FAITH NEWS SERVICE – What if the answer to one of Christianity’s most overlooked callings was hiding under a clump of weeds?
That’s the question at the heart of Why Creation Care Matters, a new book by Sally Shaw that traces her remarkable journey from missionary nurse to environmental advocate — and the unexpected moment in her own backyard that changed everything.
Sally’s story begins not in a garden, but in crisis. In 1985, she joined a Christian medical team as a nurse and midwife, caring for Cambodian refugees in a camp in Thailand. Three years later, she moved to Cambodia with World Vision to coordinate mother and child health programs.
It was there she later founded Chrysalis, a local NGO using improvisational drama to help disadvantaged people rediscover their sense of worth — an experience that revealed to her the transformative power of the arts.
In 2007, Sally relocated with her husband and three children to the Adelaide Hills in South Australia, arriving in the middle of a decade-long drought. Watching the land around her home wither, she felt an unexpected pull toward environmental care — something her evangelical upbringing had never emphasized.
Then came the moment that would set her on a new path. While clearing invasive grass from bushland near her home, Sally uncovered a small native plant thriving beneath the tangle: a Prickly Guinea flower, delicate and defiantly alive. In that instant, she felt she received a message — that the destruction surrounding her mirrored the damage done to God’s creation since colonization, and that God had not abandoned it, but was asking for her help.
What followed was not a simple embrace of a new cause, but a deep reckoning. Sally found few allies among fellow evangelicals, many of whom believed that evangelism and care for the poor should take precedence over environmental concern. Rather than rejecting her faith community, she began reexamining scripture, theology, and tradition — eventually concluding, alongside theologian Tom Wright, that Christians are called to be creation’s stewards and “vice-regents,” not merely its temporary residents.
Her convictions were affirmed on the world stage in 2011, when she represented Australia at a Lausanne Movement Creation Care conference in Jamaica, contributing to a global call for “urgent and prophetic ecological responsibility.”
Aware that few people would experience a dramatic “ecological conversion” of their own, Sally turned to what she knew best: the arts. Her Doctor of Ministry research at the Adelaide College of Divinity (completed in 2023) explored whether an arts-based workshop could help evangelical Christians move past ambivalence and into genuine transformation — and the results were striking.
Why Creation Care Matters weaves together Sally’s rigorous research, personal reflection, photography, and poetry — alongside contributions from workshop participants whose own perspectives shifted through the experience. It’s part memoir, part theological exploration, and part invitation: a book for anyone who has ever wondered whether faith and environmental care truly belong together. Why Creation Care Matters, published by Ark House, is now available globally.
About the Author
Sally Shaw holds a Doctor of Ministry from the Adelaide College of Divinity (2023), where her thesis centered on developing and testing an arts-based creation care workshop for evangelical Christians. She continues to lead these workshops across Australia. Learn more at www.theoterra.au.
