A Bad Climate For Church Insurance
Eco-justice, the Climate Crisis and Property Insurance for Churches
Last week our congregation received its annual premium disclosure from Church Mutual. We had major sticker shock, as our premium, which was already not inconsequential, doubled.
Doubled.
I went to our clergy board to see if other churches were experiencing anything similar, and actually for many churches it has been even worse. One historic downtown church saw an increase from a $350,000 to an $850,000 policy.
That’s the premium, not the insured amount.
As I read the analysis by people who know, it became clear the real issue is not industry greed or inflation, but something else altogether.
Climate change.
The sheer number of disasters and weather events, especially in the south and California, has placed a tremendous strain on the insurance industry. An increase in premiums is a spreading out of the load.
Some churches in high risk areas are getting dropped altogether.
So if you wonder how climate change is impacting you or you local community, this is one major way.
—
This morning a neighbor scheduled an office visit. She wanted to drop off a collection of books in eco-theology. As we sat down to chat, I learned she’d had an early interest in the intersection of ecology and theology, even facilitating the development of a program at a seminary in Ohio. But, as we both know from direct experience, ecology and theology is hard sell in terms of ongoing pastoral and congregational focus.
Theology has been, by and large, anthropocentric. We have difficulty centering all of creation as our “neighbor.”
As we talked, she mentioned how important the visible presence of our solar panels on the church are for the communication of a more overt eco-theology. They represent in material form both our commitment to averting a climate crisis (by reducing carbon emissions now) combined with a readiness in terms of a mitigation preparedness for climate change (more sun and heat will mean we are ready to produce electricity and less reliant on the grid).
A member of our congregation instrumental in bringing solar to our church also has a tendency to bring me stacks of books on eco-theology. He often says he has come to realize he is “a voice crying in the wilderness.”
He’s not wrong. It’s genuinely difficult to get churches to prioritize working for climate justice, even though so many of the justice matters that do concern churches are almost all exacerbated by the climate crisis (the refugee crisis, poverty, hunger and housing just to name a few).
Whenever I am among these prophets who keep ringing the bell, I recognize they are right even while noticing how much of a lockhold an anthropocentric theology still has on my pastoral sensibilities.
My guest mentioned that early in the rise of eco-theology, the only corporate interests raising the alarm were the insurance companies. They could see what was coming.
—
Back to the church insurance, I don’t know if/when churches stop being able to afford to insure themselves if we will all collectively think, “Oh, we should have been more on top of this whole climate change thing.” No specific pressure point has seemed, thus far, to bring humanity to shift it’s overall habits in the Anthropocene.
I still have hope. I have hope we may yet act not simply out of economic self-interest, or existential panic, but out of creaturely neighbor love.
Eco-theology is likely one crucial resource in the maintenance of such hope. It’s theology done always with a mind to not just the human, not just God, but the ecology of it all. All of this whole wide creation.
Slowly but surely nature itself is sending us a new insurance premium that reads, “What you’re doing is increasingly expensive, at some point you’ll become un-insurable.”
But for the time being nature has been sending us a whole different set of letters. In the spring, they read, “Hey, we like you, we’re waking up again, here’s a crocus.”
At the very least, we won’t work on anything we aren’t talking about, which is why getting a stack of beloved works on eco-justice theology is exactly the right spiritual inspiration to start this Lenten season.
It seems that Christian clergy should recognize that the Bible begins in the garden and ends in the garden, which should hint at what the authors consider to be important. As I've written before, if we get the climate wrong nothing else matters.