Pentecostal Creation Care Must Become Ordinary Discipleship

Pentecostal worship knows how to speak of wind, fire, water, breath, oil, harvest and new creation. We pray for rain, thank God for crops, dedicate buildings, respond to disasters and testify that the Spirit gives life. Yet ecological responsibility can remain outside the ordinary architecture of discipleship. It appears in a special sermon, a tree-planting day or an environmental conference, then disappears from budgets, ministerial formation, congregational routines and pastoral care.

That separation is no longer spiritually or publicly credible. Climate disruption reaches the places where Pentecostal mission already lives: farms, informal settlements, schools, clinics, water points, coastlines and households whose livelihoods can be overturned by one failed season or one night of flooding. Creation care is therefore not a fashionable addition to evangelism. It concerns the neighbour to whom the gospel sends us and the created world in which that neighbour must live.

The question for Pentecostalism today is not whether churches can organise an ecological event. It is whether our theology, worship, formation, governance and mission can sustain a truthful way of life after the event ends.

Pentecost University announced the first World Pentecostal Creation Care Conference for 1 September 2026 under the auspices of the Pentecostal World Fellowship. The announcement is historically significant as a signal: creation care is being placed explicitly inside a global Pentecostal conversation rather than treated only as…