by Avery Davis Lamb
In 2023, I gave a talk to a group of churches in Black Mountain, North Carolina. It is a beautiful small town nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, just outside Asheville, where the peaks are often draped in a serene, ancient mist (the blue for which the Blue Ridge is named). Indeed, these mountains are ancient, some of the oldest in the world, some 1.1 billion years of bearing witness to natural floods and fires, slowly eroding the granite peaks down into the calm serenity they exhibit now.
During our time together, I shared that their region was generally considered a “climate refuge”—a geographic, geological or meteorological sanctuary, shielded from the most violent effects of our changing world. We spoke of environmental justice with the comfort of those who believe the storm to be a distant neighbor.
Hurricane Helene shattered that illusion. In 2024, the same forces that eroded and molded the serene valleys of the mountains, now supercharged from human-created climate change, created a 1000-year flood event in the region.[1] The storm claimed 115 lives in North Carolina and left thousands without water, power or a roof over their heads. The “refuge” was gone, replaced by a landscape of trauma that made one thing clear: As we stand in 2026, the climate crisis has forced us to reevaluate the boundaries of where we call home and whom we call our neighbors.
This experience in Black Mountain has become a familiar one for many of us. Climate disasters are now an expected feature of living in our Anthropocene time, an era defined by the mutual “in-breaking” of the human and the nonhuman. In this era, the modern perception of human life as separate from and superior to the nonhuman world is being washed away by rising seas and migrating creatures. This is an apocalyptic era in the literal sense: The “veil” of the human-nonhuman binary has been torn. As Amitav Ghosh writes in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, we are beginning to recognize the “presence and proximity of nonhuman interlocutors” from which we had previously turned away.[2] As human systems break into balanced ecological systems, those nonhuman forces—wind, rain, heat, fire—break back into our human systems. This disastrous unveiling reveals the porous nature of our world: We were never as independent as we thought.
Perhaps one way to read this moment is as an invitation into hospitality. Rather than walling ourselves off from nature, as has been the project of the Anthropocene, we could welcome human and nonhuman forces in, welcoming the ways in which their presence might shape us.
When humans act as “rude hosts” to the nonhuman world, hospitality offers a framework for reshaping our political, ecological and ecclesial relationships with other humans and nonhuman creatures, and ourselves. As a society (and, too often, as Christians), we risk slipping into what Patrick Chamoiseau calls “dishumanity”—a state where apathy and disdain for the displaced refugees signal a disconnection from what makes us human. Chamoiseau argues for a global politics of hospitality where no one is considered a foreigner.[3] Hospitality offers a vital alternative to this dishumanity. As storms intensify and ecological challenges deepen, churches stand uniquely positioned to offer more than temporary shelter. They can provide a transformative vision of a world where all creation has the opportunity to truly flourish. This is the work of “Climate Hospitality”—the creative work of creating space for thriving in a world increasingly disrupted by climate change.
Hospitality in Creation and the Church
To understand climate hospitality, we must first recognize that hospitality is not merely a human virtue, but the very mode of God’s working in the world. As Norman Wirzba writes, “when we attend to the first Sabbath sunrise, we see a “hospitable love that ‘makes room’ for what is not God to be and to flourish.”[4] Divine love is the action that brings creation into being. God, in the act of creation, makes room for the thriving of life. This “logic of creation” suggests that the world does not operate fundamentally through the forces of competition or “red in tooth and claw”[5] survival, but through the divine nurturing presence that welcomes others into existence.
In the ministry of Jesus, too, we see this divine hospitality in action. Jesus attended to the spiritual, social and material needs of bodies, creating the “practical, social, and structured environment in which sacred life can be affirmed.”[6]5 This reflects a biblical witness where the sparrows “are not forgotten by God” (Luke 12:6) and the lilies are “clothed in splendor” (Matthew 6:28–29). Even his triumphal entry into Jerusalem—an act of “political street theater”—features Jesus riding a young colt rather than a war-horse, inviting a nonhuman creature to participate in the work of peacemaking rather than exploitation.[7] As the ultimate host, Christ makes space for the flourishing of life, reconciling the broken relationships that prevent all creatures from living into the fullness of their lives.
