Paper short abstract:

Faith leaders, as trusted opinion leaders, can play a strategic role in influencing community members towards mitigating ecological degradation. We investigate how training faith leaders can promote the extent of influence they exert within the community towards environmental sustainability.

Paper long abstract:

Faith leaders have a significant role to play in generating awareness and shaping the attitude of community members on environmental sustainability. Perceived as the most trusted members of their communities, faith leaders occupy a strategic position to more effectively influence their community members toward mitigating ecological degradation. Prior debates on religious contribution to the ecological crisis have not adequately explored the effect of intentional training of faith-leaders for combating development challenges. This paper addresses this gap in knowledge. We argue that intentional training of faith leaders will enable them to be more effective influencers on ecological and sustainability issues. The paper draws from semi-structured interviews of 20 selected faith leaders (consisting of 5 theological educators and 15 field ministers). All the respondents affirmed that faith leaders can influence their community members and shape their attitude towards creation care. This affirmation, however, did not translate to commensurate action among the field ministers as only 20% of them engaged in ecological awareness at least once in a year; 53.3%, once in 2 years; and 26.7% never did. Meanwhile, the theological educators, who have received explicit training on environmental issues, are more committed with 80% of them engaging in ecological awareness at least once in a year and the remaining 20%, at least once in 2 years. The findings underline the need for, and impact of, intentional training of faith leaders. This will equip them to appropriately engage in creating ecological awareness within the community thereby translating to mitigation of environmental degradation.