The National Religious Partnership for the Environment brings together a diverse alliance of faith institutions and leaders in order to bring voice and action on behalf of caring for God's Creation. Through NRPE's four partners we bring together 160,000 congregations in the U.S. to protect God's creation through worship, education, stewardship and public witness. The Partnership is supported by individual, church, and organizational donations.

From the Board

The cosmos, in all its beauty and life-giving bounty, is the work of  our personal and loving Creator. Our creating God is prior to and other than creation, yet intimately involved with it, upholding all things in relationships of intricate complexity. God is transcendent, while lovingly sustaining each  creature; and immanent, while fundamentally other than creation and not  to be confused with it.

The Creator lovingly cares for all creatures. God declares all  creation "good" (Gen. 1:31), makes a covenant with all creatures (Gen.  9:9-17), and delights in creatures which have no apparent human usefulness (Job 39:1-12). Created in the very image of God, human beings have a unique  relationship to the Creator; at the same time we are creatures, shaped  by the same processes and embedded in the same systems of physical,  chemical, and biological interconnections which sustain other creatures.

Called to be the Creator's special stewards, human beings have a  unique responsibility for the rest of creation. As wise stewards, we are  summoned not
only to mold creation's bounty into complex civilizations  of justice and beauty, but also to sustain creation's fruitfulness and  preserve its powerful testimony to its Creator.

We confess that too often we have perverted our stewardly calling,  rampaging destructively through creation rather than offering creation  and civilization
back in praise to the Creator. For this our sin, we  repent, gratefully acknowledging that the Creator is also the Redeemer  who promises to renew all things. In grateful obedience to this our  marvelous God, we resolve to make our homes, our faith communities and  our societies centers for creation's care and renewal, healing the  damaged fabric of the creation which God entrusted to us. We make this declaration knowing that until our God restores all  things, we are called to be faithful stewards of God's good garden, our  earthly home.

Mission Statement

Guided by biblical teaching, the National Religious Partnership for the Environment seeks to encourage people of faith to weave values and programs of care for God's creation  throughout the entire fabric of religious life through: 
  • Liturgy, worship and prayer;
  • Theological study, the education of future clergy, and of the young;
  • The stewardship of our homes, lands and resources;
  • Protecting the lives of our communities and health of our children;
  • Our social ministry to the poor and vulnerable who have first and preferential claim on our conscience; and
  • Bringing the perspectives of moral values and social justice before  public policymakers.
We worship and obey our loving God by serving God's good creation in neighborly love and in the assurance of God's covenant "between me and you and
every living creature that is with you, for all future  generations" (Genesis 9:12). Finally, we seek to offer and will eagerly discuss the insights of scripture, moral teaching and social values, especially as they have come from sustained social struggle and solidarity with those who have reached fresh freedom to serve the common good.

History

By the mid-late 1980s, portions of the religious community had begun to create responses and programs to the address environmental stewardship. In the 1990s, after an open letter sent from 32 Nobel laureates and other eminent scientists, senior religious leaders affirmed the need for theologically grounded, scientifically informed religious initiative. What followed was a formal consultation with senior religious leaders to lay the groundwork for such action. In October 1993, the National Religious Partnership for the Environment formally began its activities as an alliance of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the National Council of Churches, the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, and the Evangelical Environmental Network. The bylaws set forth its foundation and protocol for action: “The Partnership builds upon the religious beliefs and moral values of each of the bodies which make it up and which will independently undertake its own initiatives in its own community.”

Accomplishments over the years include:
  • Hundreds of evangelical leaders signed an Evangelical Environmental Declaration in a consultation sponsored by Dr. Billy Graham's Christianity Today.
  • NRPE led the effort to address the needs of developing countries (known as international adaptation) in US climate legislation.
  • Internationally prominent scientists joined religious leaders from across the denominational spectrum to issue “Earth’s Climate  Embraces  Us All: A Plea  from Religion and Science for Action on Global  Climate  Change,” calling on Congress to give serious  attention to proposed climate change legislation.
  • Scholars from the Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant traditions gathered to consider the theological dimensions of the relationship between children’s health and the environment.​
  • ​The Partnership's faith groups sent resource kits to over 100,000 congregations: every Catholic parish, virtually every synagogue, 50,000 mainline Protestant 
    and Eastern Orthodox churches, and 35,000 evangelical congregations.
  • A delegation of Christian and Jewish leaders met with officials  from Ford, General Motors, and the United Auto Workers to deliver an “Open Letter to 
    Automobile Executives” and held substantive  discussions  on fuel economy.
  • Thousands of news accounts have appeared, from the very smallest outlets such as the Laramie Daily Boomerang (WY) and the Downer's Grove Suburban Life (IL), to extended features in the New York Times, Washington Post, Washington  Times, Los Angeles Times and ABC World News Tonight. Thousands more stories and opinion pieces in the print, radio  and  network television media have featured a  variety of Partner member  initiatives, e.g., the “What Would  Jesus Drive?” campaign of the  Evangelical Environmental Network,  generating an unprecedented level of  public interest in personal transportation decisions as moral and religious choice.​
Founding of Our Partners:
The earlier work of the Partnership helped forge a coalition that, to this day, is guiding major religious communities as they continue to integrate a concern for caring for God’s creation into the fabric of religious life in America.