An interview with J. Matthew Sleeth, evangelical environmentalist and author.
"When you talk to a church and you want to get a church to do something, you have to talk to the heart, and you have to use the Bible. You have to speak the language of the church. Too often folks in the environmental movement have made people of faith feel uncomfortable...
But when somebody speaks the language of a group, they hear it. If I went and talked about greenhouse gases and global warming and 381 parts per billion of CO2 ... humans don't change their behavior based on statistics. We change our behavior based upon our hearts. The person out driving a Hummer didn't buy it because of the statistics, because there isn't anything that supports buying a Hummer. They bought it for some emotional reason...
Faith is about all those things you can't measure, whereas science is measurement. I consider myself a scientist, but the faith side of me is able to speak to things like justice and peace and love, and greed or sin or guilt. If people don't feel a little guilty and sinful about their lifestyle, we're doomed...
The amazing thing is, I get up and talk about these things like sin and guilt and the fact that this earth is a sacred thing, as it says in the Bible, and nobody has any problem with that."
FULL STORY: The Gospel of J. Matthew
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