Like every person, and every ministry, the Cornwall Alliance and I have roots going back well before our actual founding in 2005. With our 16^th birthday coming up August 31, I’d like to reminisce just a bit about one of those roots.

When I was just short of a year old, my father—a journalist—accepted a position with the United States Information Service, under the State Department. With his wife and four children, he moved to Calcutta (now Kolkota), India, where his task was to help strengthen ties between America and that fascinating, but tragically poor, nation. Among other things, he helped arrange for vast shiploads of grain from America’s farms to curb rampant starvation.

Dad quickly fell in love with the Indian people and their beautiful land, its ancient buildings, and its lovely parks, like the Maidan in Calcutta (the central feature of which is pictured above), and he loved his work. He wanted to make a permanent career of it.

But a few months after we arrived, my mother became paralyzed. That made it a real challenge for Dad to find care for my three older sisters and me. Two were middle-school aged, and he enrolled them in Loretto House, a school run by a nun who later became famous as Mother Teresa of Calcutta—one even went back and worked alongside Teresa in the 1970s and 1980s. But the youngest and I were too young for school, so he arranged our care in the homes of two Indian families. (Which is why Hindi, not English, was the first language I began to speak—though now I remember only neembu paanee, lemonade!)

Early each morning, my nurse, or “aia,” would take me by the hand and walk me to my home for the day. Going through the courtyard of our apartment building, I marveled, even at that young age, at a beautiful green tree with a red-flowering vine hanging from it. That made some of my earliest picture memories, and they’re still with me. Years later, when I’d become a Christian, I recognized that God had used that to draw me to love the beauty of His creation and want to do things to preserve and enhance it.

When we exited the courtyard, though, and walked the several blocks to my hosts’ home, I saw something different: the bodies I would step over all along the way—men, women, and children who had died of disease or starvation. I saw them because the trucks hadn’t come ’round yet to pick them up to be burned en masse in that Hindu country that put so little value on human life. Those pictures, too, have stayed with me all my life. And as a Christian, I came to recognize that they were part of what God used to make me understand the horrors of poverty and want to do things to prevent and eradicate it.

Beginning in my late twenties, after I’d become a Christian, those two things that started so early in my childhood—appreciation for the beauty of creation, and the desire to see people overcome poverty—began to shape much of my calling in life. They led to my chairing the economics committee of a large group of evangelical scholars working to apply the Biblical worldview to every sphere of life; writing a book introducing economics grounded in the Christian worldview, theology, and ethics, another on population, resources, and the environment, and two others on economics and the environment; teaching about these subjects, first in a Christian college, then in a seminary; lecturing for churches, colleges, and schools around America on both economic development and environmental stewardship; and finally, in 2005, with encouragement and assistance from longtime Christian friends, starting The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.

Since then, by God’s grace, it’s grown from an informal, unincorporated network starting with a handful of scholars to the nearly 70 who make it up today. God has used it to equip pastors, regular Christians, and even non-Christians with the truth about Biblical earth stewardship, the kinds of economies by which people climb and stay out of poverty, the good news of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. Our scholars have testified in the halls of Congress, advised White House committees, and conducted research leading to important discoveries about climate change and many other issues.

Oh. You might wonder what became of my mother. Around six months after she’d become paralyzed, Dad prayed, “God, you can take my son.” (By this he meant I could die.) “Just please give me back my wife.” Not long after, with no explanation of why, my mother’s paralysis simply ceased. Months of rehabilitation followed, and she lived a vigorous life till just short of her 93^rd birthday. (In later years, we were told that my mother might have suffered from Guillain-Barré Syndrome, but none of her doctors thought that at the time.)

So, God abundantly answered both of Dad’s prayers: that He would heal my mother, and take my life—not for death, but for lifelong service. In Part 2, we’ll see the first, faltering step toward founding the Cornwall Alliance.

Go to Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Photo by Abhisek Paul on Unsplash.