#96 - Christmas Special: The Church and The Blue Economy

With Christmas coming up tomorrow, this week I was in a more reflective and festive mood so I ended up looking beyond the usual Blue Economy mix of policy, tech, and funding. Hope you enjoy this week’s spin! God bless you and Merry Christmas!

THE CHURCH, not in a political or doctrinal sense, but as a real presence in coastal communities around the world. In places like the Philippines, parts of Indonesia, Latin America, the Pacific Islands, and Southern Europe, Christian churches sit right alongside fishing towns and coastlines. They’re often woven into everyday life in ways that don’t show up in Blue Economy strategies or investment decks.

That got me curious. If the Blue Economy is about sustaining oceans and the communities that depend on them, then the Church, quietly, unevenly, and often informally, might be part of that picture? This post isn’t about theology or preaching. It’s an attempt to connect the dots between faith, coastal communities, and ocean stewardship, and to recognise an actor that’s been there long before the term “Blue Economy” existed.

Let’s take a look!

Section 1: Key ideas from “Blue Disciple”

I came across an article and wanted to briefly break down its core ideas, as it offers an interesting and slightly unconventional way of thinking about the sea and stewardship.

Based on Elia Maggang, International Journal of Public Theology (2022):

• Christian environmental thinking has traditionally been land-focused (“green”), even though oceans dominate the planet and are central to life and livelihoods.

• In the Bible, the sea features repeatedly as a place of work, risk, food, travel, and dependence, especially for early Christian and coastal communities.

• The calling of the Galilean fishers (Mark 1:16–20) takes place within a marine economy, not separate from it, linking faith directly to ocean-based livelihoods.

• Maggang introduces the concept of the “blue disciple”, framing care for the sea and response to marine degradation as part of long-standing responsibility rather than a modern environmental trend.

• A key theme is the “community of creation”: the sea and its creatures are living systems with intrinsic value, not simply resources for human use.

• The overall takeaway is that concern for the sea is already embedded in Christian narratives, even if it has often been overlooked in practice.

Section 2: Today’s Christian Connection to the Blue Economy

Across many coastal regions, church involvement in ocean-related issues is already embedded in everyday life, even if it’s rarely labelled as “Blue Economy” work. In countries like the Philippines, churches sit within fishing communities and support practical activities such as clean-ups, waste awareness, disaster response, and community coordination around sea-dependent livelihoods. Similar roles appear across the Pacific Islands, where churches help frame climate and ocean risks in locally understood terms, and in parts of Latin America, where faith-based groups support coastal resilience, mangroves, and fishing communities under pressure. In Southern Europe and the Mediterranean, churches remain part of historic maritime towns whose economies and identities are still tied to the sea. The common thread is not scale or technology, but underlying trust, continuity, and influence over behaviour.

Some Examples:

1) Pacific churches shaping ocean policy (Deep-Sea Mining moratorium)

The Pacific Conference of Churches (PCC) is a regional body with 35 member churches and 10 councils of churches across 18 countries/territories — real scale in coastal societies. It has publicly called for an immediate moratorium on deep-sea mining, framing it as an irreversible threat to the ocean.

2) Faith leadership inside global ocean diplomacy (Our Ocean Conference)

At Our Ocean Conference 2024 (Athens) there were 3,500+ attendees from 130 countries/organisations, and the conference reported 471 commitments worth c.$11.35bn. The Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew participated and delivered a keynote — a clear example of senior church leadership showing up directly in modern ocean governance forums.

3) Faith-linked conservation delivery with measurable fieldwork (coral monitoring)

A Rocha (a faith-rooted conservation network) runs marine programmes in multiple countries. In Kenya, their coral work includes revisiting 600+ tagged corals across 70 permanent plots every six months (since 2020) to track growth and resilience/bleaching resistance — a very “real science” contribution, not just awareness-raising.

4) Church network tackling plastics at parish level (Philippines ecobricks)

In the Philippines, the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart have expanded ecobrick training into 15 parishes. Practically: each ecobrick uses a 1.5-litre plastic bottle packed with plastic waste, and the process can take up to a full day per brick — slow, but designed to keep plastics out of waterways and local environments. It’s not branded as “Blue Economy”, but it’s directly linked to coastal pollution pressures.

Concluding remarks

The impact of church involvement in ocean and coastal stewardship is hard to quantify. It doesn’t fit neatly into KPIs, investment metrics, or programme dashboards, and in many cases, it was never designed to. But that doesn’t make it irrelevant. Just as in other areas of life, Christianity has historically motivated people to organise, care, rebuild, and protect things larger than themselves. In coastal contexts, that motivation often translates into very practical forms of ocean stewardship.

The broader point isn’t that faith should replace science, policy, or innovation. It’s that, in my opinion, some of the worlds we tend to keep separate are worth exploring together rather than dismissing outright. Values, belief systems, and meaning still shape behaviour, especially in communities where the sea (and faith) is central to everyday life.

People will find meaning in different ways, and that’s not something to prescribe. But if Christianity continues to inspire care, responsibility, and long-term thinking, including for our oceans, then there’s value in acknowledging that, even as society moves further away from it. When it comes to ocean protection, the reality is simple: the more constructive motivations we can draw on, the better.

Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year!

OTI-H