WEST BRATTLEBORO — All Souls Church will kick off the New Year with a service featuring the Rev. Jim Antal, the author of Climate Church, Climate World, on Sunday, Jan. 5, at 10 a.m.
The service will be the first in a series the church is calling “Climate Sundays.” The day includes a discussion with Antal after the service. There will be light refreshments.
Antal's sermon is titled, “Defiant Hope: Our Faithful Response to the Climate Crisis.” Antal is a denominational leader, climate activist, author, and public theologian, and serves as special advisor on climate justice to the general minister and president of the United Church of Christ.
The All Souls Church congregation is currently reading his book, which was featured in the Chicago Tribune on Earth Day 2018.
At future “Climate Sundays” the church will work on ways to address the climate crisis, personally, as a congregation, and as a community.
Of his sermon for Sunday, Antal said that “the climate crisis is the opportunity for which the church was born. Hope will emerge as parishioners engage some of the numerous suggestions for how they can faithfully join others - especially young people - to address the greatest moral challenge humanity has ever faced.”
From 2006 to 2018, Antal led the 350 UCC churches in Massachusetts as their conference minister and president. Antal is a graduate of Princeton University, Andover Newton Theological School, and Yale Divinity School, where he was Henri Nouwen's teaching assistant. In 2017, Yale Divinity School honored him with the William Sloane Coffin Award for Peace and Justice.
An environmental activist from the first Earth Day in 1970, in July 2017 Antal authored a resolution declaring a new moral era in opposition to President Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord. The national UCC Synod passed that resolution with a 97 percent supermajority.
In July 2013, Antal wrote and championed the UCC's resolution to divest from fossil fuel companies, the first of its kind in the country.
In 2009 the Massachusetts Conference UCC became the first religious body in America to pass a resolution calling upon our elected leaders to commit to policies that will reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to below 350ppm.