Faith-Based Investing & Shareholder Engagement

From the the Rev. Marcella Glass, MRTI Chair, and the Rev. Kerri Allen, Chair of MRTI's Environmental Justice and Climate Change Subcommittee:

Presbyterians have never been comfortable sitting on the sidelines. From the earliest days of the Reformed tradition, we have understood ourselves to be called to engage the world around us -- the messy, compromised, contested spaces where the decisions that shape human life actually get made. That calling has never been simple, and it has never been clean. But it has always been serious.

The question before the 227th General Assembly is not whether the church should respond to the climate crisis. That question is settled. God's creation is under measurable, documented strain, and the communities bearing the heaviest cost are, with grim predictability, the ones who have done the least to cause it. That asymmetry is not incidental. It is the moral center of this conversation. The question is what faithful response actually requires: what strategy, what honesty, and what staying power the church will bring to the work. We believe targeted engagement remains the answer, and we believe that conviction is not a failure of urgency, but an act of fidelity.

The fossil fuel industry continues to lobby against the regulations it sometimes publicly claims to support, and the human costs of its influence are not theoretical. They are visible in rising seas and mounting health burdens, in erratic harvests and communities forced from their land. The window for meaningful action is narrower than it was. And yet the answer to that urgency is not gesture. It is a strategy.

Amos walked into Bethel. Jeremiah wrote letters from and to Babylon. The prophets did not bear witness by retreating from the systems they condemned, and the Reformed tradition has always understood this: witness requires presence, that virtue is not located primarily in separation. It means staying in rooms you would rather leave, saying what people do not want to hear, and remaining accountable to those most harmed by the decisions made there. This is what the Committee on Mission Responsibility Through Investment (MRTI) has done for more than fifty years, and it is the work we have sought to do together in this season. When we file a shareholder resolution asking a company to account for the gap between its stated climate commitments and its actual capital expenditures, we are not performing institutional caution. We are bearing witness. We are saying, in the only language the institution is required to hear: we see what you are doing, and we will not look away.

That witness has consequences. MRTI has brought selective divestment recommendations to three of the last four General Assemblies, strengthened the criteria by which corporations are assessed, and recommended divestment where companies have failed to meet those standards. The communities on the front lines of fossil fuel-related degradation are not footnotes to this process. They are its guides. That is easier to say than to practice. We have tried, imperfectly and with ongoing correction, to enter this work as learners, to earn trust before claiming to represent it, and to carry those voices into rooms that were not built with them in mind.

The loudest declarations are not always the most faithful ones, and there is something worth naming here, even if it is uncomfortable. Some of the institutions most celebrated for divesting from fossil fuels still hold them at portfolio percentages comparable to our own investing agencies. We do not raise this to diminish anyone's commitments. We raise it because our tradition asks more of us than a good headline. It asks us to mean what we say, and to say what is actually true. Announcements are not the same as actions, and in a tradition that takes truth-telling seriously, that gap matters.

Fifty years of this work has a way of clarifying what faithfulness actually looks like in practice. It is not the same as certainty. It means being willing to ask, honestly and often, whether our continued presence in a given relationship is producing change or merely providing cover, and acting on what we find. It means holding ourselves to the same standard of accountability we bring to the corporations across the table from us. And it means acknowledging what is true even when it is inconvenient: that this work is not clean, that every choice in it carries costs, and that anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. As the 1976 PCUS document put it: no investment is neutral.

Urgency without discernment is just panic with good intentions. Our tradition has always insisted that the two belong together, that the same God who grieves the suffering of creation also holds us responsible for the quality of our response to it. We cannot simply feel the weight of the crisis and call that faithfulness. Is what we are doing actually working? Do the people most affected by our decisions have a real voice in them? Are we willing to change course when the evidence asks us to? God calls us to speak truth about what has gotten in the way: the narratives that have delayed action, the false promises that have substituted for it, and the temptation familiar to people of faith as much as anyone, to let the performance of conviction stand in for its practice.

None of this can be done alone, and this is not a moment that rewards going it alone. The forces aligned against long-horizon, justice-oriented thinking are formidable right now, and a single denomination acting unilaterally, however sincerely, is easier to dismiss than a coalition acting together. We have seen what coordinated action can do. We have also seen what a well-intentioned exit produces: a clean conscience, a diminished seat at the table, and a world that keeps burning either way.

What this moment calls for is deeper commitment to the partnerships we have built, and the courage to build new ones. MRTI works alongside more than fifty global interfaith and values-based investing partners. Those relationships are not administrative conveniences. They are the infrastructure of resistance, the difference between a denomination casting a symbolic vote alone and a coordinated coalition moving markets, shaping disclosure standards, and making it genuinely costly for corporations to ignore the gap between their stated values and their actual practices. When we act together, we are harder to dismiss, harder to outlast, and harder to co-opt — and that is exactly the point. Press releases do not replace partnerships. Exiting the spaces where decisions are made is a short-term decision, not a long-term strategy.

The transition to a just and renewable energy economy will not come through any single institution's portfolio decision. It will come, if it comes, through sustained, coordinated, accountable pressure from every direction at once: shareholders and policymakers, congregations and communities, the boardroom and the street. The church belongs in all of those places. It belongs in the room where financial decisions are made, not because that room is holy, but because the world is at stake. Amos did not leave Bethel because the welcome was cold. Jeremiah did not stop writing because no one seemed to be listening. Witness means showing up where power is exercised and refusing to leave until something changes.

We are still in the room. We intend to stay.