Guest Post: Turned Upside Down by God

The Reverend Dr. Jessica Hetherington shares her story of discipleship and climate action

In January, I wrote about a recent Pew Research poll that looked at how a person’s religious affiliation affects his or her outlook on climate change. The poll found the more involved people are with their places of worship, the less engaged they are in addressing climate change.

There are nonetheless deeply religious people who take our warming planet quite seriously, and I wanted to hear from them. That’s why I asked Reverend Dr. Jessica Hetherington to share how her faith inspires her to lead others in combating climate change. I want to thank Reverend Hetherington for her contribution to The Green Dispatch and thank her as well for allowing me to share on her Substack the great work religious leaders and organizations are engaging in on climate change. I hope you enjoy the following essay from the Rev. Jessica Hetherington.

---

Paul Hormick and I ‘met’ here on Substack, when we noticed and subscribed to each other’s essays. We began commenting on and sharing one another’s work, and then, in the new year, Paul reached out to me and suggested that we write for each other’s newsletters. Paul asked me to write on how my faith is related to my climate activism. Thank you, Paul, for the invitation! I hope that what I have written below is meaningful for your readers. If you like what you read and are intrigued by my ideas, please check out my Substack: Faith. Climate Crisis. Action. It is for people of faith and those who believe that having people of faith at the table for climate conversations is important.

Turned Upside Down by God

I’m trying to remember what month it was, but I can tell you that it was very close to the end of writing my PhD dissertation on behaviour change in response to the ecological crisis. It was in that month – early in 2012, I think? – when God grabbed me by the ankles, turned me upside down and shook me so that the coins fell out of my pockets, my hair went all over the place, and I got very dizzy. Then, as abruptly as God turned me upside down, I was placed right side up again. I was never the same again.

In early 2012 I had just finished writing the five chapters of my dissertation, in Christian Ethics, about how we, as people of faith, can take radical steps to reduce our consumption in light of the climate and ecological crisis. I had finished drafting the 300 or so pages, and was reviewing the pages to find the through-line, the connecting thread that I would use to edit it into a single monograph.

That final bit of editing usually feels as dry as it sounds! By then I was feeling so over the writing. I just wanted to get this project finished and sent off to my advisor and the committee that would examine the work.

After all, by then I had spent years working on my topic. I had spent years researching ideas in theology about how people change their behaviour. I had explored the realm of liberation and feminist theologies; I had studied the lives of radical Christians like the 18^th century Quaker abolitionist John Woolman and 20^th century Catholic Worker Dorothy Day. My dissertation focused on the work of ecotheologian Sallie McFague, and the development of her rich theology that led to her call, in Life Abundant: Rethinking Theology and Economy for a Planet in Peril, for Christians to reduce their consumption levels for the sake of all of life on Earth. Because my own direction was about how, exactly, to get Christians to do so, I also explored the idea in environmental education of ecological literacy. The premise of ecological literacy is that the way that we learn about the Earth is meant to transform the way we live on the Earth.

I then took all of that research, and more, and wrote five chapters. In early 2012, when I was looking for the central idea to connect them all together, it was at that point, at that very moment, when everything as I knew it changed. When God turned me upside down and inside out. My understanding of my own work changed, and I became even more a committed Christian than I was already.

The Reverend Dr. Jessica Hetherington addresses a congregation on the topic of climate change. Photo provided by Rev. Hetherington.

Let me back up for just a moment. I went to graduate school because of a commitment that I have had, from a very early age, to responsible environmental action for the sake of the Earth. I decided to go to theological school because of the religious tradition that I was born and raised in, and had intentionally returned to in my 30s. I’d always been politically progressive, and so following Jesus meant helping others, and taking care of the planet. What I didn’t understand, though, before early 2012, was how absolutely interconnected those two ideas were, and how they would ultimately lead me to where I am at in my life now, as an ordained minister, a theologian, and ultimately as a devout Christian.

What happened in early 2012 was that as I read through the five pages I had written, I discovered that what I was talking about was not just about the right ethical thing to do in light of the ecological crisis. I wasn’t just writing about what ‘progressive’ Christians ought to do if they want to be progressive or ‘woke’. I discovered that everything that I had read, all of the research that I had done, had led me to a single, crystalline discovery for me:

Changing our behaviour in response to the ecological crisis is a matter of Christian discipleship.

I realized that responding to the ecological crisis as a Christian is not just about recycling or using cloth shopping bags. It is not just about extending a social justice lens from people to the planet. It is not just about saying that God created all of creation and so we had better take care of it.

Instead, responding to the ecological crisis as a Christian is a discipleship demand that comes from the Gospel itself. Ecological action, climate action is a question of discipleship for Christians.

Discovering this in early 2012 as I was reading my 5 chapters was a complete conversion experience for me. In theological terms, we call it metanoia, which means a transformation of the heart. When I realized that what I was writing about was actually about Christian discipleship, I was personally, intellectually, and spiritually transformed.

Not only did I have to edit my dissertation to reflect this shift in perspective, but my own identity and reality as a Christian shifted. Now I was acutely aware of the way that discipleship was to work in my life, and what it was to mean for my faith and how I lived it out.

What I discovered was that discipleship is faith lived out in action. Discipleship goes far beyond ethics, far beyond what the ‘right’ thing is to do in a given situation, and goes to the very heart of what it means to follow Jesus. Discipleship is about taking it seriously when Jesus says,

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” (Matthew 16:24-25. NRSV)

Contrary to a vision of Christianity that suggests that things like the climate crisis don’t matter, I learned, through theological study which is one of the ways in which I find myself in intense experience of prayer and closeness with God, that what happens in this world does matter to God, and to our salvation. I learned, in the writing of my dissertation and then later seeking to live out what I have learned about the meaning of discipleship, that discipleship is about living our lives in a ‘cruciform’ way. Going well beyond ethics, discipleship is about transforming ourselves and the world in the shape and form of Jesus’ life, ministry, death, and resurrection. It is about sacrificing so that others may live. It is about taking climate action on behalf of the planet and its people.

Thanks to writing my dissertation, but most especially because of the way that God has consistently, unwaveringly, and lovingly pressed into my life and turned me upside down, inside out, and then right side back again, I am now an ecotheologian and pastor. I am now a Christian who strives to live a life of faithful discipleship in my climate actions, as well as in every other way that I live my life. I am now a Christian who writes, preaches and teaches others to do the same. Discipleship as climate action is not (just) about doing the right thing; it is about following Jesus where he calls me, and all of us, to go. Please join me.

How is God calling you to climate action? Leave a note in the comments.