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Loving Our Neighbors
Downstream
Bethel Christian Church
Sideling Hill Creek Watershed, PA
For people concerned about protecting the environment,
the old adage, “All rivers lead to the sea,”
has a meaning beyond observing the myriad paths
to a common destination; it also serves as a poignant
reminder of the large-scale consequences our actions
can have on communities and environments far removed
from our own. The members of the Bethel Christian
Church in south-central Pennsylvania, largely
a farm community raising cows and growing corn,
had a chance to understand that lesson first hand,
when they followed the route of their own river-that-leads-to-the-sea,
and learned how the water passing downstream from
their home town effects the lives and landscape
of those who live at the receiving end.
The Sideling Hill Creek, which passes through
the rural farmland surrounding Bethel Christian
Church, flows into the Potomac River, and from
there into the Chesapeake Bay and around Tangier
Island, where numerous fishing and crabbing families
depend on the health of the water and the Bay
ecosystem for their survival. It was from this
Island that a Christian environmental group, the
Tangier
Watermen Stewardship for the Chesapeake (TaSC),
traveled to the Sideling Hill Creek watershed
to share their biblically-based stewardship activities
with the members of Bethel Christian Church.
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Through a video presentation and testimony about
their convictions, the TaSC group provoked the
Bethel church members to think about the impact
of their actions and the water they sent downstream,
and invited the church members to visit their
Tangier Island to experience the way of life on
an island of 600 people and only 15 cars; a community
where people practice creation stewardship daily
through low-impact living, responsible fishing
practices and careful tending of the sea-bed grasses
upon which they depend for their livelihood.
But the Bethel Church visitors soon realized
that the ecosystem on which the Tangier Islanders
depend is endangered by the water originating
upstream, contaminated by the runoff from overfertilized
lawns and farm fields and excessive soil or sediment,
which clouded the waters of the Bay, stunting
the growth of the seabed grasses that are home
to the crabs and fish upon which the Tangier Islanders
depend. The rural farmers and island watermen
who were already bound by common experience as
food-providers who work close to the earth, and
their newfound friendship, also found themselves
bound by the river running between them, and the
harmful matter it bore.
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