism, we use the word metanoia a lot, a transformation, a radical repentance and transformation of our hearts. And that can be done. Each of you has a responsibility to steward these religious communities and conferences all over the world. I encourage you not just to learn and study and speak, but perhaps to have fun with it.
RICHENDA:
I agree. God calls us to joy, right? And then we mess it up. I think for American bishops often, a similar thing with American churches, and I speak as a person from Oregon. You look out your window and everything looks fine. I don’t live in a place like Alaska or West Africa or the Philippines—my goodness, can we just shout out and pray for the Philippines, they really have the brunt of this climate change?
As we wrap up, I want to give you one more opportunity to share anything else that you feel like needs to be said before we wrap up?
ANN:
I will just conclude by saying that I’m grateful that every person that encounters another person has the opportunity to learn and accompany and bear witness to not just their suffering but their joy. I hope that in this training [Speak Up for Climate Action], but also in whatever church you belong to or, youth group you belong to, or cabinet, or whatever sphere of influence you have, that you find another person in the room and you’re able to connect with them. Because each time we take an opportunity to connect with someone we see their humanity. And the more we do that we’re able to see the humanity that’s outside of us in creation.
Thank you, Richenda, for doing this. Thank you to those of you who are participating, listening and engaging with this material. I will share a couple of the PDFs and I hope that you take a moment to go through them.
RICHENDA:
Thank you. Thank you so much. Okay, that wraps up our conversation with Ann Jacob. She goes on to do amazing work and all of you invited to do the same. Give yourself a shout out because sometimes just we need to do that in life and to remember the joy every time you preach a creation justice sermon, an environmental justice sermon, a human neighbor sermon, and/or plant a native bush in your churchyard.
God wants us to be joyful. So let’s find pathways to that and pathways to life. Those are so important. Thank you, again. I’m grateful that you’re here. Thank you. Thank you.