Stephen Trew shares Christian perspective on climate crisis
Stephen Trew is a climate activist, a parishioner of Magheralin Parish and a lay member of the Church of Ireland General Synod. He spearheaded the successful campaign that will see the Church of Ireland complete its divestment from companies that extract fossil fuels by the end of this year.
Stephen will be attending the COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow and was interviewed on BBC Radio Ulster’s Sunday Sequence on 31 October.
Stephen said: “The Church in recent years has really woken up to the problem. As Christians we have a moral duty to do no harm – it says in Genesis that mankind was put in the garden to work it and take care of it. People are realising now that we really have to take care of creation as part of our mission.”
He continued, “Jesus said that we are to love God and to love our neighbour and our global neighbours, as we can see, often every day, are really suffering as a result of the climate crisis. For a number of years my call to the General Synod of the Church of Ireland was, look, we are investing in the fossil fuel industry which is causing the crisis and we really need to withdraw those investments – to divest from that.”
The commitment was initially made by the General Synod in 2018, after a private member’s motion was passed which set a target date of 2022 for divestment from fossil fuel extraction
Stephen said: “The real good story in this is that it’s causing other churches and other bodies to do the same. The three major denominations across Ireland now have a united voice which is saying, it’s really not the moral thing to do to keep investing in the fossil fuel industry any longer.”
Divestment is, however, only the beginning. Listen to the whole segment at this link, starting at 10:50.