Every so often, a question finds its way into conversations among our supporters, partners, and friends: Does Plant With Purpose work in the United States?
After all, we’ve served hundreds of thousands of people across Mexico, Haiti, Burundi, Tanzania, Malawi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, and the Dominican Republic—helping rural communities overcome poverty by restoring their lands and strengthening their relationships. The global need is great, and the results have been transformative.
But the question lingers.
Why not here in the United States, too?
The Plant With Purpose model is designed specifically for remote, rural communities where extreme rural poverty, lack of access to traditional financial services, wide-spread deforestation, and the steep slope of their mountainous farms combine to fuel hopelessness. Based on our very specific model, which is applicable to many developing countries, communities in the United States aren’t likely candidates.
However, our value of “Partners not Projects” creates a model of mutual transformation, in which our supporters, churches, foundations, and partnering farmers benefit from the relationship. Since our founding, we have partnered with churches in the United States to advance our work, but we have longed to deepen those relationships and help these church partners experience more of what our global church partners gain through our program.
A Difficult Topic to Talk About
Ask a pastor or ministry leader how they lead their congregation in creation care, and you’ll often see hesitation. In many churches, environmental stewardship has become tangled in political debate around “tree hugging” or climate change. It can feel like a cultural minefield. Many churches lack accessible resources, shared language, or healthy models for integrating creation care into their shared practices.
Meanwhile, younger generations—inside and outside the church—express deep concern about environmental degradation, climate anxiety, and the future of their communities. There is a widening gap between the questions emerging in our culture and the conversations happening in our churches.
Yet, we have seen and experienced the power of creation care in our global work to bring purpose, value, and spiritual health to individuals, families, churches, and whole communities. We knew U.S. churches would benefit from a renewed focus on creation care. But how could we help churches renormalize creation care as a spiritual practice, reclaiming our biblical roots? And how can churches become equipped to lead rather than lag on this issue?
A Calling to People and Planet
Since its humble beginnings in 1984, Plant With Purpose has been committed to the restoration of creation—both humans and God’s natural world, of which we are a part. We often talk about “restoring our relationships” between people and God, people and one another, and people and the earth. Why? Because it is the degradation of these relationships that fuels the brokenness in our world. Churches have always been an integral part of this mission, both as partners in our international work and in our commitment to serving them.
We have many U.S. church partners, but while the primary focus over the past 40 years has been the expansion of our global work, Plant With Purpose has never wavered in our commitment to the local church. In fact, Church Engagement has always been included in our short and long-term strategic priorities. Yet candidly, we have simply been limited by bandwidth and finances. The timing was in God’s hands.
In 2020, Lynne Takahashi Marian joined Plant With Purpose as our Director of Marketing and Communications. Lynne had an extensive background leading national church engagement strategies at scale. She was an executive at Outreach, where she was the founding publisher/editor of Outreach Magazine, one of the most widely respected resources for pastors in North America.
Lynne caught the vision for Plant With Purpose’s commitment to church engagement, recognizing what had been simmering for years: the vision to help churches in the United States engage creation care more meaningfully, locally, nationally, and globally. But visions don’t become reality without direction, research, and structure. Lynne helped our team articulate that dream, sharpen it, and begin forming a strategy around it.
What emerged was bold: Reach 10,000 churches over five years by compiling and disseminating a trove of high-quality, biblically grounded creation care resources—sermons, devotionals, small-group guides, youth curricula, community projects, and more. These resources would help churches speak confidently about creation care, engage neighbors around shared concerns, and rediscover how stewardship shapes mission.
A Strategy Becomes a Grant
This strategy became the basis of a major proposal to the Lilly Endowment, one of the nation’s most influential philanthropic foundations focusing on religion, community development, and education. In 2024, the Endowment awarded Plant With Purpose the Thriving Congregations grant—affirming the importance, need, and timeliness of this work.
The grant became a catalyst for a new plan. Plant With Purpose would create a national church engagement program, not to connect churches to our global work, but to strengthen and grow U.S. congregations. It is our firm belief that when Christians reengage with our identity as creation, it has a powerful impact on outreach, discipleship and the vitality of the local church.
In the fall of 2024, the initiative began in earnest with the hiring of two critical team members:
- Church Engagement Manager, filled by Brendan McClenahan
- Church Engagement Administrator, filled by Nicole Sjogren
The newly formed Church Engagement Team began to make the dream a reality by building partnerships with pastors, environmental leaders, Christian network leaders, and others who share a conviction that environmental stewardship belongs at the center of Christian witness.
The Assumptions Beneath the Strategy
Like any ambitious initiative, our strategy was based on a few key underlying hypotheses. We believed that if churches were offered excellent, theologically sound, and easily accessible creation care resources, they would begin using them to engage their community. We believed that, despite the culture wars, church leaders were interested in discussing environmental stewardship—they simply lacked the necessary tools. And we hoped that by equipping churches to engage these conversations, they would naturally build bridges with younger generations already passionate about the environment.
Those assumptions shaped the structure of our grant. They influenced how we planned our timelines, partnerships, and measurement of success.
But as we moved into 2025, and our team began listening more closely, conducting research, and testing ideas, we realized quickly that churches were not responding in the way we anticipated. The assumptions embedded in our strategy, assumptions we hadn’t even realized we were carrying, were suddenly being challenged. Environmental stewardship or Creation Care, while supported, were apparently low among myriad priorities of the local church
These challenges threatened to unravel the very foundations of the vision.
So, What Now?
Renormalizing creation care as a spiritual practice would require a different posture than we anticipated.
And this is where our story pauses… for now.
In our next article, we’ll share what we discovered as we engaged churches across the country—the unexpected barriers, the surprising opportunities, and the moments that forced us to rethink our approach.
Stay tuned. The movement is just beginning.
