Environmental Missions: Planting Churches and Trees - Paperback

by Lowell Bliss (Author)

Planting Churches and Trees

Environmental Missions defines an emerging category in missions, one that takes seriously both the mandate to evangelize the world and the responsibility of caring for God's good earth. Lowell Bliss was a traditional church planting missionary in India when his best Hindu friend there died of malaria. This was just one of the events that led him to reexamine the politically charged term "environment," understanding it now as simply "that which surrounds those we love, those for whom Jesus died." In other words, the church is called to reach not only vulnerable people but the space in which they live and breathe.
Pointing to the narrative of Scripture and the history of missions, Bliss shows us that the gospel of Jesus Christ is good news for the whole creation, that we must unite two traditionally separate endeavors to fulfill the entirety of God's commission, and that the challenge of the environmental crises of our day is also one of our greatest opportunities to reach the least reached with the love of Christ.

Author Biography

Lowell Bliss is the director of Eden Vigil, an environmental missions organization launched by Christar in 2009. Lowell led the writing team for the Lausanne Global Consultation on Creation Care and the Gospel "Call to Action" and is one of the few evangelical Climate Leaders with the Climate Reality Project. He and his wife, Robynn (co-author of Expectations and Burnout), were church planting missionaries for fourteen years in India and Pakistan. They now reside with their three children in the tallgrass prairie ecosystem of Kansas.