A choir of voices joins to preach saving the earth

God is great. God is good. God is green?

Next weekend, believers will gather in Copley Square, believers in God who also believe that environmental issues, particularly climate change, have become moral issues.

Local congregations have recently felt the urgency of saving not only souls, but also the planet. They have been watching "An Inconvenient Truth " at the Cambridge Friends Meeting, screwing in compact fluorescent light bulbs at Congregation Eitz Chayim in Cambridgeport, asking for energy audits at Old South Church in Back Bay, and buying all-green energy at All Saints Church in Brookline.

Now more than 50 congregations statewide are taking part in the Interfaith Walk for Climate Rescue, which was to start Friday in Northampton in Western Massachusetts and will end next weekend in Copley Square with a rally Saturday that organizers expect to draw more than 1,000 people.

Speaking at the rally will be the Rev. Robert W. Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, which represents denominations with 45 million members in the United States.

Drawing from many faiths

While much has been going on at the congregational level, the walk's organizers say they see the rally as the beginning of much more visible environmental activism by faith organizations.

The walk "is our debut as a whole church into these issues," said the Rev. Quinn G. Caldwell, associate minister of Old South Church, a United Church of Christ congregation in Copley Square.

Saturday's rally was planned by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, a priest associate of Grace Episcopal Church in Amherst.

"I think the environmental issue is going to unite the world's religions," she said. "We'll have a glimpse of that at the rally, with local speakers from the Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, Anglican, and pagan traditions."

Worcester's Temple Emanuel is hosting about 40 walkers overnight. Margot Barnet, chairwoman of the synagogue's Social Action Committee, has been organizing an interfaith prayer event and forum.

"It's not new to have a Jewish involvement in environmental issues," Barnet said. "For us, it's a tradition that has come out of Tu B'Shevat," a Jewish holiday similar to Arbor Day.

At the Eitz Chayim synagogue in Cambridge, Governor Deval Patrick's newly appointed assistant secretary for environmental policy, David Cash, talked to the congregation last month on Tu B'Shevat about the intersection of faith and environmentalism.

"It's the environmentalists' Jewish holiday," he said. "We're so detached now from the Earth.... It's no surprise that people are looking to religion to get back to that."

Two years ago, the Massachusetts Council of Churches, which includes 17 Orthodox and Protestant denominations with 1,700 congregations in the state, formally decided to increase its commitment to the environment, according to the council's associate director, Laura E. Everett.

The council issued a consensus document that pointed out that unhealthy environments have the largest impact in poor communities. Member churches started building playgrounds with wood untreated by chemicals and teaching adults about environmentalism. This year, the council has been lobbying for the Safer Alternatives bill, which would require industries to replace toxic chemicals and pesticides.

In January, the National Association of Evangelicals and scientists at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School held a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on threats to the environment, including global warming.

Finding a basis in the Bible

For some local churches, the union of the moral and the ecological has been slower to come. At Park Street Church on Tremont Street, an evangelical congregation, some members are involved personally, said the Rev. Gordon Hagenberger, "but unfortunately there has not been a local response" by the church to the national effort publicized in Washington.

Hagenberger has preached on the topic, however. "It's a matter of moral suasion to help people become more thoughtful," he said. "A lot of environmentalism is just that. And the Bible does say a lot about the environment."

He points to Proverbs 12:10 as saying it matters to God how we care for animals. Other verses, he said, speak to the issues of preservation and sustainable use.

"This isn't sentimentalism," Hagenberger said, "but it is wisely reminding us to be thoughtful, not to savage the environment."

The roster of faith groups joining in the Walk for Climate Rescue does not include any Boston-area Roman Catholic parishes.

Terrence C. Donilon, spokesman for the Boston Archdiocese, said he wasn't aware of the walk until a reporter mentioned it to him two weeks ago. Local Catholic parishes, he said, are beginning to address environmental efficiency issues by individually and collectively working with gas and electric companies.

John L. Allen, a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, recently wrote that environmental activism is a growing trend for the Catholic Church, but he doesn't "yet see evidence of systematic Catholic activism or official leadership on the environment on a scale that bears comparison with the energies coursing today around Islam or bioethics."

Roots in Friends' traditions

Denominations such as the Quakers say environmentalism has long been part of their faith.

"It's part of our stewardship principle, of living simply and peacefully," said Gwen Noyes, clerk of the Earthcare Witness Committee at the Cambridge Friends Meeting. "There is a growing sense that all these things are related. A country that's gluttonous for oil leads us to war.

"For me, the environment has been a moral issue all along," she said. "Anything defiling the Earth has an immorality to it."

Friends will take part in the walk, and the group has been greening its facilities. "We had an energy audit," Noyes said. "We're working on our building. We need a new, more efficient furnace. We've changed our cleaning products and now have carpeting that doesn't give off gases.

"The world is in jeopardy now," she said. "It's not just lives being lost; it's becoming bad business. I hate to say it, but fear is a powerful motivator. I would rather see this coming out of a love for being in concert with the Earth."

Philip Clayton, a professor at Claremont School of Theology in California and visiting professor of science and religion at Harvard Divinity School, says environmental consciousness grew first in reaction to nuclear weapons. After the bomb was dropped, he said, "there was a sense that value-free science was destroying the world, was dangerous."

Now, with news about climate change, Clayton believes that evangelical churches may make the biggest difference. "If evangelicals really get behind it," he said, "a lot will get done."