A Field Guide to the Four Spaces of Climate Engagement
Introduction
What does it look like to truly belong to the earth…and to help your faith community get there?
Many of us measure congregational and individual climate engagement by its most intense expressions: giant rallies, petitions to Congress, or solar installations. But that picture leaves out the vast majority of people who care deeply about the natural world and simply don’t see themselves in these expressions.
Belonging to the Earth offers a different framework. Drawing on the research of anthropologist Edward T. Hall and the community formation work of Joseph Myers, this Field Guide describes four distinct spaces (Public, Social, Personal and Intimate) in which climate engagement happens, both within a faith community and in an individual’s life. It argues that all four are real, all four are necessary, and none is more important than the others.
Whether you are tending a garden in silence or standing at a statehouse, watching a documentary with strangers or sitting with a friend in grief over what the world is becoming, you are already in this work. This Field Guide gives that work a name, a map, and a community.
This is one of the most thoughtful faith and climate resources I’ve read. The Four Spaces framework gives leaders a practical and deeply human way to think about climate engagement, making room for people at every stage of the journey. As a faith community member, I expect to return to this often.
– Sarah Green, Executive Director, Iowa Environmental Council
Who is This For?
Belonging to the Earth was written especially (but not exclusively) for these audiences:
- Clergy and faith leaders who want to help their congregations become genuinely climate-informed…not just as a committee or campaign, but as a quality woven into worship, formation, and community life.
- Congregational leaders like green team members, educators, or program directors who are designing the spaces and invitations that form people for sustained, joyful engagement with the natural world.
- Practitioners and network leaders who work across many faith communities and need a richer, more flexible map of where people are and what they need.
- People of faith who are seeking fresh, simple ways of thinking about their role in caring for the Earth and the daily opportunities to take climate action.
Belonging to the Earth identifies and confirms the value and validity of each of the “four spaces” of engagement. This bedrock construct is both a place from which to build and a reminder that each action has its particular place in creating the building. The field guide sparks the joy of discovering and appreciating the beauty of each engagement.
– Crys Zinkiewicz, UMC EarthKeeper and author of the monthly United Methodist Creation Justice Tips
“This is the resource I didn’t realise I was waiting for. Deeply thought provoking, insightful and inspiring. What a gift to have these frameworks and insights from anthropological research on belonging, intimacy, community and small groups translated and applied to strengthening the formation of faith-rooted climate engagement. I can’t wait to share this with my networks as a tool to open up new ways of thinking about and improving their engagement across public, social, personal and intimate spaces.”
– Jessica Morthorpe – Founder of the Five Leaf Eco-Awards and co-author of the Climate Pastoral Care Course
Overview of the Guide’s 5 Parts
- Part One names the four “failure modes” that limit most faith-based climate engagement–Performative Witness, Perpetual Urgency, Rootless Activism, and Private Conviction–and asks what a wider, more comprehensive picture might look like.
- Part Two introduces the foundations of the four-spaces framework, explains Hall’s original research (including the actual physical distances that ground the whole model), and describes how the climate crisis extends that framework in unexpected directions.
- Part Three (the heart of the guide) explores features of each of the four spaces in depth, asking what climate action looks like there, what sacred encounter looks like there, and what formational gift only that space can offer.
- Part Four addresses deficiency and balance: what goes missing when a space is neglected, why children and youth deserve particular attention, and what a healthy ecology of a faith-and-climate movement actually looks like.
- Part Five offers practical implications for each of the three primary audiences (clergy, congregational leaders such as program staff or Green Team leaders, and practitioners in other environmental organizations.)
“Not just for faith leaders, but for anyone who has faith in the power of community-based, sustainable, and inviting approaches to climate work. Belonging to the Earth will be a valuable tool for organizations across disciplines as we all strive for intentional practices that ‘make engagement durable.'” — Charissa Menefee and Vivian M. Cook, The EcoTheatre Lab
What’s Inside
This 40-page document (PDF) is a full-featured resource, designed to help you evaluate and grow your congregation’s efforts to grow your members and friends into passionate caretakers of the planet. It includes…
- Resources for implementing the model in your context. These are separately downloadable for use in your evaluation, planning, and education.
- A personal formation inventory
- A community programming inventory
- 100 examples of activities across all four spaces
- A sample one-year program calendar
- A Field Notes summary – a 2-page summary for volunteers, green team members, congregants, and anyone who just needs the essentials close at hand.
- We will periodically update this resource as we receive feedback, stories, examples and so on. Additional related resources are planned for the future…and we encourage you to develop your own and share them with us, too!
Also Available: A Separate Guide for Individual & Group Use
Along with the main resources is an additional download, “Where Do You Belong? Finding Your Place in the Work of Caring for the Earth.”
