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Jeff Elliott is the pastor of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, Brant Beach, NJ. Carol, his spouse, is the program coordinator of the Alliance for a Living Ocean. They have two daughters, Rachel, who is at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg and Sarah, who is in high school. Jeff has recently completed an eight-year career as a Navy Reserve Chaplain. Jeff writes, “As a Christian, my environmental commitment arises from the distinction that exists between ownership and stewardship. If a person owns something, he or she can do with it whatever he or she desires. If we owned the earth, we would be free to squander its resources and diminish its beauty. It would be a foolish choice, but not necessarily an immoral choice. “However, the psalmist writes, “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it.” (Psalm 24:1). If we take the words of the Scriptures at all seriously, and consider them as a source and norm for our daily life, then we do not own the earth. God has simply given us the use of God’s planet for the season of our lifespan.
“As someone who has lived almost all of his life at the New Jersey shore, I know something about abusive tenants. God has not signed over title of God’s earth to us nor revoked our obligation to return it to God in the same condition in which it was turned over to us. To abuse or squander God’s resources while we stay here is therefore not just foolish, it is immoral. It is nothing other than sin to abuse the earth that God owns and loves. “When our congregation put solar panels on the roof or conducted the energy audit, when we purchased china cups to replace the throw away Styrofoam, we did it because we believed that this is God’s Will for God’s earth. It is simply a way of living out the prayer that Jesus taught us, “Thy Will be done.” Under Jeff’s leadership, Holy Trinity has installed solar panels through GreenFaith’s Lighting the Way program, and has conducted an energy audit which identified opportunities to reduce energy use by over 20% with retrofits that would pay for themselves within a year, reducing Holy Trinity’s greenhouse gas emissions by over 35,000 pounds annually. In recent years, Holy Trinity has also taken part in water testing at 40 different Barnegat Bay sites, taken part in successful advocacy to close a Ciba Geigy pipeline that used to dump waste into the ocean, and created a Vacation Bible School program called “Inherit the Earth.” “In asserting the doctrine of creation,” says Jeff, “Christians affirm a relationship between God and the world. God made all that is, Christ is the preexistent agent of creation, and creation is not just something that happened in the past – God is continually creating. “Human beings are not the owners or masters of the earth – we are part of creation. But as beings ‘made in God’s image,’ we have been assigned a stewardship responsibility to care for creation. This is how I read Genesis 2-3 and John 1.” << Back to GreenFaith Members in Action 
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Individual Profiles:
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Pastor Jeff Elliott 
