The group traveled to these festivals in an effort to speak to “thousands of young Christians … about why it’s so important for us to be stewards and to love our neighbors and make sure … we’re supporting clean air and clean water,” said Alexis Illyn, Midwest organizer for the Minnesota-based Restoring Eden, a Christian ministry that encourages Christians to serve and protect God’s creation and those who depend on it.

Illyn said the college interns talked with festival-goers and asked them to sign postcards to their senators, urging them to support clean air and clean water policies.

Restoring Eden began in the early 1990s in Washington state. Peter Illyn, the father of Alexis, who was a pastor, formed the group after a logging crisis in the Pacific Northwest that pitted environmentalists against logging companies.

According to the group’s website, during the logging crisis Peter came to question: “How can we be pro-life and yet cavalier with the very systems that create life? If we love the Creator, we must take care of creation.” 

As a child, Alexis spent her summers hiking and camping and loved the outdoors. She saw God in nature but “never connected it to how I should be living or speaking out.”

That began to change in high school.

“I actually started seeing more of a connection to my love for the outdoors to how that connects to loving God and how caring for what God created is actually connected to loving people,” she said.

In college, Illyn started a Christian environmental group on her campus. After college, she worked for several environmental groups but felt those groups didn’t connect care for creation with her faith. That’s what ultimately drew her to the group her father started.

For the past two decades, the relationship between Christian faith and stewardship of creation has resulted in a burgeoning industry of advocacy groups, publications and movements. For many years, evangelicals and other Christians had a complicated connection with the environment: on one hand appreciating the world that God created but on the other hand being distrustful of the emphasis—to the detriment of the Gospel—that some groups put on creation care.

While this relationship is still in its early phases, more Christians are embracing the connection between creation stewardship and how that affects love of neighbor.

“We are called as Christians to do two things: to love God and to love our neighbors,” Illyn said. “For me, we see in Genesis that when God created the earth, He called it good. He values it. Part of loving God is caring for what God saw as good and complete. God put Adam and Eve in the garden to tend and work it and so by doing that—by taking care of and protecting the fruitfulness of creation—I’m honoring God and doing what I’m called to do.”

Illyn believes that by failing to see this connection, Christians are falling short in their care for those most disadvantaged.

“Some people kind of get the fact that it’s about tending the garden but not the connection necessarily [as] to why what I do protecting the earth connects to people,” she said. “For us, when we fail at being good stewards, it’s often the poor, it’s the young, it’s the elderly who are affected. People breathing in dirty air or not able to drink water because it’s filled with all these chemicals. For me, taking care of the environment is protecting people as well.”

To help accomplish its goals, Restoring Eden employs three main ministries.

First, the group focuses on nature appreciation. “Working with Christians to see the goodness in what God created,” Illyn said.

The second ministry is service: helping individuals to be betters stewards in their daily lives.

Finally, the group emphasizes speaking out and “protecting the health of our neighbors and God’s creation by being part of the public process.”

One of the main reasons why Christians have become more engaged in the environment during the past 20 years is because of the advocacy of younger believers. Christian teenagers and twenty-somethings grew up in an era where environmental stewardship was much talked about and discussed. As they get older, they are learning how to integrate their advocacy with their faith.

“We’re finding that there is this growing shift in young Christians,” Illyn said. “We’re seeing more of a shift from a compartmentalized faith to more of an integrated [faith]. The old model was ‘it’s a list of priorities,’ so it’s ‘love God, love my neighbors.’ And while the environment might be on that list, it’s all the way at the bottom.”

With younger believers, Illyn said it resembles more of a puzzle.

“People are seeing it more as integrated,” she said. “So how is talking to people about Jesus connected to going and … making sure people in Africa have clean water or [dealing with] issues of sex trafficking? How are these all connected? Sometimes it’s not just enough to tell people about Jesus, but often if we are living in ways that reflect justice and mercy and humility, those speak just as loudly as well.”

For those who are not yet sure how to integrate their faith with creation care, Illyn encourages them to pray about it and ask, “Have I been a good steward? What does that mean to me? Who are my neighbors?”

From there, Illyn said, “People aren’t going to protect the environment and protect health if their heart doesn’t understand why it’s important and why it’s connected to our walk as Christians.”

In the end, Illyn said the group has a simple message: “God is a good God. God made a good earth, and God calls us to be good stewards,” she said.


ACTIONPOINT: For more information on Restoring Eden, visit www.restoringeden.org