Season of Creation 2021

Join us as we celebrate Season of Creation 2021

During this year’s Season of Creation (1 September - 4 October), we enter a time of renewal and hope, reflecting on the need to acknowledge and renew the beautiful, complex and interconnected relationships of our common home, designed to live and flourish together.

In the hope born of grace, we pray that the Lord who is our Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer will touch our hearts and that of all peoples this Season of Creation.

Register to receive our 2021 Season of Creation Church Resource Toolkit. 

What is the Season of Creation?

Every year, Christians around the world, from across denominations, commit the month of September as a season to celebrate God’s beautiful Earth, and renew our shared commitment to preserving and restoring that beauty. For the liturgical amongst us, this is called the Season of Creation.

During the Season of Creation, we unite as followers of Jesus, celebrating the bonds we share with each other and with “every living creature on Earth.” Together Christians celebrate the season by spending time in prayer, considering ways to inhabit our common home sustainably, and lifting our voices in the public sphere.

A home for all? Renewing the Oikos of God. 

This year, the theme for the season is “A home for all? Renewing the Oikos of God”.

Oikos is the Greek word for “home,” or “household”. This Season of Creation we reflect on the Oikos of God, a home for all, designed to live and flourish together. A beautiful creation built on diverse, wondrous and complex relationships that support and sustain. However, through the sin of greed, God’s precious creation has been exploited. Interconnected, life-sustaining relationships have been disconnected, forgotten and denied. 

Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander brothers and sisters have long walked in the wisdom of these interwoven, interdependent relationships and the need to care for country, acknowledging our role, as Indigenous Christian scholar Randy Woodley expresses, as one part of the “community of creation”. 

Season of Creation is an opportunity to reflect on our role as stewards of God’s beautiful Creation and the need for us to renew and restore the Oikos of God as we seek to live out Jesus call to love our neighbour. As Common Grace CEO Brooke Prentis reminds us, “loving our neighbour means loving our people neighbour, our tree neighbour, plant neighbour, animal neighbour, bird neighbour, fish neighbour, land neighbour, water neighbour, sky neighbour.”

Together we pray for a restoring of right relationship with God and all of creation as we confront the reality of the systems we live in where profit is put before caring for creation, economy before protecting the health of our live-sustaining ecosystems and politics before love for our neighbours. 

We pray that we would see clearly the importance of these relationships to the health and flourishing of our Common Home. We pray that we would honor God in the way we treasure and protect God’s life-giving gift of creation that sustains, brings joy and heals. We pray that we would restore just relationship with all of God’s creation, joining our voices in praise for God with all of creation (Psalm 66:4).

Sign up here to receive a Church Resource Toolkit for your church or faith community to use during Season of Creation.

As we celebrate this Season of Creation would you consider donating to support the work of Common Grace as we pursue Creation and Climate Justice? By making a donation you can help people follow Jesus in a time of ecological crisis, listen deeply to and learn from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples about caring for this country, and call on national leadership to take bold action. 

Happy Wattle Day!

Inspiration for Our Common Home blog by Jane Kelly Jane Kelly, Common Grace Creation and Climate Justice Coordinator, explores the inspiration of wattle this Season of Creation and the inclusive and unifying celebration of National Wattle Day for our Common Home.