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Edward R. Brown's book, Our Father's World, brings an important international perspective from one who has spent a lifetime involved in evangelical missionary efforts (most recently, assisting on the ground after the 2005 Pakistan earthquake). Brown has seen firsthand the environmental devastation in countries like Kenya and Haiti—countries where Christian evangelism has had some of its greatest successes. Ninety-seven percent of the island of Haiti is now deforested. Crop yields in Kenya have plummeted in a few decades. These environmental disasters have direct consequences for the mission of the church; and Brown marshals arguments from Scripture to persuade Christian readers that environmental stewardship should have been part of the mission of the church all along. Like Robinson, he offers an array of practical ideas: how church leaders can make church building programs more environmentally responsible, expose youth and adults to the beauty of creation, and incorporate environmental stewardship into their mission efforts.
It must be said that Robinson's and Brown's efforts at consciousness-raising share many qualities with the flood of evangelical paperbacks with which they compete, from their folksy pragmatism to their perfunctory writing style. And this is what makes Sleeth's book, every bit as much a "call to action" as the others, so remarkable: elegantly written, theologically and scientifically acute, and not least, beautifully typeset and bound. (Christian publisher Zondervan has brought their mighty distribution power to the paperback edition, which is all to the good, but book lovers will go out of their way to reward environmental publishing house Chelsea Green for their loving production of a risky title.) Sleeth, former chief of medical staff at a New England hospital, has the most interesting back story of all. After he returned in mid-life to serious Christian faith, Sleeth and his family examined their lifestyle and made major changes:
We no longer live in our big house; instead we have one the exact size of our old garage. We use less than one-third of the fossil fuels and one-quarter of the electricity we once used. We've gone from leaving two barrels of trash by the curb each week to leaving one bag every few weeks. … Half of our possessions have found new homes. … When we stopped living a life dedicated to consumerism, our cup began to run over.
Serve God, Save the Planet is about much more than environmental activism. In Sleeth's stories of medical missions to Central America, anecdotes from the emergency room, and narration of determined progress toward reducing his environmental footprint, we glimpse a whole life formed by Christ. Sleeth tells candid stories of his family's effort to abandon an affluent lifestyle, and the results are tremendously attractive without ever seeming too good to be true. (His 16-year-old daughter Emma, a freshman at Asbury College, has a book of her own about environmental stewardship coming out this fall.) Indeed, what I took away from Sleeth's book had less to do with the specifics of energy use and recycling than the hope that there is a better way to live as families: that it is possible to detoxify our technologized and hypermediated homes, and that our children will thank us for it. My hope only increased when our son read the book from cover to cover, then started turning off lights whenever he left a room.
Sleeth, it seems to me, is the perfect missionary for the environmental cause to American evangelicals (indeed, he is now in great demand as a speaker to churches and colleges). Evangelicals trust doctors—many evangelicals are doctors. Doctors specialize in practical intelligence; evangelicals, no matter how intelligent, lean toward the pragmatic side. Sleeth's bedside manner is perfect. He sees the symptoms of too much in our lives—the stress on the environment, on our families, and on our own bodies. He wisely does not prescribe quick fixes, but he does offer disciplines that could restore health. He does not dwell on grand global debates over climate change and overpopulation (though he has opinions on both, and shares them with his readers); he recognizes, in time-honored evangelical style, that the most important battleground for any social change is the human heart.
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