Welcome to Regents Theological College as a CreatureKind Partner

by David Clough

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CreatureKind is delighted to welcome Regents Theological College as our latest partner institution. Regents campus is on the western slopes of the Malvern hills in England. Regents is among the foremost Pentecostal Bible Colleges in Europe and one of the largest in the UK. It is also the national training centre for the Elim Pentecostal Churches.

Regents kindly invited me to give their annual Wesley Gilpin lecture in March 2018. I offered a number of possible lecture titles and was delighted they opted for ‘Eating More Peaceably: Christianity and Veganism’. A good number of staff, students, and external visitors attended and the response was encouraging: the audience was engaged and there were no shortage of questions to follow. I took the opportunity to meet with the college’s catering manager in advance of the lecture and was delighted to hear that for a long time he had been strongly committed to the idea that the college’s catering policy should reflect its Christian values.

Since then, CreatureKind has been in conversation with Regents about the possibility of their becoming a CreatureKind partner institution. CreatureKind partners typically commit to:

  • an audit to review trends in their consumption of animal products and report on where the animal products are currently sourced from;

  • an action plan to reduce consumption of animal products and move to higher welfare sources of animal products they continue to serve;

  • continued reflection on further ways to attend to the implications of a Christian understanding of animals for their institutional life.

It’s been great to see Regents’ commitment to embark on this process and to raise the issue within the Elim Pentecostal Church nationally. In the partnership agreement, Regents affirm that they are ‘committed to living into the promise of a reconciled creation by learning more about animals as a faith concern and by taking action to improve the lives of farmed animals’. CreatureKind looks forward to continuing to work with Regents as they continue along this path.

“Regents affirm that they are ‘committed to living into the promise of a reconciled creation by learning more about animals as a faith concern and by taking action to improve the lives of farmed animals’.”

It’s a particular pleasure for me to welcome the first Pentecostal CreatureKind partner. Pentecostal churches share my own Methodist Church roots in the Wesleyan Holiness movement. As I’ve explored in another video lecture, ‘Early Methodists and Other Animals: Animal Welfare as an Evangelical Issue’, both John Wesley and the early Methodist movements were known for their concern about cruelty towards animals. Wesley wrote an essay on the souls of animals as an undergraduate at Oxford, and he preached against animal cruelty (most famously in his 1781 sermon ‘The General Deliverance’ on Romans 8). He copied letters he received concerning cruelty to animals into his journal and published books on animal theology. Neither modern Methodists nor modern Pentecostals are often aware of this legacy, but I’m excited that institutions such as Regents are helping to recover this distinctive legacy.

If you know of an organization that might be interested in making connections between its Christian values and concern for animals, do get in touch. CreatureKind’s partner programme can support theological colleges, seminaries, churches, and Christian schools, universities, and other organizations in finding the right first steps for practical action in their particular contexts. We’d love to hear from you.

New Video Highlighting CreatureKind's Work!

Watch this great video to see how CreatureKind addresses faith, anti-racism, and farmed animal welfare, in conversation with other community initiatives that share similar concerns.

A note from CreatureKind: We are grateful and happy to be in partnership with Farm Forward, which takes seriously the role of faith communities in creation care and animal protection. We hope you enjoy this video, which talks about our work as it relates to other projects supported by Farm Forward. You can read more about the video series here.

This video focuses on the power of storytelling and identity to transform how we eat. It introduces Christian and Jewish faith leaders guiding our efforts to make compassion and justice for animals and people part of every meal.

Here’s what Farm Forward’s Erin Eberle says about our work: “Founded with Farm Forward's support, CreatureKind has worked with dozens of Christian churches and seminaries in the US and the UK to foster conversations about animal welfare and faith, provide education about factory farming, and encourage Christian institutions to adopt plant-based and higher welfare food policies.”

If you’d like to support CreatureKind’s work, please donate today! (note: donations are processed by our fiscal sponsor, ESA at Eastern University).

