Three Reorientations for Communities Facing Planetary Polycrisis

by Cody J. Sanders, guest co-editor

The only two responses to the ecological and climatological crises we face as a planet at present are either denial – typically for the purposes of economic or political benefit of those manufacturing the denial narratives – or facing the reality of our lives on the brink with fear and trembling. The latter is the only realistic response.

Both responses can lead to immobilization. In denial, we refuse to act because we’re convinced there’s nothing wrong. In fear and trembling, we can struggle to know where to start, or what response could rise to the mammoth occasion that we face. Three reorientations are needed to help us engage more fully and meaningfully in our current era as communities of faith. None of them are easy. But all of them, I believe, are necessary.

Reorienting Our Perspective from Climate Crisis to Planetary Polycrisis

   The ecological and climate crises we face are multiple, not singular. And they cannot be understood in an additive fashion (crisis + crisis + crisis = bigger crisis). The framework of “polycrisis” helps us to get a realistic grasp on the ways in which the crises we face multiply in their effects and severity. Climate collapse and artificial intelligence and far-right political movements and nationalism and migration patterns are not distinct crises, but each one touches and changes the others in ways that make the outcomes of all of them harder to predict.

Polycrisis is a framework that helps us see the systemic nature of the ecological crises we face. They involve multiple systems: from government, to economic systems and supply chains, to ecological systems, to technology, and even religious and theological systems that shape our perspective on all these areas.

In polycrisis, each crisis is not independent of others, but all are interconnected. One crisis intersects with and often exacerbates other crises, often in cascading ways. For example, war exacerbates the climate crisis while certain technologies and disinformation make it difficult for humans to respond to the climate crisis and often to situations of war and conflict as well. The pressures of climate change increase global migration realities, which, when interpreted through xenophobic political narratives, fuels far-right nationalism. These crises are not cumulative or linear, but cascading, amplifying, and operating with complex feedback loops.

Churches are often oriented toward technical, solution-oriented responses to crises. These often work very well when addressing a specific local crisis like a natural disaster that mobilizes the relief efforts of faith communities. But polycrisis is ongoing and has no clear “end” in sight, no simple solution that will bring resolution. The pathway for addressing the multiple outcomes of polycrisis are as non-linear as the crises themselves.

Amid our polycrisis, technical solutions are insufficient. Yet faith communities have deep wells of wisdom to draw upon in the soul craft that is necessary to cultivate congregations of care and rugged hopeful practice. A few of these tasks of soul craft involve helping people to shift our sense of life in the world away from philosophies of scarcity and individualism toward theologies of abundance and communal care, away from endless growth as a model for preferred futures toward living withing the limits of the planetary community, and diminishing the sway of the human supremacist, separation-from-nature story toward richer theological and biblical narratives of human entanglement within the wider web of life.

While many different interlocking technical approaches to the various outcomes of polycrisis are also necessary, this moment requires an overhaul of our philosophies and theologies of what it means to live life on this planet, how to practice our humanity in an ecologically interconnected way, and the ways that our theological traditions lead us in that path of planetary relationality and away from the myth of human supremacy and separation.

 Reorienting Our Posture toward Relationship with the Web of Life

We are in a relationship with the larger ecological web of life. That is the Christian story of humanity’s relationship with the wider earth. We can see it from the outset of the scriptures in the primordial story of creation. Genesis 2:7 portrays it with beautiful wordplay in the Hebrew: It is from the dust of the ground, ha’adamah, that God forms the human, ha’adam. From humus to human is our theological origin story of embodiment.

Earth creatures and celestial bodies are portrayed throughout the Bible as co-worshipers of God alongside humans and repositories of wisdom. We see it in texts like Job 35:11, “Who teaches us more than the animals of the earth and makes us wiser than the birds of the air?” (NRSVue), or the voiceless speech of the heavens and the day and the night in Psalm 19. Or Psalm 148’s cacophonous chorus of praise from the sun, moon, and stars, hail, snow, frost and storm, mountains, tress, sea monsters and animals and, finally, the human.

This is the only way we have ever been related to plants and animals and trees and mountains and bodies of water. But we have long pretended that we are separate from this eco web. And this is a very sophisticated game of pretend using theological, philosophical and even scientific justifications to bolster our belief in human supremacy over the rest of creation. But our pretend separation and our theologies and philosophies and scientific theories of human supremacy are killing us and the ecological web in which we are enveloped.

We face our current ecological context with the larger web of life in a fragile but resilient, connected but not singular, interdependent earth community. While many churches have come to understand the gravity of our current ecological and climate crises, we have often only tweaked our human supremacist orientations toward “creation care.” It’s a good start, but care for is not quite as profound a relationship as bound up with the wider web of life.

To make this reorientation, we must shift from seeing the ecological web of beings and landscapes that enfold us as repositories of natural “resources” that we and our future generations need, or even landscapes and beings of “beauty” that call for our appreciation and care. We must recover our sense of being in relationship with the larger web of life that enfolds us, and the other-than-human creatures who inhabit the planet alongside us, with their fates and ours bound up with one another. This relationship is what we see portrayed in Ecclesiastes 3:20 where the teacher reflects on both the origins and the fate shared by humans and animals alike in death, saying, “All are from the dust, and all turn to dust again” (NRSVue).

