For almost five years, Invested Faith has identified, resourced and connected some of the most creative social changemakers in the progressive religious landscape. Invested Faith exists to answer two critical questions: “What can the Church become?” and “How are people of faith putting that faith into action and finding hope for the future?” 

The institutional church is in decline, yet new expressions of religious community are being born in cities and communities across the United States. Invested Faith provides unrestricted funding to faith-rooted social entrepreneurs who are creating these new justice-making community models.

These visionaries become Invested Faith Fellows and join a resourced peer network of innovators across the country who meet virtually to share their successes and best practices, as well as their struggles and challenges. In this critical moment for American religious communities, it is vital to tell and hear these hopeful stories of what communities of faith are becoming.

In August, Invested Faith Founder Dr. Amy K. Butler and the Invested Faith team, along with Good Faith Media, visited with Invested Faith Fellows who are working in the greater St. Louis, Missouri area. This week, we will share the stories of three of these 2024 Invested Faith Fellows. 

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Josh Richardson
Brugmansia Minisries
St. Louis, Missouri

Josh Richardson is on a mission to help churches and faith communities across the United States understand how climate change will impact their immediate location and the people around them.

Richardson founded Brugmansia Ministries, an interfaith organization focused on preparing religious communities to address climate change and climate migration through resilience-building practices and resilient infrastructure design. Brugmansia helps communities identify current vulnerabilities and needs as well as potential future challenges and proactively prepare for climate-driven environmental disasters or other climate change events. 

“We’re rethinking how churches need to see and approach ministry. We’re approaching climate change from a human perspective, and so we’re not starting with technological solutions. We’re advocating for justice solutions, and even if those include technology, we have to start with justice,” says Richardson.

Richardson uses climate projections, along with current physical and social data, to identify community vulnerabilities, needs, and potential future challenges. Examples include a loss of potable water from flooding or a need for additional emergency shelters due to displacement.

He then walks alongside those faith communities as they rethink how best to address these challenges with their buildings and grounds in viable, sustainable ways to provide healing for their community. Richardson’s work begins with the community.

“I don’t come up with the solutions for the communities. That’s really important to our work. I provide information and they (the faith community) are the ones who decide what they’re going to do, and that, for me, is how we actually get to a place where the solutions are adopted, applied and succeed. And so it’s community-driven, and it’s justice-centered. We’re seeing the future of ministry.”

Future vulnerabilities for communities include food and water insecurity, injustice, overwhelming demands on the energy grid for needed cooling, and other regionally specific issues.

Solutions might include installing solar panels to help with the load on the energy grid, building agricultural independence and local food sourcing through church gardens using aquaponics and hydroponics, or building innovative emergency shelters that can be used not only for respite from the cold but also as cooling centers during heat waves. Gentrification and other housing issues exacerbated by climate migration will also turn up the heat on housing injustice.

Richardson explains:

“Climate migration often drives gentrification. The first people to migrate aren’t the ones most people expect. We have a media sense of migrants as people who are really poor and who have nothing. But that’s not really the case with climate migration. The first people to migrate will be people with resources. For example, when I was in Nashville, TN, there was a huge migration of people leaving California to avoid wildfires. And the people leaving California changed the landscape of Nashville. What I’m focusing on is giving faith communities the tools to contextualize and to understand how and why their community is changing so they can make the right decisions.”

An environmental geologist and a theologian, Richardson has a diverse scientific and social-change background, with multiple advanced degrees in public ministry and geological sciences. As a scientist and researcher, Richardson focuses on developing technologies for green energy production and nature-based solutions to environmental challenges.

As a pastor and a person of faith, he speaks around the country about the deep need for faith communities to be involved in responding to climate change.

Richardson explains the mission roots of his work:

“This project is entirely grounded in the idea that God is bringing forth a world that is healed and just, which must include caring for not only each person, but also our nonhuman brothers and sisters. On a very tangible level, we are working with faith communities to heal broken systems in their communities while also preparing for the very real future challenges of climate change. 

We are pushing for new approaches to ministry that are more holistic in their understanding of how communities survive and thrive. For example, instead of promoting food storage for natural disasters in warehouses, we’re promoting local regenerative agricultural solutions like permaculture or aquaponics and hydroponics for indoor growing that reduce the harms of extractive agriculture while also meeting emergency needs.”

Richardson’s work also helps faith communities address deep-rooted systems of injustice:

“We are identifying how climate change impacts vulnerable individuals at a community scale, which includes a deep analysis of how injustice manifests on a community scale, and then working with faith communities to address those challenges.

Our work includes having community-level and data-driven conversations on how racial or language disparities manifest within a local community and how those disparities can impact access to resources. Then, with privileged faith communities, we are identifying potential community partners that can be engaged to do this resilience work in ways that constructively support vulnerable people.

And, for faith communities that are actively being exploited, we are providing tangible solutions and possibilities that can help remove them from the systems exploiting them, like a sole reliance on government infrastructure for things like clean water.”

Recently selected as an Invested Faith Fellow, Richardson plans to use the grant funds from Invested Faith to build infrastructure to support climate resiliency programs. One project beginning this year is a climate resilience program in Metro Chicago, where Richardson and his team will work with seven different churches to build a cohort of climate-resilient churches in Chicago. 

Richardson sees hope in the visionary model of Invested Faith.

He says, “What is exciting to me about being a part of Invested Faith is that they’re working on solutions now. This is very much a realization that ministry isn’t meeting needs now, and we’ve got to change and do something now. Invested Faith is focused on changing the world now because the world needs us now. And that’s exciting.”