Climate Intercessors is administratively/fiscally supported by Eden Vigil Institute @ William Carey International University, a not-for-profit institution, located in Pasadena, CA USA
Low-lying Patmos has Enemies (Matt 5)
When our Global Prayer Meeting rolls around this month, the COP28 climate summit in Dubai will be concluding its final (scheduled) day. We will know much about whether fossil fuels are facing "phase out" vs. "phase down;" whether coal, oil, and natural gas are lumped together; whether the myth of "unabated" burning of fossil fuels has been challenged in the official texts. We will know how the COP28 president, a CEO of an oil company, has served the interests of the Paris Agreement. When we meet in prayer on Tuesday, December 12, the first two timings will include live reports from Dubai.
Our leaders (Samuel, Ben, and myself) will be at COP28, as will many others from the Climate Intercessors network. If you are interested in following along, our sister initiative, Christian Climate Observers Program (CCOP), which Samuel, Ben, and I also help lead will be sending out daily newsletters from COP28, with daily prayer requests. You are invited to sign up here:
And this month's newsletter is also going to be unique. It will be a follow-up to what we published last month about the uncomfortable perplexity of having enemies, let alone seeing the fossil fuel companies as an enemy. While we maintain our "tongue-in-cheek" biblical titling--in this case "Low-Lying Patmos Has Enemies (Matt 5)"--we invite you to a longer meditation that begins like this:
On (Finally) Having Enemies and (Starting to) Love Them at the COP28 Climate Summit in Dubai
On the day this article is published, I will be boarding a plane in Toronto to fly to Dubai for the COP28 UN Climate Summit. Upwards to 70,000 people from 195 countries will be there in the final month of the hottest year in human history to help negotiate and implement the voluntary good-will initiative known as the Paris Agreement. I will be helping lead forty emerging leaders from under-mobilized constituencies as part of the Christian Climate Observers Program (CCOP). Many of them are university students, almost all are attending a COP for the first time. When they don their yellow badges, they will be official Observers which grants them access to the “Blue Zone” where all the negotiations take place, and all the pavilions are arranged. Oil money from the UAE is reportedly helping build a Blue Zone that will be slightly less than twice the size that the Blue Zone at COP27 in Egypt was (which itself was enormous!) Our CCOPers will feel like they are walking into what will seem like the World of Discovery itself. I envy them their first blast of excitement.
This will be my seventh COP. My first was COP21 in 2015 when the Paris Agreement was adopted. What keeps an aging introvert like me going back to these events? The answer in a word is: discovery. For example, each year the CCOPers are a new group, and they represent new constituencies (churches, campuses, denominations, NGOs, professions, regions, Global South nations, etc.) They are endlessly fascinating people. Additionally, each COP is new, and not primarily because each year the host country is different. Climate change advances. The Paris Agreement evolves. The zeitgeist of planet Earth shifts. Each year I discover something more about this journey that we all share. This year however, I’ve been tipped off about discovery, and am proactively planning it into my experience of COP28. This year, I intend to: 1) discover that you and I and every living creature who cares about our planet have enemies; 2) discover that “loving your enemies” introduces us to a new type of Christian love, a kind we never learned in the Sunday Schools of our dominant culture; and 3) test the validity of Martin Luther King’s assertion: “if you love your enemies, you will discover that at the very root of love is the power of redemption.” Planet Earth could use a little redemption. The climate movement could use a new type of power. Our enemies seem to be winning. (Read the rest at WCIU blog.)
You are very dear to God,
Lowell Bliss
on behalf of the Climate Intercessors leadership team
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Major Prayer Theme for December: Live reports from COP28 in Dubai
Tuesday, December 12
on-line Zoom intercessory meetings, facilitated and interactive.
four options (for various time zones); choose one or attend multiple ones.
each meeting will be one hour in length.
simply sign in at the proper time; no need to register ahead of time.
invite friends by having them register at the website.
Climate Intercessors budgets US$300 a month/ $US3600 a year to operate. Please consider donating. Thank you. Climate Intercessors is administratively/fiscally supported by Eden Vigil Institute @ William Carey International University, a not-for-profit institution, located in Pasadena, CA USA
William Carey International University, 1010 E Union St. Suite 110, Pasadena, CA 91106
