by David Clough
CreatureKind is delighted to welcome Regents Theological College as our latest partner institution. Regents campus is on the western slopes of the Malvern hills in England. Regents is among the foremost Pentecostal Bible Colleges in Europe and one of the largest in the UK. It is also the national training centre for the Elim Pentecostal Churches.
Regents kindly invited me to give their annual Wesley Gilpin lecture in March 2018. I offered a number of possible lecture titles and was delighted they opted for ‘Eating More Peaceably: Christianity and Veganism’. A good number of staff, students, and external visitors attended and the response was encouraging: the audience was engaged and there were no shortage of questions to follow. I took the opportunity to meet with the college’s catering manager in advance of the lecture and was delighted to hear that for a long time he had been strongly committed to the idea that the college’s catering policy should reflect its Christian values.
Since then, CreatureKind has been in conversation with Regents about the possibility of their becoming a CreatureKind partner institution. CreatureKind partners typically commit to:
an audit to review trends in their consumption of animal products and report on where the animal products are currently sourced from;
an action plan to reduce consumption of animal products and move to higher welfare sources of animal products they continue to serve;
continued reflection on further ways to attend to the implications of a Christian understanding of animals for their institutional life.
It’s been great to see Regents’ commitment to embark on this process and to raise the issue within the Elim Pentecostal Church nationally. In the partnership agreement, Regents affirm that they are ‘committed to living into the promise of a reconciled creation by learning more about animals as a faith concern and by taking action to improve the lives of farmed animals’. CreatureKind looks forward to continuing to work with Regents as they continue along this path.
“Regents affirm that they are ‘committed to living into the promise of a reconciled creation by learning more about animals as a faith concern and by taking action to improve the lives of farmed animals’.”
It’s a particular pleasure for me to welcome the first Pentecostal CreatureKind partner. Pentecostal churches share my own Methodist Church roots in the Wesleyan Holiness movement. As I’ve explored in another video lecture, ‘Early Methodists and Other Animals: Animal Welfare as an Evangelical Issue’, both John Wesley and the early Methodist movements were known for their concern about cruelty towards animals. Wesley wrote an essay on the souls of animals as an undergraduate at Oxford, and he preached against animal cruelty (most famously in his 1781 sermon ‘The General Deliverance’ on Romans 8). He copied letters he received concerning cruelty to animals into his journal and published books on animal theology. Neither modern Methodists nor modern Pentecostals are often aware of this legacy, but I’m excited that institutions such as Regents are helping to recover this distinctive legacy.
If you know of an organization that might be interested in making connections between its Christian values and concern for animals, do get in touch. CreatureKind’s partner programme can support theological colleges, seminaries, churches, and Christian schools, universities, and other organizations in finding the right first steps for practical action in their particular contexts. We’d love to hear from you.