{"id":8553,"date":"2014-10-03T10:12:18","date_gmt":"2014-10-03T17:12:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/?p=8553"},"modified":"2014-10-03T10:13:09","modified_gmt":"2014-10-03T17:13:09","slug":"creation-care-team-brings-global-perspective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/creation-care-team-brings-global-perspective\/","title":{"rendered":"Creation care team brings global perspective"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Linda Bloom | NEW YORK (UMNS)<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Sotico Pagulayan knows firsthand how the acceleration of extreme drought and flooding in Cambodia has degraded the diet of its people.<\/p>\n

The Philippines native, working with the\u00a0Community Health and Agricultural Development Program<\/a>for the United Methodist Church of Cambodia, said the changing climate has hampered the program\u2019s initiatives, including a rice bank and cow bank, designed to help meet food and nutritional requirements of its beneficiaries.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have had a hard time seeing the life of local Cambodian farmers get worse each year,\u201d he told United Methodist News Service. \u201cAnd there is the prompting of the Holy Spirit that I need to do something about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pagulayan applied for\u00a0the creation care team<\/a>\u00a0that the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries is assembling. Through his involvement as its Asia representative, he hopes to make an impact on the lives of Cambodia\u2019s poor.<\/p>\n

That is the hope, too, of\u00a0the Rev. Pat Watkins<\/a>, who worked with Thomas Kemper, the board\u2019s top executive, to choose six regional representatives from the 48 persons who applied. They were both impressed, Watkins noted, with the talent and experience of those expressing interest in the project and plan to connect in some way with many of them.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy overall goal for the team is simply to define a creation care ministry for Global Ministries,\u201d Watkins said.<\/p>\n

Part of a community<\/strong><\/h4>\n

\u201cI applied for the team because it offers a wonderful chance to join a community that works for and thinks about environmental justice and responsibility,\u201d said the Rev. Marietjie Odendaal, a German citizen who is pastor of Gelterkinden United Methodist Church in Switzerland, and was selected as the team\u2019s regional representative for Europe. \u201cIn the exchange of views and experience, we will seek to change views and create new experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n

At least part of Jefferson Knight\u2019s motivation to apply came from his personal experience of how the landscape in his native Liberia has drastically changed.<\/p>\n

He remembers, as a 7-year-old, the fertile lushness of his grandparents\u2019 farm and the surrounding forest in central Liberia. \u201cBut when I returned to that same area at age 20, I saw the entire land as a different place,\u201d Knight wrote in an email. \u201cThe thick and evergreen forest was nowhere to be found. All of the trees were nowhere to be found. The place has turned into a semi-desert land area with all of the rivers dried up completely.\u201d<\/p>\n

Knight \u2014 who directs the peace with justice program of the United Methodist Church in Liberia and is the team\u2019s Africa regional representative \u2014 cited environmental concerns ranging from sea erosion to deforestation to outright land grabs. \u201cThese are unprecedented moments for Africa and there is a serious need for intervention,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The Creation Care Ministry Team will meet as a group Dec. 2-13 at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Lima, Peru.\u00a0\u201cOur big focus will be to relate to the church in Peru,\u201d said Watkins, who also will speak at a training event, organized by ACT Alliance, on disaster risk reduction related to climate change.<\/p>\n

\"Secretary-General<\/a>
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visited the Parque E\u00f3lico Camilo Ortega Saavedra wind farm in Nicaragua. Photo by Mark Garten,United Nations<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The fastest growing segment of the Methodist churches in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia are its indigenous members, he noted, who have concerns over land rights and local rights issues related to climate change. The team wants to \u201chear their stories and to understand what life is like for them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Deforestation is an enormous problem in Latin America, said Anahi\u00a2 Alberti D\u2019Amato, the team\u2019s regional representative from Salta, Argentina, who has a Ph.D. in biological science and works as a university teacher and researcher. Another concern is the presence of agricultural toxins in the soil and in the water supply from the use of insecticides and other chemicals.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a national church, we are very much worried about the lack of care in areas related to the stewardship of creation,\u201d added D\u2019Amato, who comes from a missionary family. \u201cWe believe that we need to grow in awareness, compromise, responsibility and actions in regard to the creation care.\u201d<\/p>\n

Awareness is crucial<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Awareness and action are crucial in the Pacific, where rising sea levels are affecting island life. The team\u2019s Pacific representative is Cliff Bird in Sula, Fiji, a native of the Solomon Islands who works in the Pacific Office of the Uniting Church in Australia, an office hosted by the Methodist Church in Fiji.<\/p>\n

Bird is well aware, he told the board, of how the small island nations of the South Pacific \u201cexperience firsthand the negative and life-threatening impacts of climate change that is caused more by countries of the West and the rising industrial powers in the likes of China and India.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2015, the creation care team will travel to Paris for the Nov. 30-Dec. 11 U.N. climate change conference that will look beyond the\u00a0Kyoto Protocol<\/a>, which legally binds developed countries to emission reduction targets. While there, the team will meet with European United Methodists to discuss environmental issues in that region, Watkins said.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverybody has their eyes focused on Paris as the conference that will create some sort of international agreement that will replace the Kyoto accords,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

The need for action resonates with the Rev. Susan Mullins, a minister at Faith United Methodist Church in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. Mullins, who also holds a master\u2019s degree in geology, is concerned about the environmental impact of a domestic oil boom in her area at a time when, she believes, the United States should be decreasing its reliance on fossil fuel.<\/p>\n

As the team\u2019s North America regional representative<\/a>, Mullins is eager to share and learn from others. \u201cOne of the strengths of the UMC is our connectional system, and I think it is important that we hear one another\u2019s stories and connect what is happening in one region with what is happening around the world,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\n

*Bloom is a United Methodist News Service multimedia reporter based in New York. Follow her at\u00a0<\/em>http:\/\/twitter.com\/umcscribe<\/em><\/a>\u00a0or contact her at (646) 369-3759 or\u00a0<\/em>newsdesk@umcom.org<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Linda Bloom | NEW YORK (UMNS) Sotico Pagulayan knows firsthand how the acceleration of extreme drought and flooding in Cambodia has degraded the diet of its people. The Philippines native, working with the\u00a0Community Health and Agricultural Development Programfor the United Methodist Church of Cambodia, said the changing climate has hampered the program\u2019s initiatives, including […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":8554,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[321,32,3],"tags":[412,411],"class_list":{"0":"post-8553","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-creation-care","8":"category-news","9":"category-umns","10":"tag-climate-change","11":"tag-creation-care-2"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/sec-gen-cliimate-change-605x388.jpg?fit=605%2C388&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2l75j-2dX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8553"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8557,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8553\/revisions\/8557"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}