In a recent issue of the Journal of Pastoral Theology (Vol. 35, No. 2, 2025), I theorized a concept I termed, “ecopneumastalgia,” to describe our longing for these lost relationships with spiritually alive earth others. (Eco designates the ecological setting. Pneuma is the Greek word for “breath” or “spirit” used throughout the New Testament pointing us toward that inspiritedness of an ecological web of life. Algia is a Greek word for “pain,” and can also denote something more like “longing” or “yearning” in the way it is used in the term “nostalgia.”)

To make constructive theological contributions toward addressing our collective ecological crisis, Christian faith praxis must attempt to restore this inspirited connection to earth others, moving beyond simple care for the earth to a shared love – biophilia – of life that unites God, humans and the ecological world. Nothing short of a theological reorientation of our relationships with the ecological web of life will begin to approach the tasks ahead of us in facing the planetary polycrisis alongside the larger earth community.

 Reorienting Our Path toward Feral Hope-in-Practice

Seeing our future with an everything’s-going-to-all-work-out-in-the-end optimism is a recipe for disappointment and dejection. Believing in the unfettered linear path of progress that will ensure that we will avert disaster in the end requires us to treat the very real setbacks and dangerous sideroads on the path of supposed progress with denial.

Our ways of practicing hope together must become undomesticated from hope’s captivity to ideologies of progress (e.g., things are always getting better, scientific advancements will save us, etc.), emotional dominance of optimism and toxic positivity (e.g., look on the bright side, don’t get so bogged down in the details of our situation, etc.), and spiritual bypassing (e.g., God’s got this so there’s nothing to worry about or do). None of these are robust enough to carry the weight of something approaching “hope.”

Hope – in a genuine biblical and Christian theological sense – is germinated in the soil of despair. Despair is not the enemy of hope, it is most often hope’s starting place. But hope, to be meaningful in contexts of despair, needs to be put into practice in our lives, and not be relegated to a feeling or belief. Here are a few of the interlocking practices that I believe are necessary to practice a feral hope that emerges from the context of planetary polycrisis.

We need to cultivate communities of collective efficacy. Hope is rarely practiced alone. Throughout the biblical text, narratives of hope take shape when communities are called together, often into wilderness places of danger and death. The congregations we belong to have all been called to do hard things in our pasts. These stories, retold with appreciation and awe and an eye toward what we can learn from our faith ancestors, help us build a sense of collective efficacy – the belief/feeling that we can do hard things and be successful at reaching meaningful milestones together. There are no solo disciples. Jesus always called disciples into community. We need strong relational tapestries to practice hope together.

We need a realistic appraisal of what’s actually happening in our life in the world. That’s why “polycrisis” is a helpful reorientation of our sense of what’s going on around us. If we start with denial or a bright-sided perspective, we cannot approach the tasks that are needed for communities moving toward hopeful futures amid polycrisis. Take it all in. Refuse to look away from the heartache. Move toward the painful places in the world with eyes wide open. Hope begins with realistic perspective.

We must develop an anticipatory vision for what might be possible beyond the present status quo. If all we have is a realistic appraisal, we may know the diagnosis very well but have little sense of what can be done, or what preferred futures might look like. Part of this anticipatory vision of possible futures should include a more robust relational eco-theology. But beyond that, we must also ask together what kind of futures we feel called to cultivate together. How do our values and theological tradition inform this sense of call and these futurist visions? The eschatological imagination and prophetic tradition of the Bible developed this type of anticipatory vision for our faith ancestors. We continue to be called into futures that are yet unknown and must envision them with the eyes of faith.

We must cultivate our collective courage to risk together. Hope and risk are siblings. In the coming days, we will be called to risk more and more for the wellbeing of our neighbors, human and other-than-human. We will risk comfort, safety, money, relationships and much more if we are following a sense of call toward relational reorientation and justice on a planetary scale. The call of Jesus is the call to risk. There’s no way around it. But we do not practice courage alone. We learn courage together, and from the examples of our faith ancestors throughout history. We practice risk alongside others who are called into the way of Jesus, too.

We need robust practices of care for the human and other-than-human beings suffering the realities of the present status quo. While we move toward possible futures, many are suffering and falling through the cracks of our systems of support. Our communities must continue to look at those around us – our neighbors human, animal, vegetal and geological – and ask what our mutuality in the web of life demands of us. Solidarity, not solutions, is the clearest orientation toward care. Plant the trees. Tend the community gardens. Feed the hungry. Protect the immigrant. All these care practices are vital, even as we look toward larger reorientations toward the planetary polycrisis.

The reality that many will not make it with us requires that we hold sufficient space for grief and lament for all that we are losing along the way. Grief keeps our hearts nimble so that they don’t break under the weight of the losses we face. Grief is a communal task that we too often shirk by not creating sufficient space for people to bring their heartbreak into community. Lament helps us hold together the experience of both grief and anger, expressing these in full-throated cries to God for our pain and the pain of the earth. To love the world right now means that we also grieve it. It bears the weight and the scars of our human supremacist theologies and the ways we have feigned separation from the ecological web up to the breaking point of the earth systems that sustain us. We must grieve deeply to practice hope.

Cody J. Sanders is associate professor of congregational and community care leadership at Luther Seminary, St. Paul, MN, an ordained Baptist minister, and a member of the CET board. He has written a number of books, including, Spiritual Care First Aid: An All-Hands Approach for Church and Community (Fortress, 2025).

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