Singing the Future

Singing the Future: Hymns of hope in a climate crisis

This collection was produced by Richard Baker, a local preacher in the Macclesfield Circuit and a former lay pastor at Bramhall Methodist Church.

Singing the Future: Hymns of hope in a climate crisis is offered here as a way of stimulating thinking in worship around climate issues. If not sung, then the words of Richard’s hymns might be spoken as prayers or poems, for use alongside sermons and in reflection.

Introduction

Richard writes:

I wrote this short collection of hymns for an assignment for the Communication Module of a master’s degree in Sustainability and Behaviour Change at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth, Wales. The exercise was to consider an audience with which I was familiar and choose an appropriate medium to communicate some of the ideas we had been learning about. I chose church congregations and wrote five hymns.

The collection is rooted in the sixth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes, which confirms that climate change has already caused “widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people”. However, it also offers hope that there remains a “rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all”.

The Report also acknowledges that “religion could play an important role in enabling collective action”. I hope that the hymns can help equip Christians for that role, offering them an opportunity to express their concerns for this planet and, more importantly, to build the hope that is essential to enable that collective action.

Richard Baker

For most of his adult life, Richard enjoyed a successful career as an academic in the field of Biomechanics. In his mid-fifties he felt a call to leave this work and serve as lay pastor at Bramhall Methodist Church. In 2021 he led the church in a Climate Year of activities leading up to the COP 26 meeting in Glasgow.

Through this experience, Richard’s own concerns for the climate and wider environmental crises consolidated and he left Bramhall to study for a master’s degree in in Sustainability and Behaviour Change at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth. Now semi-retired, Richard engages in a range of climate related projects, mostly through Christian organisations. Richard writes an occasional blog in which he responds to the climate crisis as a Christian and a scientist at www.largeblue.co.uk