It’s not every day you’re threatened with hospitalization by a circus clown. I was once a budding environmental activist, and some friends and I were protesting outside a circus that (so we’d been told) was mistreating a captive elephant. So there we were, four or five of us, standing by the roadside next to the entrance with signs and placards. We weren’t doing anything illegal or uncivil, but our presence naturally gave some members of the public reason to rethink whether they wanted to purchase a ticket, and before long one of the performers—the head clown, he informed us (and thankfully not yet in costume)—made it clear that if one more car turned away, he’d personally send us to the emergency room. As if any of us needed further reason to be scared of clowns. We had to decide, then and there, whether to continue or call it a day. Did we care enough about the issue of animal cruelty to risk harm to ourselves? Not really, it turned out, so we made our way home. We weren’t quite the committed eco-warriors we imagined ourselves to be. In our defense, we were only 16. 
I’d long wanted to be an environmentalist. I joined Greenpeace and was involved in a number of their campaigns and activities. I cared about the planet. This was in the early ’90s, and we were then talking about things like acid rain and the ozone layer. Global warming was an issue, but climate change as a matter of international urgency wasn’t yet part of the mainstream media diet. When I turned 18, I became a Christian. In the space of just a few weeks, I’d realized that if God was real, I didn’t know him—and I was probably supposed to. I learned that Jesus had come to “seek and save the lost” (Luke 19:10), and I put my trust in him. Sometime later, I talked to one of my fellow wannabe environmentalist friends about my recent conversion. He was discouraged. As far as he was concerned, me becoming a Christian was going to be a loss to the green cause. Which raises a question: Was he right? Does the gospel pull us away from environmental concerns and toward more weighty and eternal matters? Does the health of the earth matter less to us when we come to know Jesus? As a teenager, I’d planned to be an environmental activist. Instead, I ended up becoming a pastor and a preacher. Had I let the planet down? Many voices would say becoming a Christian is bad for the planet: that the Christian faith itself is one of the drivers of environmental exploitation and degradation and that the creation mandate incentivizes abuse of the physical world. The secular world increasingly insists we should express environmental concern with near hysteria–that nothing can be more important than preserving our home. Parts of the Christian world, on the other hand, insist the physical world doesn’t matter at all, that it’s perishing. Therefore, because a new and better world is coming one day, we may as well drive as big a car as we can because the planet’s going to end up in smoke anyway. I haven’t found these two views compelling. And for the same reason: Jesus. His relationship to the physical world shapes his people’s. | 
