The Season of Creation is a time that communities across Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant denominations observe from September 1, which is the Day of Prayer for Creation, through October 4, the Feast Day of St. Francis of Assisi. As the Season of Creation website says, this season invites all Christians “to renew our relationship with our Creator and all creation through celebration, conversion, and commitment together.”

If you are new to the Season of Creation or are interested in resources to help your community inhabit this season this year, we’ve got you covered. This article provides an array of creation care and climate justice resources for all ages. We’ve included activity and action ideas, books, curricula, and resource hubs.

If you know of a helpful Christian formation resource on creation care and climate justice that isn’t on this list, leave a comment below and tell us about it!

Activities & Action

Creation Care Pilgrimage
A pilgrimage can be a great way to connect with and learn more about the ecology in or near your community. Valerie Reinke’s “Planning a Youth Creation Care Pilgrimage” offers helpful tips and resources for organizing a creation care pilgrimage. The wisdom she shares can be useful not only for youth trips, but also for adult and parish-wide pilgrimages.

Green and Growing Club
Amy Campbell’s “The Green and Growing Club: Engaging Families in Creation Care Practices” is a formation opportunity that involves sending families resources in the mail or online so that they can learn about and care for creation at home. The design of this program has a lot of room for adaptation and creativity to fit your context.

Greening Congregations Toolkit
Earth Ministry (Washington Interfaith Power & Light) has developed a “Greening Congregations Toolkit” to help congregations of various faiths put into practice their commitments to care for creation. The toolkit includes information about becoming a “greening congregation” as well as ideas for incorporating creation care into worship, education, buildings and grounds, community engagement, and advocacy. You can access the toolkit for free through the link above.

Nature Trekking, Journaling, Sketching, and Wondering
In “Celebrate Creation with Wondering Questions,” Angela Compton-Nelson provides a number of ideas and tips for exploring the outdoors in ways that honor and wonder about all that God has created. A trek in nature, as she points out, can include pauses for journaling or sketching. Her suggestions are particularly helpful for children, families with kids, and intergenerational groups.

Prayer Calendar and Bingo
Sarah Bentley Allred offers two intergenerational formation resource ideas with downloadable printables and templates in “Prayer Calendar & Bingo Sheet for Creation Season.” Both the prayer calendar and bingo board can be tailored to your community’s ecology and interests.

Stations of Creation
This idea comes from “Via Creationis: The Way of Creation” on the Season of Creation website. Like a Stations of the Cross, this practice invites participants into prayers and readings at a series of stations that focus on creation. The link includes a guide and sample liturgy. The guide indicates that it was originally written for Roman Catholic communities and “can be freely adapted to other denominational settings.”

Books

Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land by Norman Wirzba (University of Notre Dame Press, 2022)
This book begins with the conviction that “the God of scripture is an agrarian God” (as Wirzba says at the start of the preface). It consists of nine chapters and explores six spiritual practices—”pray[ing],” “see[ing],” “descen[ding],” “humility,” “generosity,” and “hope”—through the lenses of an agrarian-centered theology.

The Art of Being a Creature: Meditations on Humus and Humility by Ragan Sutterfield (Wipf & Stock, 2024)
This book provides 42 short meditations (2 – 4 pages long each) on soil interwoven with personal narrative and theological reflection.

Becoming Rooted: One Hundred Days of Reconnecting with Sacred Earth by Randy Woodley (Broadleaf, 2022)
This book of 100 short meditations (2 pages long each) draws upon the author’s Indigenous experience to encourage readers to learn from and to become more connected to creation in the places and lands where they live. Each meditation also offers reflection prompts and practices.

The Creation Care Bible Challenge: A 50 Day Bible Challenge edited by Marek P. Zabriskie (Forward Movement, 2022)
This book is a devotional that offers 50 entries (roughly 4 pages long each) with scriptures, reflections, and prayers on creation.

Everyone Must Eat: Food, Sustainability, and Ministry by Mark L. Yackel-Juleen (Fortress, 2021)
This book calls attention to rural church ministry as a vital site for engaging ecological degradation and creation care. It aims to equip ministry leaders in various contexts with deeper theological, biblical, sociological, and economic insight into the significance of contemporary land practices so that Christian communities can better discern faithful and sustainable ways to care for food systems and all the lives impacted by them.

