"[T]he human hybrid known as a Green Evangelical"

That's a phrase from Laurie Goodstein's profile of Jim Ball, executive director of the Evangelical Environmental Network and a leading force in the "What Would Jesus Drive?" campaign.  As the story says, "[f]our years ago Mr. Ball . . . and his wife, Kara, drove [their] Prius from Texas east across the Bible Belt in a provocative stunt that, in keeping with the core mission of his organization, awakened evangelical churches to the threat of global warming."  Goodstein notes: "It also awakened Americans to the existence of the human hybrid known as a Green Evangelical."

In the story, Ball tells about his conversion to the cause of creation care.

In . . . seminary, [Ball] had dismissed environmentalism as unimportant compared to poverty and oppression and war. But while studying for a Ph.D. in theological ethics at Drew University, he was challenged by another student to reread what the Bible had to say about care for God’s creation.

“Colossians, chapter 1, verses 15 to 20 is the touchstone text for me,” he said. “ ‘All things have been created by Him and for Him. All things have been reconciled by His blood on the cross.’ The Apostle Paul tells us we are called to be ministers of reconciliation, and that means caring for all things.”

He read everything he could on energy policy, climate science and the history of environmentalism, but said one book in particular made him realize the connections between global warming and poverty. Asked what book, he said: “I’ll cop to it. It was ‘Earth in the Balance,’ ” the 1992 bestseller by Al Gore. “That might get me in some trouble,” he said. “I’m a great admirer of the vice president, but some people in my community aren’t.”

On their “What Would Jesus Drive?” tour, Mr. and Mrs. Ball returned to the Creation Fest in their Prius. “A few folks were hostile,” he recalled. “We got e-mails from people who thought we were being disrespectful to Jesus. They didn’t understand we were taking the question seriously, that Christians should be concerned about this. They felt it was some cheap stunt by environmentalists.

“I said to them, I’m literally taking Jesus as Lord of my life, of everything — including how I get around,” he said. “There’s nothing that falls outside that scope.”

Apparently, Ball is a rare bird in more ways than one.  For example, the article notes that he has given the microphone to others when he believes it serves the cause better.

While running a household on eco-friendly Christian principles requires a chain of small interlocking choices, Mr. Ball’s real gift is for large-scale strategizing. Raised in Texas as a Southern Baptist, he knew that conservative evangelicals had long been allergic to anything like environmentalism, associating it with hippies, communism, feminism, anti-corporatism, gun control and nature-worshipping paganism.

Mr. Ball spent the last seven years inviting evangelical pastors to sit down with climate scientists who shared the same born-again faith and corporate executives who were making an effort to reduce pollution. Progress was slow and he did not convince them all, but in the last year he has led an effort that has persuaded more than 100 influential evangelical pastors, theologians and organizational leaders — many of them political conservatives — to sign an “Evangelical Call to Action” on climate change.

Since his leading role in the “What Would Jesus Drive?” campaign, Mr. Ball has preferred to stay out of the limelight while pushing his new converts forward as frontmen. He figured that the Rev. Rick Warren, the megachurch pastor and author of “The Purpose Driven Life,” could attract far more Christians to the climate-change cause by preaching about creation care than he could.

Congratulations to Ball for his work and to Goodstein for looking for some of the lesser-known forces behind the evangelical environmental movement.