Fifth Mark of Mission

Protect, care for and renew life on our planet

ABM encourages all our supporters to engage with the Season of Creation.

Around the world, Anglicans, and members of many other churches, will focus on care of the created order from 1 September until 4 October.

On this page you will find links to resources created around the world that will allow you to shape services and prayers for the Season of Creation. You will also find a link to ABM’s excellent Climate Change study, “Climate for Change”.

ABM takes the fifth Mark of Mission very seriously, working to ensure – with our Partners – that the projects we engage with are environmentally sound and good for the future world. The Gospel call is to restoration and renewal, not just for souls, but for bodies of all kinds. Many of us find God speaks most clearly when we are at one with nature and we find our hearts grieving when we see nature being callously destroyed or abused.

Prescient and prophetic poet, Mary Oliver, wrote a warning cry in 2008:

Of The Empire

We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

© 2008 by Mary Oliver. From her 2008 collection, Red Bird, p. 46. Published by Beacon Press 2008

We encourage you to live, work and pray for a world restored to the “goodness” it enjoyed when it was young.

This year’s theme is “Creation speaks – let’s listen”, and the text is from Exodus 3. 1-12.

Download Season of Creation Resources here:

For more details and information about the 2022 Season of Creation, you can download a webinar which launches the Season, with speakers from around the world, here: https://seasonofcreation.org/

The 2022 Season of Creation Celebration Guide with liturgical suggestions based on Revised Common Lectionary here: https://seasonofcreation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/SOC-2022-Celebration-Guide-Final-English.pdf

The Season of Creation Website:
https://seasonofcreation.org/

The Anglican Communion Environmental Network website:
https://acen.anglicancommunion.org/

See ABM’s Climate for Change studies about the climate crisis here: https://www.abmission.org/resources/climate-for-change/

See Christian Aid’s Letters for Creation Campaigns here: https://www.christianaid.org.uk/get-involved/campaigns/letters-creation

See the Anglican Communion’s Resources for the Communion Forest Project here: https://www.communionforest.org/