This 12-page, simpler, more reflective version of the main resource is ideal for use by individuals or in group settings. It includes questions for journaling or discussion.
What Climate Leaders are Saying
I am genuinely impressed with this field guide. From the start with the “notes before we begin” (which I think was incredibly helpful ) to the quotes scattered throughout to the inventories towards the end – I truly cannot think of anything else I would add or take away. This is an incredible piece of work that should make anyone want to participate in this exploration of how to take care of our earth.
– Lori Freudenberg, former Program Coordinator at Our Lady of the Prairie Retreat and Iowa Faith & Climate Network board member
The overwhelming majority of us are concerned about climate change, but feel alone in our concern. When climate is integrated into the life of our faith community, including religious services, we feel less alone, are able to see the connection to our faith, and have avenues for engagement. Belonging to the Earth provides a new framing for climate solutions with practical tools for taking action.
– Rev. Carol Divine, Program Lead at One Home One Future
For decades there have been people of conscience who have wrestled with how best their personal testimony could be used to persuade others that their individual and collective worldviews are only truly grounded in reality if they formed while cognizant of all humans’ inseparability from nature. But, the larger, reckless disregard for humanity’s natural context has led to “wholly other” being our adopted reality. Religious education has imbued a seemingly positive stance of dominion or stewardship while promising an inheritance of a renewed or ethereal promised land for the faithful who have “made the grade”. Consequently, we’ve long failed to recognize the “depth and distance” of discovery that the Belonging to the Earth field guide calls us to pursue. Our plight as climate-aware people of faith has long seemed to be one of persuasion and passion, leaving little room for inspiration to come from quieter, more contemplative sources. As the field guide itself says, our renewed calling should be “…to help every person find their place in the community of belonging to the earth and to recognize that place as sacred.” Activism has an important role to play, but it must be accomplished within the greater context of the community building and graceful relationships we all need to shelter us as we move forward through the necessary difficult times ahead. This new resource from Iowa Faith and Climate Network comes at an important time, as many of us are seeking better ways to meet people “where they are” and to embrace a framework to help guide discussions, nurture relationships, and seek common ground as we embrace an individual vocation to belong to the earth and to be invitational to others to do the same.
– Chuck Porter, Board Chair at Nebraska Interfaith Power & Light
Belonging to the Earth offers a helpful framework to deepen and broaden our climate engagement work and I look forward to sharing it through the UM Creation Justice Movement. I’m already thinking of how to apply these four spaces to our current planning, especially for our green church initiative and annual conference outreach. The resource is very well designed. I was thinking to myself as I started reading that it would be helpful to have reflection questions and a worksheet to map our work – and then found exactly that in the appendices.
– Cathy Eberhart, UMC Earthkeeper and a founding member of the United Methodist Creation Justice Movement
A Different Kind of Invitation
The goal is not to make everyone a climate activist. The goal is to help every person find their place in the community of belonging to the earth and to recognize that place as sacred.
– from Belonging to the Earth
We are each called to a belonging as wide as the earth and as intimate as a single seed held in a single hand. This Field Guide is Iowa Faith & Climate Network’s attempt to honor the full range of that calling. We hope it gives you a richer map of the territory along with a more hospitable invitation to everyone in your community who hasn’t yet found their way in.
Feedback Team
We’re grateful to the following readers for sharing their feedback with us.
- Rev. Carol Divine, Program Lead at One Home One Future
- Cathy Eberhart, UMC Earthkeeper and a founding member of the United Methodist Creation Justice Movement
- Lori Freudenberg, former Program Coordinator at Our Lady of the Prairie Retreat and Iowa Faith & Climate Network board member
- Sarah Green, Executive Director, Iowa Environmental Council
- Rev. Kate Hogg, Deacon, Christ Episcopal Church in Cedar Rapids
- Deaconess Irene DeMaris, Executive Director, Iowa Faith & Climate Network
- Jessica Morthorpe, Five Leaf Eco-Awards Founder and Director
- Rev. Lee Roorda Schott, Senior Pastor, Collegiate United Methodist Church/Wesley Foundation
- Rev. Jenny Phillips, Director, Environmental Sustainability, General Board of Global Ministries
- Chuck Porter, Board Chair, Nebraska Interfaith Power & Light
- Crys Zinkiewicz, UMC EarthKeeper and author of the monthly United Methodist Creation Justice Tips
- Members of the first Iowa Faith & Climate Network Climate-informed Clergy Cohort
- Members of the second Iowa Environmental Engagement Cohort
We’d Love Your Feedback, Too!
This resource is unlike anything we’ve ever created before, so we’d love to hear what you think of it. Let us know what your responses to it are and how you want to use it. Down the road, tell us what changed, what you tried, and what questions it raised for you or your faith community.
Email us at info@iowafaithandclimate.org or use our contact form.