Churches of Restoration in Michigan: Song of Wing and Waters

_{Cover image portrays a Northern Parula (Setophaga americana), a migrating bird whose range overlaps with Michigan. By A Rocha volunteer Brent Henderson.}

by Noah Guthrie

Our Churches of Restoration program helps participating churches integrate care for God’s creation into their congregational lives. These past two years, we have worked with over 50 churches from a diverse range of denominations, regions, and cultural backgrounds. Each church brings its own unique story and circumstances, and each pursues carefully chosen actions, large or small, to take a step forward to care for God’s creatures and landscapes.

This is the story of one participating congregation in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Eastern Avenue Church. We are inspired by the efforts of Rev. Lindsay Small, Julia Smith, Trenton Wells, Matt Heun, and other members of Eastern Avenue’s care team to care for their local plants and waterways.

Special thanks to Julia Smith and Matt Heun for sharing their team’s story with us, and for the subsequent photos. Unless indicated otherwise, all of the pictures below come from Eastern Avenue’s creation care team.

Worshiping with All Creation

A spring zephyr weaves among trunks of Sugar Maple, Bitternut Hickory, and American Beech. With it, the wind carries the yellow-brown wings of the Ovenbird, the Rose-breasted Grosbeak, and the sunny flare of the Yellow Warbler, all returning to the Calvin University Ecosystem Preserve to breed. Feather and leaf intertwine, and birdsong mingles with the hymns of the little gathering of humans below.

Every year, Eastern Avenue Church gathers to worship at Calvin’s nature preserve, joining the birds to celebrate their spring migration. Once the service ends, a local birder – sometimes a member of the congregation – leads the group on a walk to greet the winged pilgrims.

Eastern Avenue’s creation care team has only been recognized as an official church committee for about a year, but they’ve already taken great steps in reshaping their congregation’s relationship with God’s world. Many of their efforts center around their values for joy and community.

“Early Bird Worship” service at the Calvin University Ecosystem Preserve.

“If you’re motivated by guilt to do better by the creation,” explained Matt Heun, the chair of the creation care committee, “that motivation is not going to last for very long.” (He attributes this idea to Christian activist Kyle Meyaard-Schaap.) Yes, there are many environmental issues to lament over, and developing sustainable habits is often hard, but Matt insists that “there’s also joy and fun in finding ways to do better.”

The Joyful Earthkeeper

Aside from their worship services with the birds, Eastern’s creation care team has also embodied joyful sustainability work through the liturgical Season of Creation. This month-long occasion runs from September 1st to the Feast of St. Francis on October 4th. During the Season of Creation in 2024, Eastern dedicated two of its Sunday services to honoring God’s world. For both services, they wove creation care values into their liturgies and worship songs, and they hosted two sermons from Kyle Meyaard-Schaap, the author of Following Jesus in a Warming World: A Christian Call to Climate Action. Eastern marked the season again in 2025, theming three of their Sunday services around ground, water, and air.

The creation care committee also organized a fair to celebrate this season. At this gathering, congregants sampled vegetarian foods, adopted native plants, constructed seed bombs, and chatted with representatives from environmental groups like Wild Ones and the Citizens’ Climate Lobby.

A children’s “ants on a log” snack bar at Eastern Avenue’s creation care fair.

Through these kinds of events, Eastern’s creation caretakers hope to invite more of their community to get involved. Julia Smith, one of the committee’s liaisons with A Rocha USA, stated, “As a team, we need to build on that value for having lots of people involved and around the table.” They want to ensure that they’re not contenting themselves with “preaching to the choir” of those already passionate about creation, but are inviting new advocates to join this vital aspect of discipleship.

This kind of “internal outreach” is something many creation caretakers struggle with. How do we invite those who are already in the church, but who are disengaged from creation care, to join in? Fortunately, Eastern Avenue’s creation care team has many strategies for pursuing this.

One approach is the hosting of educational events, such as the creation care fair referenced above, or Eastern’s recent solar energy event. The latter encouraged some ten or fifteen congregants to request quotes from a visiting solar energy contractor. Another strategy is the offering of volunteer opportunities, like the native gardening days that Eastern has on its property.

Vermicomposting education table at Eastern’s creation care fair.

Internal creation care outreach can also look like communal events. During their interview, Julia and Matt reflected fondly on the monthly vegetarian potlucks they used to organize. These dinners not only encouraged sustainable eating habits, but also facilitated discussion around creation care oriented readings. They were a wonderful way of weaving the delights of conversation and relationship into sustainability.

The Full Community of Creation

Eastern Avenue is part of A Rocha USA’s 2025-26 Churches of Restoration cohort. Looking back on their experience of the program, Julia commented that it was encouraging to cultivate the “sense that we’re not alone,” getting to know churches involved in the program from across the country. Eastern’s creation care team also appreciated being introduced to A Rocha’s Wild Wonder VBS Curriculum, which they plan to try out this summer. Moreover, as they’ve developed their storm drain adoption project, they felt that A Rocha’s involvement encouraged them to make a bigger “splash” (as Julia put it) than they would have otherwise.

Why on earth would someone want to “adopt” a storm drain? To help answer this question for their church, Eastern’s creation care team hosted an educational gathering where a representative from the Lower Grand River Organization of Watersheds explained the importance of keeping storm drains clear of pollution.

“Water is life,” Julia affirmed. “It’s a gift from God, and we and all the more-than-human creatures need it in the most basic way… Just paving over all the surfaces and not caring for what ends up in our river is just not consistent with our faith and with our following the Creator.” So, by adopting six storm drains around their property and keeping them clean, Eastern Avenue seeks to maintain the health of all the creatures that live in their watershed. This honors both the community of creation and the Creator.

“Early Bird Worship” service at the Calvin University Ecosystem Preserve.

The church’s creation care committee has instilled joy in this adoption process, too. They invited congregants of all ages to submit suggestions for what to name their six drains, and they got about fifty responses. Among the submissions were “Drano,” “Singing in the Drain,” “Drain Over Troubled Water,” and (perhaps most concerningly) “Drainiel in the Lion’s Sink.” As promising as these “drain” puns were, the congregants ultimately granted victory to the “grate” puns, voting in the following six names: Faithful Flo, Grate Expectations, the Grate Escape, Grate Full, Alexander the Grate, and How Grate Thou Art.

Eastern Avenue Church is a wonderful reminder of all the opportunities to find connection and joy in our creation care practices. This can look like coming up with goofy names for a storm drain, or it can look like facilitating creation care fairs, potlucks, gardening sessions, or the poetry of a creation care liturgy.

Perhaps the most complete vision of this collective rejoicing is Eastern’s worship service at Calvin’s nature preserve. When our voices interweave with the song of the gale, the birds, and the verdant tambourines of beeches and maples, it’s an echo of Eden. It’s the exultant community of creation we were meant to be.