Green Seminary Initiative and CreatureKind Announce Partnership

GSI director, abby mohaupt, and CreatureKind co-directors, Sarah Withrow King and David Clough, on the campus of Santa Clara University in San Jose, CA.

GSI director, abby mohaupt, and CreatureKind co-directors, Sarah Withrow King and David Clough, on the campus of Santa Clara University in San Jose, CA.

While environmental advocacy and animal advocacy groups have often been at odds with one another, Green Seminary Initiative and CreatureKind believe that a holistic, effective approach to creation care must include attentiveness to both the breadth of environmental issues and the particular concerns raised by industrial farming practices.

Green Seminary Initiative (GSI) fosters efforts by theological schools and seminaries to incorporate care for the earth into the identity and mission of the institution, such that it becomes a foundational part of the academic program and an integral part of the ethos of the whole institution. CreatureKind’s mission is to encourage Christians to recognize faith-based reasons for caring about the well-being of fellow animal creatures used for food, and to take practical action in response. Today the two organizations announced a formal partnership that allows CreatureKind to work with GSI schools to help them achieve GSI’s certification standards related to food policy and to encourage them to include concern and action for animals in other areas of community life.

As an organization committed to many faith traditions, GSI understands that food and eating are central to multiple religions, as well as to spiritual formation. The consumption of food is a human experience that crosses ethnic and geographic barriers, and many religious traditions see animals as sacred in some way. GSI is also committed to paying attention to the ways in which environmental justice interlocks with justice for the poor, workers, and other marginalized communities.

CreatureKind calls attention to the abyss that currently exists between what Christians believe about animals and how we treat them in industrialized food production. Concern for animal well-being is deeply rooted in our Christian faith, and there is a long history of Christian leadership in animal protection movements. But as industrialized systems of animal agriculture have developed over the last century, churches have remained mostly silent about our radically altered relationships with pigs, chickens, turkeys, fish, and cows (and with the people who work to produce our food), and the devastating consequences of animal factories on the broader environment. Scientist and policy analyst Václav Smil has estimated that from the year 1900 to the year 2000, the biomass of all domesticated animals increased from three and a half times to twenty four times the biomass of all wild land mammals. During that same period of time, the biomass of wild land mammals was halved. It’s no coincidence that these same hundred years saw the demise of the small family farm alongside the birth and global spread of factory farming, which is now the dominant means of producing animal products for human consumption.

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As more and more land is consumed by animal agriculture, the wild animal population shrinks, and there are additional urgent problems caused by increased consumption of animals. In addition to Industrial farms and slaughterhouses cause widespread environmental damages and use a disproportionate share of earth’s resources, while subjecting animals to painful physical mutilations, miserable living conditions, and traumatic deaths. Workers within the industrial farming system endure long hours, frequent injuries, and unjust working conditions. The increased use of antibiotics has contributed to the rise of so-called “superbugs,” and the overconsumption of animal products has been linked to a host of human ailments. In the United States, the vast majority of animal products—meat, milk, and eggs—are now produced on these intensive farms, where it is impossible for creatures to flourish as their Creator intended and where both humans and animals pay a high price for the availability of cheap meat.

These factory farms and other unsustainable food management systems are odds with theological institutions committed to teaching and embodying environmental justice for workers, consumers, and animals alike. That’s why GSI requires schools in their certification program to offer vegetarian food choices at all meals and to include organic and/or local produce at all meals. Electives in the program include the 30% reduction of the amount of meat served over three years, vegan options, and cage-free eggs.

Worldwide, more than 70 billion fellow land creatures and up to 7 trillion sea animals are killed for food each year. The use of animals for food massively dominates all other human uses of animals, and yet farmed animals—the animals on our plates—are conspicuously absent from the vast majority of Christian conversations about stewardship, creation care, and the environment. The partnership between GSI and CreatureKind seeks to correct that oversight.  

CreatureKind will join GSI and other partners at the Southwest Symposium on Ecologically Informed Theological Education at Brite Divinity School on March 13-14. More information can be found here.