In Deep Waters: Spiritual Care for Young People in a Climate Crisis by Talitha Amadea Aho (Fortress, 2022)
This book discusses how to minister among youth amid the current climate crisis. It uses stories and reflections to highlight adolescents’ experiences and concerns around grappling with the ecological devastation that has been handed to them, and it provides pastoral wisdom for those who minister with youth in attending to their gifts and needs in responding to the climate crisis.

Curricula

Abundant Life Garden Project (Episcopal Relief & Development, 2020, Episcopal Church)
This is a free digital curriculum for children and intergenerational groups that emphasizes the abundant life that God gives to creation and the importance of sharing that life with others. It consists of 6 lessons on the topics of “Water,” “Soil,” “Seeds,” “Animals,” “Harvest,” and “Celebration.”

Climate Justice Curriculum for Youth and Young Adults (Lesson Plans That Work, 2021, Episcopal Church)
This is a free digital curriculum for middle and high school youth as well as for young adults that enables them to reflect on the climate crisis theologically so that they can draw upon faith to act for ecological justice. It includes 7 lessons, and age-specific plans for each lesson are available for youth and young adult groups.

Faithful Resilience (Creation Justice Ministries, 2022, multi-denominational)
This is a free digital curriculum for adults for exploring how communities might practice resilience and seek equity and justice in the face of imminent changes that the climate crisis is bringing, especially rising sea levels and people having to relocate to other communities and places as a result. It offers 6 lessons that include scripture, questions for reflection, research prompts to learn about local ecologies, actions to take, and stories spotlighting communities that put resilience into practice.

Follow Me: Care for Creation (Growing Faith Resources, 2024, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.))
This is a unit within the “Follow Me” curriculum that grounds creation care in Christian faith. It is available in versions tailored to children, youth, adults, and intergenerational groups, and it can be purchased as a standalone printed or digital product or in a bundle with other units. It involves 4 lessons on the topics “Appreciate God’s Creation,” “Till,” “Share the Planet,” and “Restore Creation.”

God’s World in Community: Creation Care (GenOn Ministries, ecumenical)
This is a digital intergenerational curriculum for purchase that invites participants into scripture readings, creation care activities, and prayer together. It consists of 7 lessons that follow Genesis 1 in tandem with related psalms.

An Illustrated Earth: Celebrating God’s Creation (Illustrated Ministry, denominationally unaffiliated)
This is a digital curriculum for purchase designed for children that highlights stories in scripture about creation. It offers 12 lessons on four main topics: “water,” “plants,” “food,” and “animals.” Lessons include gathering activities, age-appropriate scripture paraphrases, open-ended questions for wondering, coloring pages, and prayers. A separate version of the curriculum made for families to use at home is also available for purchase.

Resource Hubs

Creation Care Study Guides from The Episcopal Diocese of Arizona
This website includes links and information about several different formation resources for youth and adults.

Resource Hub by Creation Justice Ministries
This hub features a wide array of formation resources for children, youth, and adults, including Bible studies, liturgies, issue-focused guides, seasonal and holiday resources, and more. The site also has a table that lists all the resources that Creation Justice Ministries houses with tags, scripture references, and other helpful information.

Resources at Interfaith Power & Light
This resource page provides materials for worship and education as well as for learning about solar energy opportunities for congregations.

Season of Creation 2024 and St. Francis Day Resources from Episcopal Church Creation Care
This page offers links and information about the Season of Creation, the Prophetic Voices podcast for the Season of Creation, and Episcopal liturgical resources for the Season of Creation and the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi (which are available in English and in Spanish).

Season of Creation Resources at Season of Creation
The Season of Creation website provides a number of resources for commemorating the season. These include denomination-specific materials, advocacy resources, promotional downloads and graphics, liturgical resources, and activities. Some resources are available in English and in additional languages.

Toolkit for Launching Your Creation Care Ministry from United Methodist Church Discipleship Ministries
This page offers a host of resources for understanding and implementing creation care, including scriptures about creation, theological perspectives from John Wesley and other church leaders in Christian history, prayers, book lists, movies, practical tips, and additional websites and resources to check out.

Featured image is by Jeffrey Workman on Unsplash