An Ecumenical Endeavor
We seek to serve the whole church by providing resources for Christian worship that promotes love of and care for God’s creation.
Purpose
“Let All Creation Praise” offers resources for congregations to celebrate God’s love for creation, to worship God with creation so as to reconcile and restore our human relationship with the rest of nature, and to foster love and care for God’s whole creation. We also provide resources to celebrate a “season of creation” or “creation time” in the church year.
History
This website began as a satellite of Web of Creation at www.webofcreation.org. As the founder of the Green Congregation Program, the Web of Creation has been a Christian ecumenical organization active in providing environmental resources for faith communities in the area of worship, education, building and grounds, lifestyle at home and work, and public witness. We have also been the North American site for the Season of Creation. Because of the increased interest in our worship resources, we decided to develop an independent website wholly devoted to providing worship resources for caring for creation.
We believe that care for creation should be integral to the life and witness of Christian communities. Our worship should seek to bring us not only into right relationship with God and our fellow humans but also with the rest of creation. For that reason, we seek to provide resources that bring the celebration of and the care for creation into the liturgical practices of congregations.
Staff
Director, Nick Utphall, Pastor, Advent Lutheran Church/Madison Christian Community, Madison, WI. I am a pastor for a great ecumenical congregation
strongly invested in creation care with solar panels, pantry gardens, prairie restorations, occasional honeybee residents, and more. I am a bike commuter and regular tent-er on minor adventures. I am a mediocre birder and inattentive gardener. I keep track of some of my words at https://utphall.wordpress.com/ nick@theMCC.net
Susan Zencka, Pastor, Frame Memorial Presbytrian Church, Stevens Point, WI. I have a B.A. in Humanities from The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, and and M.Div. from McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, IL and also earned an MBA from the University of Illinois at Chicago majoring in Accounting and Economics. I was a CPA for 10 years before entering seminary. I am co-founder of the Interfaith Community for the Earth (ICE) in Stevens Point. I am currently working on my D.Min. through the Association of Chicago Theological Schools at Chicago. A particular passion of mine is the Season of Creation, and our church has celebrated it for 6 weeks each year since 2006. suzzencka@gmail.com
Alydia Smith, ProgramCoordinator of Worship, Music and Spirituality for the United Church of Canada. I have worked as an Educator and Pastor, working as a Learning Strategist inthree universities and serving two urban United Church of Canada congregations.I am delighted to help provide worship resources that celebrate and support thecare of creation. asmith@united-church.ca
Leah D. Schade, Assistant Professor of Preaching and Worship at Lexington Theological Seminary (KY). I received my PhD with a dissertation on eco-justice preaching and have served as an ordained Lutheran minister (ELCA). I am the author of the book Creation Crisis Preaching: Ecology, Theology and the Pulpit and continue blogging at EcoPreacher. lschade@ltsp.edu
David Rhoads, Director, Lutherans Restoring Creation. I am a retired professor of New Testament at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. I have been working on ecological issues from a religious perspective for about 25 years, founding the Green Zone at the seminary, developing the Web of Creation (www.webofcreation.org) and the Green Congregation Program, and editing Earth and Word: Classic Sermons on Saving the Planet (Continuum, 2007) and (with Norman Habel and Paul Santmire) The Season of Creation: A Preaching Commentary (Fortress, 2011). drhoads@lstc.edu
Invitation to participate
We invite you to join us as friends and participants in this endeavor.
- Tell us your story about transformative worship that has brought you into relationship with creation
- Send us resources you have found helpful: liturgies, litanies, confessions, hymns/songs, sermons, blessings, and other elements of worship. We will share them with others.
- Lend your name or the name of your congregation as ones who support and practice creation-care worship.
Location