Climate justice - bringing together the humility and the responsibility of Christian discipleship

John Wesley’s signature appears on the original 1759 deeds of the site where the present-day Salisbury Methodist Church stands. Half a mile away stands the medieval Salisbury Cathedral, founded over 800 years ago in 1220, and three miles away is the site of the original Norman Salisbury Cathedral built in 1100 inside the iron age hillfort of Old Sarum, thought to date back to 400BC. Nine miles from the church stands the Neolithic Stonehenge, believed to date back to 3,100BC, which stands on the edge of the chalk downlands of Salisbury Plain, already ancient when the primitive stone age barrows were built. South of the city lies the New Forest, some of whose deciduous woodlands are thought to remain much as they were at the end of the last ice age in 10,000BC. And on the other side of the New Forest stretches the Jurassic Coastline, where fossils are evidence of pre-human life-forms from 14 million years ago.

So it’s perhaps not surprising that, when he joined us for our Climate Sunday worship, our MP, John Glen, said, “We’re in front of an awesome God who’s given us so much and we as individuals will always ultimately be pretty insignificant.”

John Glen MP addresses Salisbury Methodist Church

Climate change is happening at such a frightening pace because we human beings have believed ourselves to be the centre of the universe and viewed all things asmere resources for our own benefit and profit. But living and worshipping in the ancient landscape and historic city of Salisbury we quickly realise how small and fleeting our part in the boundless time and space of God’s creation.

And at Salisbury Methodist church we worship each week beneath the stunning “Creation Embroidery”, installed in 1993 when the Sanctuary was re-ordered. Designed and embroidered by Angela Dewer and Gisela Banbury, this much-loved artwork shows the historic buildings of Salisbury, caught up in the vast and dynamic sweep of the wholeness of God’s creation; so when we gather to worship we are constantly aware that our worship is only a small but precious part of the immense and timeless worship of all creation.

This sense that we are part of something much greater than ourselves motivates the congregation at Salisbury Methodist church to seek not to live in a way that exploits God’s creation to serve our own convenience. Instead we try to create a church culture that contributes something, however small, to the goodness and vitality of God’s creation.

For five years we have had an array of solar panels that feeds into the National Grid; we use LED lightbulbs to reduce our energy use and have recently installed motion sensors so that no unnecessary power is used for lighting. Our Scouting groups set up a successful church recycling system some years ago and we are now working towards our Eco Church award.

But indeed, as individual people and as individual churches we remain fairly insignificant, and the task of creating global climate justice is immense. Through engagement with the Walking with Micah Project and the Methodist Justice lecture, we have realised the power of mass movements calling for change and justice, and so we have been seeking to join our small voice with others.

One way we are trying to do this is by building a relationship with our local MP. A member of one of our local Anglian churches, John Glen is Economic Secretary to the Treasury and has particular responsibility for ‘green finance.’ When he joined us to share in our worship, we were able to ask him what that meant in practice, and to hear about his responsibility for the “infrastructure bank” which will channel public and private investment into transformative green technologies, such as offshore wind farms.

Mr Glen’s sense of the urgency of the climate crisis was encouraging; he said it was “a life and death issues” and that “profound and serious changes” were needed and reflected on the impact of climate change on other parts of the world, mentioning the Maldives, at risk of complete submersion.

Mr Glen also spoke about how his own faith motivates his work as a government minister: “My Christian faith is just fundamental to who I am and what motivates me… And that means really thinking about, for the short amount of time (relatively) that I will have, what can I do to execute long-term decisions that are good for climate change?... What we’ve also got to do is actually encourage a commitment from many people, many parties in this country and abroad, to make things better. And that is achieved by trying to draw common motivations and I think my Christian faith leads me to try to seek that, even when clearly many people disagree with the policies and particular choices my government is making.”

Mr Glen reflected on how praying and taking action for climate justice was an integral part of bringing together the humility and the responsibility of Christian discipleship: “I think you need to hold those two things together: that humility that the things that I do, or even the things that we do in the UK, will not in itself transform everything, whilst also keep on persisting with the ambition to change things. And that’s probably a bit of a metaphor for the Christian life in the sense that we’re never going to be perfect this side of heaven, but we need to keep on trying.” 

Salisbury Methodist Church received invaluable support and guidance in building a relationship with their local MP from Hope for the Future.

Campaigns we are involved in at Salisbury Methodist Church include:

•  Young Christian Climate Network Relay to COP26
• Make COP Count 
• The Time is Now
• CJ4A 

The Revd Anna Bishop is Assistant Minister at Salisbury Methodist Church

Header photo: “Creation Embroidery”, designed and embroidered by Angela Dewer and Gisela Banbury,

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