Rev. Dr. Ambrose Carroll, founder of Green the Church

“So we need to get back to our roots and at our roots, we are an Earth honoring. We're in relationship with the planet. We are calling up on that and we are calling that out of one another. And we're saying, don't you remember? Don't you remember when you knew the language of the birds? You have forgotten.”

I'd like to introduce Rev. Dr. Ambrose Carroll, Senior pastor at The Church by the Side of the Road in Berkeley, CA and founder of Green The Church, a sustainability initiative designed to tap into the power and purpose of the Black Church Community and expand the role of churches as centers for environmental and economic resilience.

Transcription:

We don't talk about environmentalism in the black church, but we talk an awful lot about revival. We talk about things that are old, decayed, that they can be made brand new again. And so for us, there's this notion of renewal, of revival. There's a word from the African diaspora that is called Sankofa. As you move forward, you always look back. So what we do is we tell those stories of that.

A lot of people shied away from in the seventies and eighties. They didn't want you to know that you were from another country, right? But we tell those country stories and we talk about quilting and we talk about you doing more with less. And we talk about preservatives and we talk about herbal medicines that they made us stop talking about. They didn't want us to talk about weed. That wasn't good. Cannabis. Now cannabis is all over the place. Now it's okay. But these are our things. This is what we come with. But, when grand mama who's an herbalist, when she was doing her medicines, they said it was voodoo, and you couldn't do that in church.

So for us, it's getting back to who we are, to our indigenous roots that are native. To the African continent. But the reality is for many of us, they're native to us right here on this continent. We were already doing community for eons. So I'm a black pastor ordained by the Baptist church, but I don't do this because of what the Anabaptist did in Switzerland. We've been doing communities. It's in my blood line,. We've been leaders of congregations.

We've been leaders of tribes for thousands of years. It is that line that we teach. So not to get confused with, I'm not having a lot of hangups about the theology of the Germans and what they was talking about, but I'm looking at it from a more ancient standpoint. And so those are pieces, and from an ancient standpoint, there was no division between sacred and secular. Some parts, we don't even have words for that. It all goes together. So trying to, what we call it we are decolonizing the black church. The black church has been colonized.

And so we have to decolonize that and get back to our roots and at our roots, we are an earth honoring. We're in relationship with the planet. We are calling up on that and we are calling that out of one another. And we're saying, don't you remember?

Yeah. Don't you remember when you knew the language of the birds? You have forgotten. Some of our musicology is this earth that this world ain't my home. Some of the things that we sing because of the oppression, there's been a spirit of escapism. My daddy used to preach when I get to heaven. He said, "I grew up, I didn't have shoes on my feet, but when I get to heaven, I got shoes. You got shoes. All God's children got shoes." When we get away from the planet.

The Bible also says that there will be a new heaven and a new Earth. And that the notion of eschatology is not about an other place. The idea of theological eschatology is about what happens on this planet in the new day. And that's the place of healing, that's the place I believe that we all have to march towards. And so, yeah, it makes us wrestle with a lot of those pieces.

My friend tells us, I was talking to Dr. Derly and he was talking about the planet and the environment and a young college kid was like, "Well, that's okay. I think it's okay to talk about the earth." He said, But this is hell down here, Dr. Derly and why would you want to spend that much time taking care of hell?" Because for him, life on this planet is hell.

That's the reality of the oppressed, of the wretched of the earth. Those who are abused and see death and destruction in this place. It is a place that can be that and is that for a large part of society that is in darkness today, that are abused today. So this is a place that people are not trying to overcome, don't feel powerful enough to change. Then it becomes a place that we want to escape. And so religiosity, spirituality outside of the science becomes a coping mechanism until I'm able to be free.

However, I was listening to a scientist and they started talking about water. It really blew my mind. They said the same amount of water that was here in the beginning is still here now. That we live in a closed system. I said wow, because we've always equated water with spirit. So if it's the same amount of water on the planet and water just changes from ice to the ether and moves around, but it's still here. I begin to believe then that spirit is the same.

Nobody's going anywhere. This is it. We are tied to the reality of this planet. And every day with the expansion of time, the Cosmos is yet expanding. When I came into the environmental movement, people are skeptical of the black church. People are like, nah, we not really talking about that. Because there's a lot of oppression. There's a lot of hurt. There's a lot of misogyny. It is many things. However, I would say that anti-racist work, the work that we're doing for the planet, activism is still spiritual work. And a lot of people are trying to do spiritual work without any spiritual grounding.

Try to do spiritual work, but we're on empty because this work wears us. So my wife is a therapist. She's a self-care therapist. So she always asking, even for people in the movement, okay, where's the place for you? Where's the self-care place? Where's the place that you recharge? How are you getting that done? Whatever the language. This work can take and so we need communion, community in order to revive.

Where's the place that you recharge? This work can take and so we need communion, community in order to revive.