As part of its founding vision, Earth Ministry reached out to people of faith who wanted to create a just and sustainable world. Because most of the early members and colleagues were from Christian denominations and because our familiar theology was Christian, the first thirteen years of Earth Ministry’s work was primarily ecumenical. The word ecumenical means interaction between Christian denominations.

As we grew in our success, and as many of the original ideas that we pioneered concerning faith and environment spread through Christian denominations in the United States, we began to look ahead to the next stage of our work.  The beautiful language of scripture and the message it gives us about caring for God’s complex and wonderful creation is a language that we share with the other “people of the Book”, our Jewish and Muslim neighbors.  In fact, it became clear that the work of caring for creation was not something that any of us could do without the other.  As a result, we at Earth Ministry began stepping up our interfaith work on behalf of environmental stewardship.  The word “interfaith” means between people of very different traditions, and it was to these others that we began to reach out.