Melbourne College of Divinity Earth’s Cry: Prophetic Ministry in a More-than-human World a Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Ministry Studies Submitted by Janet Elizabeth Morgan

Earth cries out: a cry that is global and emplaced. Ministry is a response to cry. This thesisoffers a conceptual structure for a process I call ecoministry. The structure arises from threeintersecting elements: the critical interdisciplinarity of the ecohumanities, the ministerialmodel of James and Evelyn Whitehead (1995), and the prophetic imagination as interpretedby Walter Brueggemann (2001). A thread that runs through all three is narrative, andnarrative is always emplaced. The ecophilosophical critique of the nature/culture divide holdsradical implications: in essence it requires resituating culture in nature. ‘Nature’ is both aconstruction and a reality beyond and underlying all texts. Understanding this tension indiscourses about nature challenges traditional approaches to religious tradition, and leads to arecovery of place. Brueggemann’s interpretation of the prophetic imagination presents placeambiguously, and it is elided in Whiteheads’ model. In this thesis I attend to place in thenarratives of Victorian Volcanic Plains grasslands, and include a stalk of kangaroo grass as away of recognising the materiality that must now be taken into account as sacred. Iconceptualise a structure for ecoministry, rooted in the prophetic tradition, that is a call to thevocation of learning what it means now to be human, by attending to Earth’s cry globally andin local places, by critiquing silences and owning the violent misuse of our power, by grievingthe multiple losses entailed, by trusting emergent outcomes and by risking alternative formsof praxis.