Creation Care Mission's Podcast

For this episode we will be sharing a talk from Steve Dresselhaus. Steve serves as TEAM’s senior director for global ministry with a focus on Latin America. He also serves as TEAM’s strategist for care of creation. Steve was raised in Venezuela where his parents served as career missionaries with TEAM. Shortly after his marriage to his wife Lois, Steve enrolled in the Seminario Bíblico Rio Grande in preparation for missionary service, serving first in Caracas and then eventually for seventeen years in La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico, where Steve served as the ministry area leader. In addition to his leadership role, he was involved with the starting of churches, a safe house for abused women and children, and a discipleship oriented ministry using sea kayaks in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez. Steven Spicer and Mike Soderling host this edition of the Creation Care Missions Podcast. Find the full text of talk Steve Dresselhaus gave at CreationCareMissions.org

Brad Smith is a licensed psychologist and founding Director of Belhaven University's Institute for International Care and Counsel. Brad's focus is on mobilizing, training, and networking resources for global mental health and trauma needs especially among the poor. As the Lausanne Catalyst for Global Mental Health and Trauma, he desires to see the church respond to care for mental health as an essential part of mission. So what brings Brad as a psychologist to care about the environment? He sees the environment as intricately connected with how people hope or despair, how they think about the future, or about their identities as a people. To care for the whole person we need to care for their environment. Paul Dzubinski and Steven Spicer host this edition of the Creation Care Missions Podcast. The full text of talk that Brad Smith can be found at CreationCareMissions.org

Don Cox – Owner, Bald Guy Brew, Johnson City, Tennessee Area From the time Don first saw someone roasting coffee outside in an open market, took a pound home and proceeded to burn it, filling the kitchen with smoke, he has been excited about coffee roasting. Over the course of many years, which took Don and his wife Shannon to various parts of Mexico, Pittsburgh, and eventually Boone, NC, they developed Bald Guy Brew. When arsonists burnt down the business in 2016, their focus turned to training and using coffee as a platform for making a difference in the world. Coffee roasting is not just about the coffee: it's about the people who enjoy it together, the people who grow it, and the places where they live. Don's story and ways of thinking about coffee open up conversation for us to think about the ways we consume, the ways we do business, and how our lives can be intentionally lived in ways that bless the unreached and the poor. He shows some of the connections between land, people, and the global supply chains that connect us all. As you listen be thinking about ways you can live intentionally to bless the people and the lands of the world. To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. Paul Dzubinski and Steven Spicer host this edition of the Creation Care Missions Podcast. Check out the full text of this at CreationCareMissions.org

Chris Elisara is a visionary educator dedicated to raising up Christian environmental leaders. Chris is clearly motivated to help churches engage in caring for God's creation. He and his wife Tricia founded the Creation Care Study Program (CCSP) in 2002, which now partner with over 30 Christian colleges and universities in the U.S. The program equips and helps Christian communities and leaders to act on their creation care convictions. In this podcast Chris talks about the massive growth in the world of urbanization. The reality is that if cities do not plan for this expansion then poverty and slums are the result. That in turn impacts the environment and people's lives. Chris addresses how Christians caring for Creation impact all of this and how we can be the incarnation of Jesus in this inevitable future.

Paul Dzubinski and Steven Spicer host this edition of the Creation Care Missions Podcast. Mike Soderling Spoke at the Creation Care at the Frontiers of Mission conference and we had the privilege to interview him. He is an MD with an MBA in International Development. After serving 11 years in Central America Mike returned to the US to lead the Center for Health in Mission, which seeks to see people from all nations living lives of health and wholeness. He and his wife, Chris, live and serve with Frontier Ventures (formerly the US Center for World Mission) and William Carey International University in Pasadena, CA. Their daughter, Leah, attends Judson Int School on the WCIU campus. Mike is also co-catalyst for the Lausanne Health in Mission Issue Network. The Centre for Health in Mission manages the Christian Journal for Global Health (for which Mike is Associate Editor for Missions) and stewards the Best Practices in Global Health initiative.

Today we will be sharing a shorter talk from Scott Bessenecker, Director of Mission for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, looking at the intersection of environmental justice with economic and ethnic justice. Scott originally joined InterVarsity staff a year after graduating college in 1985, and his love grew for the poor and for mobilizing university students. Following that passion, he is now Director of Mission for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and each year he helps to mobilize thousands of students to domestic and international mission. He is the author of a number of books, including The New Friars: The Emerging Movement Serving the World's Poor and Overturning Tables: Freeing Missions from the Christian Industrial Complex. We think Scott brings a really helpful perspective as he makes it clear that environmental crises are often just one aspect of a complex and broken set of systems. But he also draws from a beautiful biblical picture of what it looks like for God's kingdom to be expressed, which gives us true hope for God's redemptive purposes that we get to participate in. Paul Dzubinski and Steven Spicer host this edition of the Creation Care Missions Podcast. The full text of talk that Scott Bessenecker gave at the Creation Care at the Frontiers of Mission conference is on http://www.creationcaremissions.org/blog.

