The Parish as Oasis: An Introduction to Practical Environmental Care

By Kevin Hargaden and Ciara Murphy

The Parish as Oasis is a practical and accessible introduction to how local churches can contribute to the healing the environmental crisis. A notable feature of this book is that it does not engage with that crisis. “Climate change” can be a contentious cultural issue. And “climate despair” can be a pressing pastoral issue. By focusing on practical and accessible “experiments” that any parish can explore according to their own context and capacities, this book seeks to equip people with a hands-on understanding of the ideas unpacked in Laudato Si’. It is a book that aspires to inspire congregations to get their hands dirty, but it also plants those initiatives within a coherent eco-theology and re-locates how we think about faith and the role of church to the margins, serving as an oasis in those parts of our society that are parched and denuded.         

It consists of three parts: an introductory essay that situates the theological vision of the book, a practical array of experiments that congregations can undertake to care for our common home, and a conclusion pointing people to further resources. While being intellectually rigorous, it is written in an accessible, non-technical fashion. The practical experiments draw on real-world examples, including interviews, to give each of these sections an easy magazine-like feel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Messenger Publications
• Release date: Oct 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781788125772

Kevin Hargaden

Kevin Hargaden is the Social Theologian at the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice in Dublin, Ireland. He is the editor of Beginnings: Interrogating Stanley Hauerwas (2017) and (with Brian Brock and Nick Watson) Theology, Disability and Sport: Social Justice Perspectives (2018).

Book preview

Part I

The Church as an Oasis

Standing in the Oasis

If you ever find yourself in the area, the fields around Lake Tana in Ethiopia can be incredibly hot and dry. When facing that circumstance, it would be wise for you to seek out a church. It is not just that the high domes of the buildings offer a cooling respite, but that for 1,500 years they have been set within carefully cultivated, sprawling forests. In a country famed for its dry, brown soil, churches stand as literal oases on the horizon, verdant corners of Eden. Indeed, that is the theological vision that excites the members of Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church. The trees represent the clothes of the church building. The Book of Genesis talks about walking with God in ‘the cool of the day’, and the forest churches of northern Ethiopia – almost 3,500 of them in total – seek to recreate that sense of peace.

Alemayehu Wassie Eshete, a biologist who is working to help churches preserve their green spaces teeming with biodiversity, describes the shift from the parched soil of wheat fields to the gardens of these churches: ‘From an ecological perspective, it’s like going from hell to heaven.’ Raised around such churches, he sees how each of these little forests is a spiritual centre, a beautiful place geared towards prayer with God and communion with creation.

How did these forests come to be?

Ethiopia was, historically, a green and pleasant land, almost half covered in forest. When Italy invaded and briefly colonised the country, vast swathes of trees were felled and the land dedicated to food – wheat, cattle and coffee. Less than 5 per cent of the country remains under the shade of trees. Originally, the cultivation of the trees around churches was not meant as a prophetic gesture against the rapacious nature of modern capitalism or technologised agriculture. From the earliest days of the Ethiopian Church, congregations ensured that the ground around their buildings was teeming with vibrant life. It is only now, as fields multiply upon fields and gobble up the forest, that the remaining church groves have become so symbolically meaningful. Aerial photographs of the churches demonstrate this clearly: their bursting greens in the vast deserts of brown are a visual metaphor of what the Church is called to be.

The forest churches are under threat. Drought can starve them. Cattle can trample them. Invasive species can take them over. Satellite and drone imagery confirm what the locals already know: these forests are shrinking. Wassie now runs a project, in conjunction with hundreds of priests, to build small stone walls around the complexes – quite similar in every way to the traditional stone walls that dot the Irish countryside. These stone walls protect the land from encroachment, deter cattle and focus the attention of the congregation on the land that needs to be protected.

They are working. Everywhere they have been built, the forest flourishes, to the extent that some churches are extending their walls again, reclaiming green diversity where there had been brown uniformity. Where the forests stand, there is cool respite. The water quality is better, seedlings grow more easily, pollinators replicate faster: fecundity triumphs over the aridity created by human efficiency. (For more about these churches, and to support their continued development, visit https://churchforests.org).

The Historical Location of the Irish Church

Across Europe, one of the most common architectural features of towns and cities is that the church is placed on the market square. We find this in northern Finland and in the cities of Andalusia in southern Spain. We can think of the most famous examples: St Paul’s in London or St Mark’s in Venice, but the pattern is replicated in regional cities and even small towns. It is a bricks-and-mortar testimony to how our societies understood the role of the Church as central to all the business of the wider community.

Ireland is a bit of an outlier in this respect. We can visit the Catholic cathedral in Dublin very easily; it is a short walk from the JCFJ offices in the north inner city of Dublin. However, the Pro-Cathedral is on a relatively anonymous tributary road off the boulevard of O’Connell Street. It is a large building, but it seems to shrink back from the side of the road. For centuries, Dublin was known as a city with a vibrant Catholic faith, but the main church is not on a market square or even on a main street.

The particular factor at play on our island is the Penal Laws, the official system of bias that sought to support the Church of Ireland as a buttress to British rule. The Catholic Church, along with the Presbyterians, Methodists and other smaller groupings, was literally marginalised.

The Penal Laws were gradually repealed through the nineteenth century and the Church of Ireland was disestablished in 1871, but the legacy of this period of legalised religious prejudice lingers. It was almost as if Irish Catholicism had a great surge of pent-up energy in the 1850s, as the decades of repression were ended. Church buildings went up all across the country and the period of extraordinary devotion, participation and vocations began. Historians point to the importance of figures like Cardinal Paul Cullen, but we should not see this explosion of ecclesial initiative as a product of hierarchy. After all, the ideas, the funding and very often the actual toil was provided by the faithful. Today, we would call this a grassroots movement, perhaps unparalleled in Irish history.

