Evangelicals call for action on global warming - OrlandoSentinel.com: Seminole County News

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More than 80 national evangelical leaders launched a campaign Wednesday to help curb global warming, an initiative that features the pastor of a Central Florida megachurch in a television ad. "We're going to be facing some real challenges environmentally," said the Rev. Joel Hunter of Northland Church in Longwood, who is in a national TV commercial endorsing the initiative. The group's declaration, unveiled at a Washington news conference, was signed by 86 leaders and asks Christians to "present a distinctively biblical and moral perspective" in combating global warming. However, other major figures in the evangelical movement have refused to sign the document. Recommended measures in "Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action" include limiting carbon-dioxide emissions "through cost-effective, market-based mechanisms." Hunter, whose church has a weekend attendance of about 8,000, said his commitment to the issue comes from the Bible, which instructs humans to be good stewards of the Earth.

"We feel it's our responsibility, since we see the Bible as the authority in our lives, to follow that instruction about what we're supposed to do with Earth," Hunter said in an interview. "We're to cultivate it, but also to protect it." More than 70 percent of evangelicals think that global warming will pose a threat to future generations, according to a poll conducted by Ellison Research and released at the news conference.

More than 60 percent think that the issue should be addressed immediately, and 51 percent said they would take steps to remedy global warming, even if there is a high economic cost to the U.S., the survey of 1,000 born-again or evangelical Protestants found. Along with Hunter, those who signed the declaration included Rick Warren, megachurch pastor and author of The Purpose-Driven Life; W. Todd Bassett, national commander of the Salvation Army; Duane Litfin, president of Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill.; and the Rev. Jack Hayford, a leading Pentecostal pastor and author. But some prominent names from the more conservative wing of the evangelical movement were missing from the list, including James Dobson of the evangelical group Focus on the Family, and televangelists Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and D. James Kennedy. Kennedy is pastor of the 10,000-member Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale. The Rev. Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, said he was not asked to sign, and would not have anyway.