Before we can talk well about creation care, climate change, gardens, stewardship, or green ministry, we may need to begin with a more basic question:

Is creation good?

It is easy to lose sight of goodness in the middle of ordinary life.

Tasks pile up. News scrolls by. We get tired, discouraged, distracted, or drawn into negative thinking until it can feel as though there is not much good around us. In Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Cameron Fry says he has seen “nothing good” all day, and Ferris challenges him to look again.

That may be a surprisingly good place to begin.

Doesn’t God also call us to look again?

For Christians, the answer should be simple. Scripture begins with God creating the heavens and the earth, filling the world with light, land, water, plants, creatures, and human beings. Again and again, God sees what has been made and calls it good.

Then, after the creation of humankind, God calls it very good.

That is where the biblical story begins: not with escape, not with disgust toward the material world, not with a temporary stage set for human souls, but with the goodness of God’s creation.

And yet many Christians live as though creation is spiritually unimportant.

We may not say that out loud. We may believe, officially, that creation is good. But our habits sometimes tell another story. We can treat the earth as background, food as fuel, land as property, animals as objects, and our own bodies as inconveniences. We can imagine faith as something that happens mostly in thoughts, words, and church buildings, rather than in soil, meals, breath, work, rest, neighbourhoods, watersheds, and weather.

Green Ministry begins by remembering what Scripture has never forgotten:

Creation is good because God made it.

Creation is beloved because God sustains it.

Creation matters because God has not abandoned it.

Good Does Not Mean Unwounded

Calling creation good does not mean pretending everything is as it should be.

The world is beautiful, but it is also wounded. Creation gives life, and creation groans. Soil can be fruitful, and soil can be depleted. Water can cleanse and nourish, and water can be polluted. Bodies can bear God’s glory, and bodies can suffer. Weather can sustain harvests, and weather can become violent. Human beings can image God through love and care, and human beings can distort that image through greed, violence, neglect, and exploitation.

Christians do not need to choose between beauty and grief.

We can tell the truth about both.

Creation is good, and creation is groaning.

That is part of why creation care belongs within Christian faith. We are not caring for something disposable. We are tending something good that has been damaged. We are participating, in small and local ways, in the healing work of God.

The Material World Matters to God

One of the strongest signs that creation matters is the incarnation.

In Jesus Christ, God does not save the world from a distance. God enters creation. The Word becomes flesh. God takes on a body, breathes air, drinks water, eats food, touches the sick, walks roads, notices seeds and birds and lilies, shares meals, dies a bodily death, and rises bodily from the grave.

That should change how we see the material world.

Christian faith is not a rejection of bodies. It is not a rejection of earth. It is not a rejection of ordinary creaturely life. The incarnation tells us that God is willing to meet us here, in flesh and place and time.

The resurrection tells us that God’s future is not the abandonment of creation, but its renewal.

This matters because some Christians have inherited a thin version of hope: the idea that the earth is only a temporary place we leave behind. If that is our imagination, creation care can feel optional. Why tend a world we think God plans to discard?

But Christian hope is larger and better than escape.

God’s saving purpose includes human beings, but it is not limited to human beings. The mission of God is as broad as creation. The centre is Christ, and the reach is cosmic.

The Church Has Confessed This From the Beginning

The goodness of creation is not a modern invention.

Early Christian confession was not a vague spirituality floating above the material world. The ancient baptismal creeds, including the early Roman symbol that helped shape what became the Apostles’ Creed, confessed a faith rooted in history, flesh, suffering, death, resurrection, and the life of the world to come.

That matters.

Christians have never believed that history is meaningless or that the material world is beneath God’s concern. We believe God acts in history. We believe the Word became flesh. We believe in the resurrection of the body. We believe that God’s eternal purpose is worked out not by abandoning creation, but by redeeming what God has made.

Later familiar wording in the Apostles’ Creed makes this explicit: God is the maker of heaven and earth.

So when Christians care about soil, bodies, food, water, creatures, and places, we are not adding something strange to the faith. We are taking seriously the faith we have inherited.

Creation Is Not God, But It Is God’s

To say creation is good is not to worship creation.

Christians worship the Creator, not the created world. But worshiping the Creator should make us more attentive, not less attentive, to what God has made.

A painting is not the painter, but it can reveal something of the painter’s skill, patience, delight, and imagination. A garden is not the gardener, but it can show the gardener’s care. In a similar way, creation is not God, but creation can bear witness to God’s generosity, wisdom, beauty, order, abundance, and sustaining love.

This is why Christians have sometimes spoken of the “book of creation” alongside the book of Scripture.

Scripture gives us the authoritative story of God, creation, sin, redemption, and new creation. Creation, rightly received, can train us in wonder. It can teach us humility. It can reveal interdependence, limits, patience, death, fruitfulness, rest, and renewal.

We do not read creation instead of Scripture.

We learn to read creation with Scripture-shaped eyes.

Why This Question Matters

If creation is not good, then creation care becomes a hobby, a preference, or a political add-on. If creation is good, then creation care becomes part of discipleship.

If creation is not good, then damaging it may seem regrettable but spiritually minor. If creation is good, then harm to land, water, creatures, and vulnerable neighbours becomes part of the brokenness Christians must confess and address.

If creation is not good, then gardens are merely useful. If creation is good, then gardens can become places of prayer, hospitality, learning, repentance, and hope.

If creation is not good, then Christian mission can shrink into saving souls from the world. If creation is good, then Christian mission can be understood more fully as witness to God’s renewing love for the whole creation, with human redemption at the centre but not the circumference.

That does not mean every church needs to do the same thing. Not every congregation will start a community garden. Not every Christian will become an environmental expert. But every Christian can begin by receiving creation differently.

With gratitude.

With humility.

With restraint.

With wonder.

With responsibility.

With hope.

Learning to Say Good Again

One small practice may help.

Go outside, or stand by a window, or sit beside a houseplant, or hold a piece of fruit in your hand.

Notice one created thing.

Do not rush to use it, fix it, photograph it, analyze it, or turn it into a lesson.

Simply receive it.

Then say, quietly if you like:

God made this, and it is good.

That sentence is not naive. It does not deny suffering, pollution, extinction, climate change, or human sin. It simply begins where Scripture begins. It trains us to see the world not first as resource, threat, scenery, or inconvenience, but as gift.

From that place, stewardship can grow.

From gratitude, care.

From wonder, humility.

From humility, repentance.

From repentance, repair.

From repair, hope.

For Reflection

Where have you been tempted to treat creation as background instead of gift?

What created thing helps you remember the goodness of God?

How might your care for creation change if you began with the conviction that the world is good, wounded, beloved, and awaiting renewal?

A Simple Prayer

Creator God,

You made the world and called it good.

Teach us to receive creation as gift, not as a possession.

Open our eyes to beauty without making us blind to suffering.

Forgive us for the ways we have treated Your world as disposable.

Form in us gratitude, humility, restraint, wonder, and love.

Help us care for what You love.

Amen.