Having been unjustly displaced from the centre of Irish life, this newly empowered Catholic Church and the emerging Catholic middle class were not about to let their influence in society wane again. One of the ways to understand the very politicised kind of Christian religion that developed in Ireland is as a reaction to this period of intrusion from the state under British rule. A church that had to fight hard against systemic disadvantage to build a cathedral in a city globally famous for its devotion became a church adept at fighting for all sorts of political benefits and social advantages.

Across Europe, where churches were given a central role in the life of society, as demonstrated by the placement of church buildings at markets, the message of Christianity commonly became confused with the agenda of the state. The noble ideal behind placing the church in the centre of the market – that there is no part of our life separate from our faith – was slowly colonised by demands for economic growth and social stability. Charged with embodying God’s love in the world, Churches which were given seats of authority and power in societies became embodiments of human rule. This is why the French Revolution vented such anger on the Church – it had lost touch with the core message of Jesus by serving the needs of wealthy, powerful lords and monarchs.

Today, across Europe, historic Churches have largely liberated themselves from this comfortable captivity to state sponsorship. We can think of prime examples, like the Confessing Church in Germany that resisted Nazi rule, as signals that times had changed. Even the Church of England, which is still established and structurally embedded in the British state, now has the freedom to be an outspoken critic when political policies are embraced that are unjust or unwise.

In Ireland, that process happened at a different rate. The Church remained central to the life of the state until relatively recently. Perhaps we are in a sort of reactionary phase, because this ecclesial influence is often overstated or described in stark binary terms as entirely negative.

The Contemporary Location of the Irish Church

The noble ideal of the Church as embedded in the business of everyday life – so that our Christian faith shaped everything we did – persisted, and it generated lots of good in our society. It is also undeniable and unforgettable that horrendous crimes were conducted by people who were called to be ambassadors of the Prince of Peace. When those crimes were discovered, very often they were hidden again because the leaders were more concerned with protecting the institutional influence of the Church than protecting the people God called them to care for.

If there is a single factor that explains the contemporary location of the Irish Church, it is the scandal of abuse and the cover-ups that followed. On its own, each instance of abuse was horrendous, but it was doubly destructive because it was so hypocritical towards the message of Christianity. Jesus explicitly taught about the importance of safeguarding children. Jesus was born to a woman scorned by her society for being pregnant outside of marriage. Seen rightly, that there is any credibility left in our witness at all seems almost a miraculous grace.

Ireland’s secularisation process is distinct because Ireland’s church context was different. Historical factors like the memory of the Penal Laws shaped the particular way in which the Church was central to the business of the state. That the buildings weren’t on the market square meant it was all the more important that Church thinking was placed at the centre of society. Elsewhere in Europe, the Churches themselves were arguably the source of the secularisation. It arose as much as a conversation within the European Churches as they sought to find the space to more faithfully enact their mission as it was imposed on them by external forces. In Ireland the collapse in Church authority has been sudden and traumatising, born out of the revelation of deep corruption and horrendous abuse within the Churches and within institutions run by the Churches for the state.

Thus, when we think about what the word ‘church’ evokes for Ethiopians, it is very different from what Irish people might think of. The Church in Ireland had for so long been at the heart of our society. Our churches may not often be on the market square, but they are often built on the most prominent height, with spires that reach above all the surrounding buildings. While churches are not physically moving to the edges of town (though some of the most vibrant expressions of Christianity on this island are found in business parks and community centres among evangelical congregations), the Church as an institution – even as a concept – has been dramatically marginalised.

For many who remain within the Church, this marginalisation has been disorientating. We can understand why people have found the sudden collapse of the influence of the Church distressing. Change is always hard. The most common expression of this is to misinterpret this movement as the end. How often have conversations about Christianity in Ireland assumed the word ‘decline’? How often have conversations secretly longed with nostalgia for ‘the good old days’? What this books argues, implicitly, is that this decline need not be interpreted as a desolation so much as a relocation. It is not a bad; it is a new thing.

What if the good old days were actually quite bad? What if marginalisation is not death? What if the dramatic transformation in the fortunes and status and worldly power of our Churches is actually an opportunity to return to tasks that are impossible when you are at the centre of society? What if we are being invited to engage in an experiment in faithfulness that is possible only from the margins?

Market Square or Oasis?

This book is a practical how-to guide that draws from the best thinking and the best examples of how faith communities can care for our common home. It is also an audacious theological argument that the response to the existential question of how to go on being the Irish Church after the dark legacy of the twentieth century is to reimagine what we think of when we think of Church.

The original impulse to place the Church within the market square was positive. The desire to follow Jesus into every aspect of our life is virtuous. A society that did actually prioritise the words of Jesus over the demands of profit would be a very interesting place to live – where no one was homeless or hungry, where the care of children would take centre stage, where feasting and celebrating was considered the default position, and where everyone’s private gain was secondary to anyone’s specific need.

However, that is not the society that emerged. When the Church took the place offered by the state at the centre of the market square, the message of Jesus was slowly domesticated. Serving the state and protecting that place of influence became the priority.

The Irish Church had been in that seat of honour for so long, and was so comfortable there, that being evicted feels, for some, like a death. We want to suggest it is an opportunity for rebirth, or, to put it in the words Jesus prefers, a chance for the Churches on this island to be born again.

To begin to see that, it might be helpful to consider how a market square differs from an oasis. Both are places of congregation,