Our podcast this time features a talk from Peter Harris. He says he was born with a great love for nature, and a fascination with birds in particular. Following this ingrained concern for the environment, he co-founded A Rocha in 1983 when he and his wife Miranda moved with their family to establish a field study center and bird observatory in Portugal. In 1995 the work was given over to national leadership and they moved to France where together with national colleagues they oversaw the establishment of two other centers, while traveling to resource the growing global movement of Christians active in nature conservation. A Rocha field projects are now operational in twenty countries worldwide, each looking for creative and collaborative ways to engage in nature conservation out of love for God and His good creation. Paul Dzubinski and Steven Spicer host this edition of the Creation Care Missions Podcast. The website www.CreationCareMissions.org/blog has the full text of talk that Peter Harris gave at the Creation Care at the Frontiers of Mission conference.

Dr. Katharine Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist and professor of political science at Texas Tech University, where she is director of the Climate Science Center. She is the CEO of the consulting firm ATMOS Research and Consulting, helping organizations plan for ways that climate change might impact their industries. She was named in Time magazine's 2014 100 most influential people in the world list. Her book, A Climate for change: global warming facts for faith-based decisions, looks at the science and misconceptions around global warming. (you can watch her presentation of the book at Cornell University where she gives the Beggs Lecture on Science, Spirituality and Society in October 2012. The Q&A time is really worth your time.) In 2012 she was named by Christianity today as one of 50 women to watch and named one of Foreign policy's 100 leading global thinkers Through various avenues, such as her PBS show, "Global Weirding", she helps people see how the changing climate affects them and what they can actually do about it. And as a Christian, she deeply cares about the ways that climate change impact the world, the poor, the unreached, and the ways that we try to share good news in a world where the environment itself is crying out for salvation. Steven Spicer and Paul Dzubinski host this edition of the Creation Care Missions Podcast. The full text of talk that Dr. Katharine Hayhoe gave can be found at www.CreationCareMissions.org

Lowell Bliss is the director of Eden Vigil, an environmental missions organization which seeks to combine church planting with creation care particularly among least-reached people groups. He and his wife Robynn, a proud Canadian, were church-planting missionaries with Christar in India and Pakistan for fourteen years. The Book Lowell mentions in his talk, People, Trees, and Poverty, can be found at WilliamCarey.com. He also is the author of Environmental Missions, Planting Churches and Trees can also be found there. As Lowell shares in the talk we are about to listen to, it was in that context, alongside the polluted Ganges River, that he developed the conviction that he must be just as much an environmentalist as he is an evangelist. For him, sharing good news with people about Jesus Christ has to include good news for their bodies and the environment they live in. As you listen to Lowell's story and his journey with God to reach the place he is now, trying to be fully committed to creation care AND frontier missions, reflect on how you're feeling. How would you respond in the circumstances he describes? Does his story give you a different perspective on caring for creation as an integral part of mission work to reach the unreached with the gospel of Jesus Christ? Give warning that his stories do get a little graphic. Steven Spicer and Paul Dzubinski host this edition of the Creation Care Missions Podcast. Below is the full text Lowell Bliss' talk he gave at the Creation Care at the Frontiers of Mission conference can be found at www.CreationCareMissions.org/blog

Picture Dr. Ruth Padilla DeBorst yearns to see peace and justice embrace in the beautiful and broken world we call home. A wife of one and mother of many, theologian, missiologist, educator, and story-teller, she has been involved in leadership development and theological education for integral mission in her native Latin America for several decades. She works with the Comunidad de Estudios Teológicos Interdisciplinarios (CETI), a learning community with students across Latin America. She coordinates the Networking Team of INFEMIT (International Fellowship for Mission as Transformation), collaborates with Resonate Global Mission, and serves on the board of Arocha and the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies. She lives with her husband, James, in Costa Rica as a member of Casa Adobe, an intentional Christian Community with deep concern for right living in relation to the whole of creation. Ruth is committed to a gospel of reconciliation with God, people, and all of creation that is as holistic as it is thoughtful. Steven Spicer and Paul Dzubinski host this edition of the Creation Care Missions Podcast. For the full text of talk that Dr. Ruth Padilla DeBorst gave go to the blog at CreationCareMissions.org

We are excited to introduce you to the Creation Care Missions Podcast. This series comes from the Creation Care at the Frontiers of Mission conference we had in Pasadena. We are excited to bring to you the experts who combine gospel ministry, creation care, science and a deep passion for Jesus. Ed Brown is the focus of our first podcast. He talks about hope and joy in the face of the complex realities related to the gospel and the environment. Ed is the Director and CEO of Care of Creation, and also serves as Lausanne Catalyst for Creation Care for the Lausanne Movement. He directs the work of Care of Creation in the US, Kenya, and Tanzania. He oversees the development of the global creation care network in partnership with the World Evangelical Alliance. Steven Spicer and Paul Dzubinski host this first edition of the Creation Care Missions Podcast.