For Churches the call to action could not be clearer. We should use as little plastic as possible, in catering or furnishing for example. Collecting plastics for ‘recycling’ is not sufficient. We must always ask what happens to the “recycled” product. This is often impossible to discover: the recycling firms often say they send it on for reprocessing to some unspecified destination. Church councils and circuit meetings have to be in the forefront of reducing in every way possible the use of plastic and replacing it with wood or metal. Unless we do this we will eventually drown in unbiodegradable plastic. George Herbert sang “Teach me my God and King in all things thee to see”: do we see God in plastics?
The essence of the problem is that we do not understand God’s time. Our time horizon is too short. We have evolved to be able to look a year ahead to the next harvest. We do not think a hundred years ahead to the inevitable results of what we are doing now. Yet we have computer modelling which allows us to do just this. The church is eternal. If any organisation should be looking further ahead than the next election or the end of this financial year, it is us. As sea levels inexorably rise by more than 3 mm a year, wildfires burn more trees, and the mountain of plastics overwhelms us, we must act now, both personally and corporately, on all these issues.
We Christians are receiving a call from God to save humanity from its own weaknesses and greed. This is our new evangelism: to see God in all creation, not to pretend to make a different – sometimes plastic – creation which does not grow, mature and decay as does that that of God. We are playing God in making plastics which will last for ever. In Genesis 3:22 God sends us out of the Garden of Eden because we might ‘take from the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.’ Earthly eternity is our temptation. Heavenly eternity is our true hope.