God is Just Getting Started

“We have never needed church more.”

I heard myself say those words early in my time as a student at Yale Divinity School, in a conversation about the future of church: its unambiguous decline, our fear of its impending demise. I’m not sure I knew, in that moment, what I meant. It was more gut feeling than reasoned analysis. Now, with some years of actual ministry behind me, I am more keenly aware of the challenges confronting church and yet more convinced than ever that church has something to offer that we, and this world, need right now. For me, that has to do with what it means to be church in and for a climate-changed world.

We are building a discipline of hope collectively; we are sending one another out to live our hope out loud.

I came to ministry from a long career as a scientist. As a professor at Middlebury College in Vermont, I studied the impacts of climate change on the boreal forests of Alaska and Siberia and taught courses on ecology, evolution, and climate change. I lived and breathed the changes being wrought on this blue-marble planet we call home. And then, I left it all behind to answer a call to pastoral ministry. Ministry required learning a new language, a new skill set, a new orientation toward the world. In the early days, I felt like I had been airlifted from the path I’d been walking and dropped onto a completely new path, leading up a completely different mountain. 

Science and Spirit

I don’t feel that anymore: the Venn diagram of overlap between my life as a biology professor and my life as a pastor is richly populated. And with the help of the communities that I have been privileged to serve, I am coming to see more clearly what I meant back then: the unique and necessary role that church can play in the work of finding a new path forward for humanity and for all life on this earth that God named good. That role includes making space for lament, the collective cultivation of hope, and shaping our lives into songs of praise to God. 

In these times of great and complicated grief—anticipatory grief, climate grief, solastalgia, enough new forms of grief that we’re having to invent words to describe them—church offers space for lament. A place where we can give voice to sorrow, a place where we can hold our heartbreak together. In my senior sermon at YDS, preached in Marquand Chapel in November 2021, I ended with a dream of church as a place of shared lament. We can create brave spaces for lament, I said, spaces in which to speak aloud and listen to the truths that grief tells. We can build communities in which we learn how to practice solidarity with those who mourn, to honor the grief of those who weep.[1]

Grief and More

During the three years that I served as a pastor on the coast of Maine, where proximity to the ocean makes climate change an inescapable reality, I witnessed the pervasiveness of climate grief—brought on by the disruption of familiar, seasonal rhythms, the dwindling of beloved species, the devastation wrought by unprecedented winter storms. And so, one January day in 2025, I collaborated with the Reversing Falls Sanctuary, an interfaith community in Brooksville, Maine, to create an interfaith service of lament.

We shared music and poetry. We broke into small groups for conversation. What are you grieving? Where and how do you feel grief in your body? How might you bring that grief to a place of collective holding? Those conversations made plain that where space is made for grief, joy blooms, too. Laughter flowed as freely as the tears. We ended the service with an invitation for each participant to write down, on a piece of paper, a grief they were carrying. I collected them in a basket and invited people, as they left, to take one of those expressions of grief with them and pray with it in the week ahead.[2] In sharing our grief, in holding one another’s grief, the grief became a little easier to bear. Church can be a container to hold, together, the grief of these days.[3]

Being Human in This Era

And church can be a place where we practice the discipline of hope.[4] Church is—or can be—a place to which we return each week to reconnect with hope’s source, nourished by ancient texts that remind us that when the story seems over, God is just getting started. And just as church can be a place where we carry our grief together, church can be a place where we cultivate hope together. At the Church of Christ at Dartmouth College, where I currently serve as co-pastor, I see hope being nourished in a monthly gathering created and led by two members of the congregation. 

This gathering, called the Round Table, is a space for honest conversation about being human in these times. We sit in a circle and, one by one, we offer our response to whatever prompt our facilitators have offered. Sometimes hope is the prompt; often it is the subtext. I have listened as people have shared what gives them hope. And I have listened as people are honest about how elusive hope can be, these days. Around that circle, we are together in the struggle. We are holding hope—honest, rugged, and hard-won—in community; we are leaning on the hope of others when our own grows dim; we are building a discipline of hope collectively; we are sending one another out to live our hope out loud. It feels like good church. The collective cultivation of hope feels like necessary church. 

And last, but not least, church grounds us in the practice of praise—the beating heart of our life as a worshiping community. I’m thinking about Psalm 104, about how praise—hallelujah!—gets the literal last word in that wonderstruck hymn to creation’s intimate entanglement with its Creator. To gather in worship and praise is to root ourselves in the truth of our dependence on God who is Source of Life and Author of All. In praise, our gaze is lifted beyond the illusion of self-sufficiency. In praise, we remember the sheer giftedness of all that is. And so, in praise, we find our way to a gratitude that sends us on our way to do the work of healing this world that God so loves. Work that is, after all, the only right response to the gift we’ve been given. Work that makes of our very lives a song of grateful praise to God who holds us all. 

In grief, in hope, in praise: we’ve never needed church more.

Andi Lloyd ’22 M.Div., co-pastor at the Church of Christ at Dartmouth College, was ordained as a United Church of Christ minister in 2022 after 22 years as a biology professor at Middlebury College. With a B.A. in geography from Dartmouth College and a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of Arizona, she is also the co-author of Letters from the Ecotone: Ecology, Theology, and Climate Change (Wipf and Stock, 2022), with Andrew Nagy-Benson. Her interest in climate change, ecology, and creation justice continue to inform her understanding of ministry.