It's hard to know how to pray for something as big as climate change, but here are some ideas that might help you and your group...
- Commit to spending time purposefully trying to get to know God better and allow God to break your heart with the things that break His. We're motivated to act when something gets to us on a heart level. Here's some great tips on how to seek God.
- Go for a walk, and imagine how the landscape around you may look in 100 years’ time. Chat to God about how that might affect people, and how it makes you feel.
- Put on some loud music, and use it to help you think about how we can make a louder noise about climate change so politicians hear us.
- Climate change can sometimes seem a bit of an abstract issue. Ask the Holy Spirit to help you develop the human connection, and spend some quiet time thinking about or looking through pictures of the diversity of human cultures around the world. Allow God to touch your heart with thoughts of the people who are and will be affected directly and indirectly, and what we stand to lose as a global society.
- Each time you use motorised transport this week, use it as a reminder to pray for a shift away from an economy based on fossil fuels.
- Genesis 2:15 indicates that God’s purpose for us on earth as a species is to both work and care for the earth. Pray over how we can make both the global economy and caring for the earth and everything in it compatible and productive.
- Take some time to pray about your own money, where it is spent and how it is invested (bank, pension fund, your own giving etc), and whether there’s anything you can do to make it work better for justice.
- As a group, collect up all your spare change between one meet up and the next. When you bring it all together at the next meet up, spend a while praying over the change you can make together and what you could do to campaign for your church or local university to disinvest from fossil fuels. You could send the change (or a donation for the same amount!) in to SPEAK afterwards to contribute towards the campaign.
- Look up pictures of the fossil fuel industry (coal, oil rigs, fracking sites, power stations etc), and pictures of sustainable technology and renewable energy sources (eg efficient cars, wind farms, small scale combined heat and power systems, eco houses etc). Use the pictures (on your own or with others) to inspire your prayers for investments to move from supporting fossil fuels to supporting sustainable technology.