Christians are making their presence felt at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow with a range of charities, including Tearfund, World Vision and A Rocha being sited within the Blue Zone during the course of the conference.
Laura Young who’s a campaigner with Tearfund and who’s in Glasgow tells Premier she’s very encouraged by the turnout:
“Within the Blue Zone I have bumped into many people from different Christian organisations. It’s just wonderful to know that we are all there with the same message. A lot of us are driven by our faith with our climate action, looking after God’s creation and ultimately, this is a justice issue. This is what really spurs us on.Â
“I just really feel there is this hopeful Christian message being put across and you recognise the people that you’ve seen from all those organisations.
“At the weekend, there’s also going to be a big march for the global day of action on 6th November. One of the big things that’s happening in Glasgow is the main march and there’ll be maybe even up to 100,000 people taking part. There’s going to be a faith block, with a big group of us all together. Tearfund will be there, in our classic yellow T shirts we are really hard to miss! There’s this real group of Christian presences.
“Over the last year we’ve been doing projects, all to do with climate change. Churches are reaching out, even if they’re not in Glasgow and couldn’t be at COP26. They are saying ‘we want to talk about this in our church, we want to preach about this, we want to pray about this and we want to take action’ and that has just been amazing.”
“For me, you only have to open the Bible on the first page to really hear about God’s creation, hear about our responsibility for God’s creation, to look after it to attend to it. But when we look at some of our destructive practices, we know we’re not doing so.
“This is a justice issue. We’ve been called to love our neighbour and when our neighbours are telling us that they are being impacted by the climate crisis, you can’t really sit still and think I’m just going to continue living a life or not take action against a system that contributes to the climate crisis.
“It’s the fact that we need to love our neighbour and there’s multiple parts of the Bible where God talks about injustice and about us living a life of sacrifice – Romans 12 jumps to mind -about living in a way that is in accordance with His world, His plan for restoration and a just way for everyone.”
SOURCE: PREMIER CHRISTIAN NEWS