Southern Baptist Environment & Climate Initiative

Check out this new website called Southern Baptist Environment & Climate Initiative

http://www.baptistcreationcare.org/

Here's the Greeting:

Welcome to the home of the Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative (SBECI). This ministry began as a simple conviction that Southern Baptists sould be actively involved in creation care, but it has now become a promising vision for Southern Baptist Stewardship.

You certainly do not need this website to tell you that creation care issues are some of the most pressing of our day. In the past, these conversations have been largely abandoned by evangelical Christians. But today, both younger and more established Southern Baptists are excited to produce a unified moral voice on these issues.

And snippets from the Declaration:

We have recently engaged in study, reflection and prayer related to the challenges presented by environmental and climate change issues. These things have not always been treated with pressing concern as major issues. Indeed, some of us have required considerable convincing before becoming persuaded that these are real problems that deserve our attention. But now we have seen and heard enough to be persuaded that these issues are among the current era’s challenges that require a unified moral voice.

We believe our current denominational engagement with these issues have often been too timid, failing to produce a unified moral voice. Our cautious response to these issues in the face of mounting evidence may be seen by the world as uncaring, reckless and ill-informed. We can do better. To abandon these issues to the secular world is to shirk from our responsibility to be salt and light. The time for timidity regarding God’s creation is no more.

Therefore, we offer these four statements for consideration, beginning with our fellow Southern Baptists, and urge all to follow by taking appropriate actions. May we find ourselves united as we contend for the faith that was delivered to the saints once for all. Laus Deo!

Read the 4 statements here.

See the list of signatories here (original) and here (recent).

They include: Danny Akin, President of Southeastern Seminary; David Dockery, President of Union University; Ronnie Floyd, Pastor of First Baptist Springdale, Arkansas; Timothy George, President of Beeson Divinity School; Jack Graham, Pastor of Prestonwood BC and former SBC President; Johnny Hunt, Pastor of FBC Woodstock, Georgia; James Merrit, former SBC President, Frank Page, President of the SBC;

And many more...

My friend Nathan Finn, a Professor at Southeastern, has blogged about the website and Declaration here. He writes:

As you may know, last year the SBC voted to affirm what I believe is a rather pitiful resolution On Global Warming. I was not impressed. Thankfully, I am not the only SBC conservative who thinks there is something to the threat of global climate change and the need to be better stewards of God’s creation. A group of forty-four Southern Baptists, including current SBC president Frank Page and a number of my colleagues, have signed a statement titled “A Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change.” The statement can be found at a new website called the Southern Baptist Environment & Climate Initiative. There is also a place to add your signature to the document. I signed it about ten minutes ago.

I am thrilled that some Southern Baptists want to engage this issue more holistically (and biblically) than is the tendency among many ideological conservatives. Be sure to also check out the document “Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action,” a document drafted in 2006 that was also signed by several SBC leaders and that I publicly endorsed on my blog.