Hope for All Creation was published in July 2026 by the Church of England as ‘a major new teaching document from the House of Bishops’. With the subtitle, A Theological Response to the Environmental Crises, it provides a clear and authoritative expression of ‘the House of Bishops’ understanding’ of the topic (p. 3). (It is worth noting that the report was not written by the bishops themselves, with only one bishop being named on page 3 as a member of the working group.)
The report is freely available online as a PDF and is also available in print as a book. I have only seen the PDF version, and it is very well produced indeed. It has 156 pages, all told, but the layout is spacious, so it is very concise. As a short book written by a committee, it is inevitably somewhat bland, but the content is excellent, on the whole.
The report has three parts, following the pattern of ‘See, Reflect, Respond’. Part One (See) gives a brief outline of the multiple crises affecting the ‘interconnected processes which support life’ (p. 20). This is followed by the longer Part Two (Reflect), which is the theological heart of the report, and which takes us from creation through sin and redemption to the coming renewal of all creation. Part Three (Respond) looks at how we can respond, whether as individuals, within communities, as parish churches, as the Church of England, and within the Anglican Communion and the global church.
The weakness of the report, in my opinion, is its failure to develop the theme of hope with more creativity. The theological material certainly gives us a strong motivation to respond to the environmental crises, but there is little in the report to suggest that our response should be any different in quality to that of people outside the church who are similarly concerned about these crises. But how does the Christian hope make a difference? For example, in contrast to the desperation of many, does our hope in God (and not in our own abilities) help us to keep these crises in perspective? Or, in the face of despair, does our hope in God enable us to continue to act, with joyful faith, even when the cause looks hopeless, humanly speaking? A truly Christian hope-filled response to the environmental crises must surely be different in character to a secular response, and I would have loved to see that explored in this report.
Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed…. Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead – since he was about a hundred years old – and that Sarah’s womb was also dead. Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised (Romans 4:18-21, NIV).