If hospitality is the fundamental logic of God’s relationship to the world, then the mission of the church must be a creative redeployment of that logic in our specific time and place.[8] The church is called to be the embodiment of Christ’s hospitable works on earth. This transition from theological foundation to institutional practice requires us to bridge the gap between our Sunday liturgies and our Monday landscapes.
As Christine Pohl reminds us in her work, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition, “hospitality is a personal but institutionally rooted practice” that depends on the viability of the institutions in which it is embedded.[9] For the church to be a “sanctuary” in the Anthropocene, its structures and sensibilities must be responsive to the creaturely needs of our warming world. This is where the political and the parochial meet: The church becomes a hybrid “oikos-polis”—a household and a public assembly—where we negotiate a common life with friends, strangers and the nonhuman “friendless.”
To follow Christ into this work, we must move from mere contemplation to misericordia—the capacity to understand the pain grief, or sorrow of another as one’s own.[10]9 This capacity allows us to see the “world of wounds” and respond with the deliberate shaping of spaces where life can take root again. When we are linked to our guests by misericordia, hospitality becomes a formative practice that changes the host as surely as it aids the guest.
Four Modes of Climate Hospitality for the Church
This constructive engagement requires the intentional shaping of our physical, social, spiritual and political structures. True climate hospitality requires addressing the systems that create displacement and destruction. For the local church, this work can be understood through four reciprocating modes: Gardens, Encounters, Rituals and Movements.
Gardens: Physical Hospitality. The journey begins with the mode of physical hospitality, where we ask how to make room for the thriving of displaced and dispossessed creatures. A gardener creates the appropriate conditions—the soil, light and nutrients—under which the creatures in the garden can thrive. This requires an intimacy with the local ecosystem, recognizing that a “tree’s beginning is at the meeting point of seed and soil.” In Annapolis, Maryland, St. Luke’s Episcopal Church embodied this by restoring a buried stream and creating a “living shoreline” to absorb rising tides.[11]
Encounters: Social Hospitality. Social hospitality is not just about friendliness; it is about building the encounters that form the backbone of a community’s survival. Because climate-resilient communities are built on strong social bonds, we must practice getting to know our neighbors—both human and nonhuman.
Recent scholarship confirms that social cohesion is one of the best predictors of a climate-resilient community. Resilience is more than just “bouncing back” to a pre-disaster state; it is the capacity of a community to “bounce forward” by learning, adapting and taking collective responsibility for its future. This collective efficacy depends on what sociologists call “community capitals”—specifically the social capital found in the “bonding, bridging and linking” ties that hold a neighborhood together.[12]
Rituals: Spiritual Hospitality. The spiritual dimension is found in rituals that shape us to see the world as creation, not as resources to exploit and destroy. In the Anthropocene, we need rituals that can address the deep trauma and anxiety wrought by climate change. I write this the day after Ash Wednesday, a day filled with earthy significance. It is one of the many Christian practices, including the sacraments, that could use a good re-earthing. For me, this has meant reimagining Ash Wednesday by rubbing muddy humus between my fingers to remember that we are divine dirt, a ritual echoing those words we hear or say on this day: that “we are dirt, and to dirt we shall return.” It has meant experiencing baptism as a creation-soaked sacrament, by being held in the 40-degree meltwater of a dying glacier—a ritual of rebirth into love for a world that is presently dying. These re-earthed rituals move us toward an active hope, grounded in the reality that everything is not all right, but that redemption is possible.
Movements: Political Hospitality. Finally, parochial actions must expand into Movements, the mode of political hospitality that seeks to change the systems that destroy life. This work moves beyond personal charity to engage in works of justice with creation. We see this struggle play out vividly at Chi’chil Biłdagoteel—Oak Flat—a site in Arizona sacred to the San Carlos Apache Tribe. To the Apache, Chi’chil Biłdagoteel is a sanctuary where Ga’an (messengers) dwell and prayers ascend straight to the Creator. This cathedral of creation is currently threatened by a massive copper mine that would cause the land to collapse into a gaping crater. The legal and spiritual struggle led by Apache Stronghold is an act of spiritual solidarity and a holy refusal of empire’s script, and the support of many Christian institutions, who have advocated and filed amicus briefs, seeing the support of Oak Flat as an issue of human and more-than-human justice.[13]
Building the Ark
Timothy Gorringe argues that the time for the purely prophetic is over. He suggests that in the face of our current global emergency, “ark building might be the task to which theological ethics leads us.”[14] While this imagery draws on the Noah story, the sentiment applies directly to our role today: In the midst of crisis, the material matters. For the church, “ark building” is the faithful work of hospitality. It is the labor of constructing and maintaining the physical, social, spiritual and political structures that can sustain life through the oncoming storms.
