When many congregations gather for worship on Sunday, April 21, they will sing hymns, read scriptures, and recite much of their liturgy molded around the care and feeding of the earth — all in observation of Earth Day, which is Monday, April 22. 

Environmental love is a factor of the dominion Christians claim as their spiritual heritage.

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“The earth is the Lord’s, the fulness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein” can be found in the 24th Psalm. But as God’s people belong to him, so does the responsibility to maintain the planet belong to them.

That’s why this year, Creation Justice Ministries, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, is focused on helping folks eliminate single-use plastic from our lives. They emphasize that there’s no plastic in the Bible.

To that end, the nonprofit — which educates, equips, and mobilizes people to protect, restore, and rightly share God’s creation — developed a free downloadable resource, “Plastic Jesus: Real Faith in a Synthetic World.” 

“We in the present-day Western world have more distance from the world of the Bible than any other culture in history,” Dr. Ellen F. Davis, the Amos Ragan Kearns Distinguished Professor, Duke Divinity School, said. “That’s not just in terms of time, but also in terms of technology, attitudes, and disconnection from the non-human world around us.”

In 2021, the average American used 309 pounds of plastic, and only 5% of it was recycled. What happens to the cigarette butts, water and shampoo bottles, potato chip bags, freezer bags, plastic cutlery, and bottle caps that aren’t dumped in landfills? It often burns in incinerators, which tend to be in or close to Black communities. The emissions are toxic to the environment and our health.

That’s why Creation Justice Ministries’ goal is “to help congregations think more deeply about the ways that plastics impact our lives and God’s creation,” and also “equip people of faith to take actions to address this epidemic in faithful and practical ways,” according to the organization’s website. 

“As people of faith, we are not exempt from the overuse of plastics,” they said on their website. “Communion cups, nativity scenes, and Easter eggs are just a few of the Christian staples that contribute to our single-use plastics issue.” 

Recycling Is Not Enough

A recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that about one-third of Americans have reduced their use of plastic within the past five years. People making the most effort are women, people in households making more than $50K annually, and college graduates.

The researchers wrote, “Democrats and independent voters reported more of a decrease in their use of single-use plastics over time compared to Republicans (40 percent and 34 percent, respectively, versus 19 percent). Women of all political affiliations reported a steeper decrease compared to men.”

But as PBS reported, “Leaders in the plastic industry have long emphasized the promise of recycling, but a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions of metric tons of plastic produced globally each year is recycled. That waste is sometimes exported from richer countries and dumped in poorer ones.” 

RELATED: Mass Plastic Recycling Is a Fantasy

Recent research from Greenpeace found that even when we put plastic items in a recycling bin, it usually isn’t recycled. There are just too many different kinds of plastics and they can’t be melted down together. 

The Plastic Jesus resource guide offers suggestions for changes people can make “to protect God’s creation” and eliminate plastic in their personal lives, congregations, and communities. It also asks that people petition their member of Congress “to pass the REDUCE Act, a bill that would put a fee on the sale of new, virgin plastic resin used to make single-use products.”

Worship planners can also find resources for singing, praying, liturgy, and preaching on earthday.org, which proclaims, “It’s not a day, it’s a movement.” Participating can be as simple as planting a tree, teaching a lab for children, volunteering at a local preserve, or minimizing your carbon footprint in some other creative way.