As another storm looms, NC faith leaders seek local resilience to climate change
In Aurora, N.C., climate change is not decades away. It is here, now, and it has flooded my church twice in the last decade. As a minister at St. Paul AME Zion Church and a former marine biologist, I see firsthand the effects of climate change on God’s human and marine creation. I also see the immediate need for resilient policies and institutions that will protect these people and places that I, and my Creator, care for so deeply.
While St. Paul has been victim to the effects of climate change, namely sea level rise and intensifying hurricanes, we are also trying to become a hub of climate resilience in the Aurora community. In many small towns across the East Coast, African American congregations like my own are already beacons of resilience, supporting Black folks when local, state, and federal government failed to.
We are entering what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration expects to be an abnormally dangerous hurricane season, with three to six major hurricanes and nearly 20 named storms. All we are experiencing this year, with the layered crises of climate change, COVID-19, and systemic racial injustice, is a foretaste of climate breakdown in the next century. If we don’t take action to slow emissions of climate-polluting gases the East Coast could experience six to eight feet of sea level rise. That would put my church, and the homes of many of my congregants, chronically underwater. Many African American communities like mine have difficulty recovering and rebuilding after a disaster. Many are forced to leave their home, church, and community as a result.
Thankfully, God has given us the tools to protect our coastlines and buffer our communities against intensifying storms. To start, protection and restoration of natural coastal ecosystems like saltmarshes and mangrove swamps have the three-fold effect of protecting us against storms, providing homes for our fellow nonhuman creatures, and pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. To be a steward of God’s people and God’s Creation, the Church must step up and proactively build resilience, putting place structures that will withstand the physical and spiritual storms of the climate crisis.
Faith leaders across the Southeast are seeing this need and responding, finding that the work of building climate resilience is not a deviation from their Christian mission. Rather, it is a deeper fulfillment of the call to care for God’s people and Creation. Through the Southeast Faith Leaders Network, congregations and faith-based non-profits are exploring how our communities can make changes to be hubs of climate resilience. On August 6, I am joining the Network for the Faith Communities & Climate Resilience Virtual Summit. I’ll be sharing about my own experience as a marine scientist and minister on the front lines of climate change. Participants will leave with tools to build resilience and climate preparedness in their communities, sent out into the world to make resilient disciples, baptizing our neighbors in the waters of love, justice and resilience instead of the rising seas.
Registration for the Summit is available at sfln.org.