Disrupting a church service in the name of climate change isn’t Christian

Christian Climate Action has interrupted a service at Chichester Cathedral in order to protest about climate change. But whatever your views on the environment, the worship of God is sacrosanct. It should not be disrupted – especially by those who claim to follow Jesus – argues Gavin Ashenden

Every so often different parts of one’s life can suddenly be brought together by a single incident.

As I looked at the photograph of Christian action disrupting a service of divine worship – the choral Evensong at Chichester Cathedral on Tuesday night – suddenly I was more than usually involved in an incident I had not been physically present at.

A large four-metre banner of protest is held up in front of the Canon stalls, declaring the Chichester Diocesan funds climate chaos. The place was very familiar.

A warm front

For about ten years, I was a Canon Theologian at Chichester Cathedral, and the banner was held up in front of the long wooden screen that held ‘my’ stall. This was the place that the Canon Theologian had sat since the Cathedral was built during the medieval warm period (between 750-1350). The Catholic priests and monks who sat in the seat that I inherited got even hotter in their robes than I did in the stuffiest moments of our high summers. They grew grapes and made wine in Sussex then. Temperatures in our islands were warmer than they have been even in the last 50 years.

[…]  For now, we need to recognise that however we got to where we are, the science is not yet clear. I know that to even suggest this is to risk being called a ‘denier’, one of the most serious kinds of contemporary heretic. Yet the question of what lies behind the changing climate (and it is alarming) and what can be done about it remains unpleasantly unsolved.

We know that weather models are notoriously unreliable. In 1971, The Washington Post wrote desperately about the new ice age that was coming. In 1988, it was prophesied the Maldives would be totally submerged by 2018. In 2000, a senior British scientist at the University of East Anglia went on record saying that, very soon, our children would never experience snow in the UK. In 2008, the Arctic was going to be wholly ice-free by 2018 at the latest. And so on ad nauseam.

So let’s leave the science, and turn to God.

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