You're Already Doing This Work. It's Time to Name It.

By Rev. Dr. Ambrose F. Carroll, Sr.

Let me tell you something I've learned from fifteen years of doing this work.

When I walk into a church and start talking about environmental ministry, one of two things usually happens. Either someone leans forward because this is exactly what they've been waiting for permission to say — or someone leans back, crosses their arms, and says, "Pastor Carroll, that's not really what we do here."

And then I ask them what they do do. And they start talking.

They tell me about the Wednesday food distribution. The annual coat drive. The men who went out before sunrise last Saturday to feed people living outside. The grandmother who organizes the congregation to bring fresh produce when there's been a flood and the grocery store is closed. The after-school program that keeps young people off the streets. The drug rehabilitation ministry that nobody in the denomination talks about because it makes some people uncomfortable.

And I listen. And then I say: All of that is environmental ministry. You just haven't been calling it that.

A Bigger Tent Than You Think

Here's what I want pastors and church leaders to understand: environmentalism and sustainability are a very big tent. There is not much you can do in genuine service to your community that is not also care for the environment — because the environment is not just trees and rivers and polar bears. The environment is the conditions in which people live, breathe, eat, sleep, and survive. The environment is your congregation. The environment is your neighborhood.

When we at Green The Church talk about environmental justice, we are talking about the same people the Black church has always shown up for. We are talking about the grandmother whose asthma gets worse every summer because of what the petrochemical plant is putting in the air two miles from her house. The family that drives forty-five minutes to find a grocery store because there's no fresh produce within walking distance. The man who sleeps outside in winter because the shelter is full and the church down the street decided that wasn't their ministry.

The Black church has never let those people be invisible. That is the ministry. We're just here to help you see the full scope of what you're already doing — and to add some tools to what you've already built.

My Daddy's Drop-In Center

I want to tell you about my father and the Alcoholic Drop-In Center at First Baptist Church in St. Louis, Missouri. My first job was there. And I promise you, my daddy did not call it environmental ministry. He wouldn't have used those words. But that's exactly what it was.

This was the 1970s. In that era, when a white man drank too much, he was called an alcoholic. When a Black man drank too much, he was called a wino. And there were Black men — human beings, God's children — dying on the streets of downtown St. Louis. Dying outside, in the cold, because there was no place for them to come in.

My father opened a door. He created a space where men who had been written off by the city, by the medical establishment, by polite society, could come inside. Find some coffee. Find some donuts. Find some conversation. Get some counseling. Get out of the heat in summer and the cold in winter.

That was a man saying: the conditions in which my neighbors are living are unacceptable, and the church has a responsibility to change those conditions. That is environmental justice. That is creation care applied to human beings who are part of creation. That is ministry inside the big tent.

My brothers remind me — the church also distributed government cheese and peanut butter during the food crisis of that era. And First Baptist was the place the community called. People knew: call Pastor Carroll. The community is going to benefit. There was knowledge, there was presence, there was manpower, there was care. That is the church doing what the church was designed to do. And that is environmentalism.

Food Sovereignty, Right Now

One of my brothers — pastor of the Greater Antioch Missionary Baptist Church in West Palm Beach — told me about an organization called Parianna Precious Hands, led by one of his members. She came to him two years ago and said, "Pastor, can we use the church as a food distribution site for the neighborhood?" He said yes. Every Wednesday since then, the church has been a place where the community can come and get fresh vegetables — greens, purple cabbage, real food — at no cost.

They did a calculation. People are saving somewhere around fifty to seventy dollars a week on groceries because of what the church is providing. For a working family living close to the edge, that is not a small number. That can mean the difference between making a rent payment. Or a utility bill. That is sometimes the margin between making it through the month and not. And that is the church — not a government program, not a nonprofit with a grant cycle, but the church — acting as an anchor of food sovereignty for its neighbors.

That is environmental ministry.

What I'm Really Asking You to Do

I want to be clear: I am not trying to get social justice people onto the environmental justice bus. I am trying to get environmental people onto the social justice bus. Because you — the Black church, the faith community, the congregation that shows up when everything else has failed — you are already on the bus. You have been for generations. I just need you to look out the window and recognize the road you're traveling.

Green The Church is here to help you name what you're doing, draw the lines you may not have drawn before, and add the tools that make your community more resilient. Solar panels and battery storage so your lights stay on when the city loses power. Building efficiency so your utility bills stop eating your operating budget. Food gardens on that vacant lot the church has been holding. Clean energy so the children in your congregation grow up breathing clean air.

But it starts with recognition. You are not starting from zero. You never were.

So let me ask you what I ask everywhere I go: What is your church already doing that you haven't been calling environmental ministry? Because when you find it — and you will — that's where we begin.

The mandate has always been there. Genesis 2:15 calls us to tend and keep the earth. The prophetic tradition of the Black church has always answered that call, even when the language was different. It's time to expand the vocabulary. It's time to connect the dots. It's time to name the work — and then build on it.

The church was never just a Sunday institution. It was always the resilient hub. It's time we made that official.

Be the revival.

Learn more from Rev. Dr. Carroll, and hear the call to serve the land as Revivalists. Preview the first chapter of his new book, Green The Church, available now in paperback. Sign up to receive your free Chapter 1 preview when you visit greenthechurch.org/book, and see why others are calling the text "A prophetic blueprint for the future of faith and justice."