What Are ‘Sustainable Traditions’?

What are ‘Sustainable Traditions’?

You may be wondering why we call this project Sustainable Traditions. What are ’sustainable traditions’ and what do they have to do with JESUS and whole-life Christian faith? Take a few moments with us as we define ’sustainable traditions’ and what we think this concept means for Christians and the church at large.

Sustainability: These days the concept of sustainability has become a major cultural force. Like many broadly embraced ideas a singular definition is widely debated (-some even outright reject it can exist) and this debate has lead to numerous (and conflicting) ’solutions’ or ways of reordering society. In a nutshell sustainability could be said to encompass three aspects of human society:

• Social
• Environmental
• Economic

A 1987 U.N. conference defined sustainable developments this way: “meet present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs”. Robert Gilman, president of Context Institute and Founding Editor of IN CONTEXT quarterly, speaks of it in these terms:

While the word is a mouthful, what it refers to is a very old and very simple concept – the ability to keep going over the long haul. As a value, it refers to giving equal weight in your decisions to the future as well as the present. You might think of it as extending the Golden Rule through time, so that you do unto future generations (as well as to your present fellow beings) as you would have them do unto you.

Many traditional cultures hold this value very strongly. For example, in their councils, the Iroquois and other Native American groups required that each decision be evaluated by asking “What impact will this have on the seventh generation from today?” On the other hand, the world is full of the ruins of civilizations that died because they sacrificed the value of sustainability to the pressures (and greed) of the present – they overgrazed, overfarmed and generally overexploited their surroundings and their people.

You may love or hate the word ’sustainable’. I’ve heard it called everything from a frivolous personal luxury to a global movement bent on controlling the nations. We have no doubt it can be used to these extremes. Even Christianity itself has been distorted to destructive ends throughout history (on both regards). Here also we must draw the line between the popular movement to ‘green’  everything (especially corporate wallets) and our own personal efforts to live out of a holistic (and holy) Biblical worldview that is concerned with being caretakers of both creation and one another. In both Christianity and sustainability the top-down mega-solutions and popular en-masse expressions are continually in danger of being ruled by consensus rather than by GOD’s wisdom and guidance.

Our search for sustainability in human society is a spiritual search at the core. To take Robert Gilman’s thoughts a bit further, it could be said that sustainability (social equity, environmental balance, and economic viability) could result if we all were living the Golden Rule. Consider JESUS’ words:

One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?” “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:28-31)

JESUS is quoting one of  the most defining prayers of the Jewish faith, the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4) and then a portion of the Mosaic Law (Leviticus 19:18). What would our world be like if we followed these two commands? Here again we depart from human idealism knowing that our efforts apart from GOD will always fail to accomplish lasting redemption. But in Him, is there a  sustainability that is centered in the person and purpose of JESUS? Is there a renewing by the Holy Spirit that springs forth when we walk in His love in the world? Is there a ‘christian sustainability’ that is based on a Biblical worldview? Can we broaden the definition to critique and renew our religious institutions? We say “yes”!

By finding the meeting point between the sustainability movement and Christian faith we see that the world is waking up to the consequences of sin and finding that the answers may be hidden in the ancient texts of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. The world is seeking an answer to the dis-integration, the dis-ease, the fragmentation, the imbalance, the injustice, the turbulence all around us. We believe our environmental, economic and social crisis are pieces of a greater and deeper spiritual crisis: our rebellion against our GOD and creator (aka: sin). How can the church embrace a world in search of a way forward in human history? And what can the church learn from the world’s search for sustainability? We believe there are three lessons that can be immediately gleaned for the church to refocus on. We must again become:

• Generational
• Future Orientated
• Holistic

Broadly defined, a ‘christian sustainability’ would cause a re-ordering and rethinking of the ways we live life, practice our faith and integrate the two.

Traditions: Finally, what do traditions have to do with it all? Traditions are “customs practiced from one generation to the next”. A tradition is “an inherited, established, or customary pattern of thought, action, or behavior (as a religious practice or a social custom)” and “cultural continuity in social attitudes, customs, and institutions” [Merriam-Webster]. We believe many of our “social attitudes, customs, and institutions” that we are passing on to our children are destructive on a spiritual and societal level (as we already mentioned). Some of these traditions we think of include:

• Religious (zombie congregations, megachurches, compartmentalizing faith, GOD-less self-serving spirituality, worshiping the created rather than the Creator…)
• Agricultural (centralized, industrial scale, chemical dependent, globalized, inhumane, unjust, polluting, disease-producing…)
• Familial (divorce, broken marriages, absent fathers and mothers, abuse, neglect, indifference…)
• Economic (debt-driven, exploiting, greed-ridden, poverty entombing, limitless growth pursuing, environment destroying…)
• Environmental (man separated from GOD’s creation, creation exalted over man, only economic worth regarded, disregarded, uncared for, misused, abused, seen only as a resource…)

There are many more we can mention.

Summed Up: Sustainable traditions then could be defined as: “life giving social attitudes, customs, and institutions, practiced from one generation to the next that are able to be renewed both now and in future generations”. This encompasses both the church and the world. It encompasses how we relate to other believers, our neighbors, and the poor, what we do for work, what we eat, where we live, what we buy, how we spend our time. Truly sustainable traditions, we believe, come only through a life centered around GOD’s two ‘books’, or revelations of who He is: the natural world (Romans 1:19-20) and the Bible (Luke 24:27, Romans 15:4, 2 Timothy 3:16, 2 Peter 1:20-21). We also believe that dependence on the Holy Spirit is essential to rightly interpreting both ‘books’ and to living a life of radical love and devotion to JESUS the Messiah (Galatians 4:6-7, 3:3, 5:25). At the center of all this, what makes it possible to pursue shalom, is GOD coming to us, Himself seeking our shalom and paying for it’s possibility through the life, death and resurrection of JESUS. We cannot see full wholeness and healing in this age but certainly the time is now to prepare for the age to come when He will reconcile all things in a new heaven and earth (Revelation 21).

As this project progresses I’m sure we will continue to have new thoughts about all this so this really is a conversation. We’re not setting any of our thoughts in stone just yet.