Fifth Mark of Mission

Protect, care for and renew life on our planet

ABM encourages all our supporters to engage with the Season of Creation*.

Around the world, Anglicans, and members of many other churches, will focus on care of the created order from 1 September until 4 October.

On this page you will find links to resources created around the world that will allow you to shape services and prayers for the Season of Creation. You will also find a link to ABM’s excellent Climate Change study, “Climate for Change”.

ABM takes the fifth Mark of Mission very seriously, working to ensure – with our Partners – that the projects we engage with are environmentally sound and good for the future world. The Gospel call is to restoration and renewal, not just for souls, but for bodies of all kinds. Many of us find God speaks most clearly when we are at one with nature and we find our hearts grieving when we see nature being callously destroyed or abused.

The 2024 theme is “To hope and act with Creation”.

Download 2024 Season of Creation Resources here:

For more details and information about the 2024 Season of Creation, you can download the Season of Creation website: www.seasonofcreation.org

An Australian Anglican liturgy celebrating the Season of Creation, written by ABM’s the Rev’d Canon Stephen Daughtry, can be downloaded here:
www.abmission.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Season-of-Creation-Prayers-2023-.pdf

2024 Season of Creation resources produced by the Season of Creation team can be found here: https://www.abmission.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/EN_Celebration-Guide_Season-of-Creation-com.pdf

Green Anglicans, the worldwide Anglican Communion Environmental Network, has produced a range of resources you can access here: https://www.abmission.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Green-Anglicans-Season-of-Creation-Manual-2024.pdf

You can download resources produced by the Episcopal Church (our sister church in the United States) here: https://newcreationliturgies.org/seasonofcreation/

Action by Churches Together, of which ABM AID is a member, has a website where you can read about (and join in, if you wish) the Fossil Fuel Treaty letter from members of faith communities. https://fossilfueltreaty.org/faith-letter

The Anglican Communion Environmental Network website:
https://acen.anglicancommunion.org

See ABM’s Climate for Change studies about the climate crisis here:
www.abmission.org/resources/climate-for-change/

See the Anglican Communion’s Resources for the Communion Forest Project here:
www.communionforest.org

Download ABM-AID’s Environmental Sustainability Policy here: https://www.abmission.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Environmental-Sustainability-Policy.pdf

Prescient and prophetic poet, Mary Oliver, wrote a warning cry in 2008:

Of The Empire

We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

© 2008 by Mary Oliver. From her 2008 collection, Red Bird, p. 46. Published by Beacon Press 2008

We encourage you to live, work and pray for a world restored to the “goodness” it enjoyed when it was young.

* Season of Creation is an annual initiative of the World Council of Churches.