Avery Davis Lamb is executive director of Creation Justice Ministries and a writer exploring the intersection of Christianity, ecology and justice. He leads national ecumenical efforts to equip congregations and denominational partners for faithful climate action, weaving together theology, advocacy and spiritual formation. An avid runner, cyclist and outdoor pilgrim, he draws on experiences in wild places to imagine a church rooted in sacred kinship and committed to the flourishing of all creation.
[1] Haley Thiem and Rebecca Lindsey, “Hurricane Helene’s Extreme Rainfall and Catastrophic Inland Flooding,” NOAA Climate.gov, November 7, 2024, https://www.climate.gov/news-features/event-tracker/hurricane-helenes-extreme-rainfall-and-catastrophic-inland-flooding.
[2] Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 30.
[3] Patrick Chamoiseau, Migrant Brothers: A Poet’s Declaration of Human Dignity, trans. Matthew Amos and Fredrik Rönnbäck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).
[4] Norman Wirzba, From Nature to Creation: A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015), 7.
[5] This phrase is a reference to Alfred Lord Tennyson’s 1850 poem In Memoriam A.H.H., written as a lament following the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam. Tennyson’s description of “Nature, red in tooth and claw” predates the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by nine years, yet it came to represent a popular, if narrow, interpretation of Darwinism that viewed the natural world as an arena of unceasing, violent competition. Modern ecological science has largely moved past this singular focus, proving that collaboration, symbiosis, and mutual aid are just as fundamental to the survival of life (if not more so) than competition. This is evidenced, for example, by the “wood wide web” of fungal networks, researched and written about by Suzanne Simard, that allow trees to share resources.
[6] Norman Wirzba, This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 173.
[7] Ched Myers, “Palm Sunday as Subversive Street Theatre: Sixth Sunday in Lent (Mk 11:1-11),” Radical Discipleship (blog), March 26, 2021, https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2021/03/26/palm-sunday-as-subversive-street-theatre-sixth-sunday-in-lent-mk-111-11/.
[8] For a deeper exploration of how religious traditions are used to address unprecedented ecological problems, see Willis Jenkins, The Future of Ethics: Sustainability, Social Justice, and Religious Creativity (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2013). Jenkins argues that religious ethics are effective not because they contain a static set of universal “values,” but because they function as living traditions that are constantly being renegotiated and redeployed to meet new contextual demands. In this view, climate hospitality is a creative “ark-building” project that uses the ancient tools of Christian tradition to address the unique spiritual and material crises of the Anthropocene.
[9] Christine D. Pohl, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans), 57.
[10] I draw on Alasdair MacIntyre here. MacIntyre identifies misericordia as the greatest virtue relating us to our neighbor, defined as the aspect of charity where we supply a neighbor’s needs by understanding their sorrow as our own. See Alasdair C. MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 2001).
[11] I tell the story of St. Luke’s at length in Avery Davis Lamb, “How Three Coastal Churches Became Hubs of Climate Resilience,” Sojourners, April 2020, https://sojo.net/magazine/april-2020/how-three-coastal-churches-became-hubs-climate-resilience
[12] For an in-depth review of how social networks and collective action serve as the primary drivers of community-level adaptation, see Shaikh Mohammad Kais and Md Saidul Islam, “Community Capitals as Community Resilience to Climate Change: Conceptual Connections,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 13, no. 12 (December 2016): 1211. Kais and Islam argue that overall resilience is located at the intersection of a community’s capitals and its capacity for self-organization.
[13] Avery Davis Lamb, “Worship the Empire Fears: Oak Flat and the Choice Before Us,” Do Justice (blog), Christian Reformed Church in North America, June 2025, https://www.crcna.org/do-justice/worship-empire-fears-oak-flat-and-choice-us.
[14] Timothy J. Gorringe, “On Building an Ark: The Global Emergency and the Limits of Moral Exhortation,” Studies in Christian Ethics 24, no. 1 (2011): 27.
