Twin Towers UMC
Participants in the climate migration study at Twin Towers UMC in Alameda, Calif. (California-Nevada Conference Photo)
July 06, 2023
Twin Towers United Methodist Church in Alameda, California, has taken on a challenging issue: the current and future impacts of climate change on global migration. On the first Saturday of each month, their book study group meets on Zoom to discuss Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince.
Twin Towers’ pastor is Akesa Po’oi Fakava, and the church’s mission statement is “A community called to be conduits of God’s healing in our neighborhood and beyond.” In the case of this study, “beyond” encompasses the whole world, including those regions that have now become uninhabitable because of rising global temperatures and extreme weather-related disasters, and those regions that will be impacted in the future.
Here is how the Twin Towers team describes this effort:
"The Twin Towers Community Health Action Team was founded over a year ago by our Pastor Emeritus, the Rev Donald Cunningham (second from right in the photo). Our mission is to provide meaningful, truthful information and initiatives about health issues affecting our church and the community beyond. To date, we have covered mosquitoes, viruses, and bacterial diseases. Under Pastor Don's leadership, we participated in and spread the word about President Biden's 100-day mask challenge. Currently, we are working on the impact of climate change on population migrations. As climate zones become warmer and unable to support traditional agriculture, we can expect massive migrations of people to more temperate areas. The immigration dilemma we are experiencing at our southern border now, while driven by more than just agricultural failures, is just a hint of what may be in our future. How do we as Christians respond? We are using the book "Nomad Century" by Gaia Vince as a basis for our studies."
The California-Nevada Climate Justice Ministries Task Force supports Twin Towers UMC for the work they are doing to bring this issue forward and to become educated about the challenges and possible actions we can take as individual churches and as an Annual Conference “to be conduits of God’s healing” in the context of increasing migration due to climate change. The task force will continue staying connected with Twin Towers, to learn more and educate the annual conference, and to bring possible advocacy or action items forward through Instant Connection, our Climate Justice newsletter, and beyond.
The following is an excerpt from the Introduction to Nomad Century:
“For you, the coming upheaval may be a sudden, urgent exodus because climate change has devastated harvests, food prices have soared, and your country has been overtaken by violent conflict and has become unsafe. Or it may be that a hurricane overtakes your town, or ocean waves erode your village. The upheaval will happen suddenly, in the wake of catastrophe, and it will happen slowly, in dribs and drabs. The United Nations International Organization for Migration estimates that there could be 1.5 million migrants in the next thirty years alone. After 2050, that number is expected to soar as the world heats further… Disasters already displace ten times more people than conflict and war worldwide.
“We are making a new and very different world through our environmental changes. As the only sentient beings capable of such audacious transformations, we must have the maturity and wisdom to direct our talents toward changing ourselves….
“Humans evolved to cooperate, and they also evolved to migrate... Now is the time to restore this inherent flexibility about where we live… This is a chance to recognize the dependence of all of us on each other, and our species’ dependence on the natural world, as we restore its healthy function for the protection of us all.”
Find out more about Twin Towers UMC and its leadership.
Contact California-Nevada Climate Justice Ministries Task Force at climatejustice@cnumc.org. Subscribe to the task force's newsletter.
The Rev. Sharon Delgado is a clergy member of the California-Nevada Annual Conference. She is author of The Cross in the Midst of Creation: Following Jesus, Engaging the Powers, Transforming the World and serves on the steering committee of United Methodist Creation Justice Movement. This article is adapted from a post on the California-Nevada Conference website and republished with permission.