Nic Fridenmaker, Director of Student Ministries at Eastbrook Church in Milwaukee, was standing behind the church when he noticed something in the water he “couldn’t quite describe.” It was an animal, “long dead as it floated in the shallows of the river just out the back door of my church,” he wrote for BioLogos. “I was saddened, but I wasn’t surprised to see it.” “Standing there,” he recalled, “a feeling rose up inside of me: compassion.” In the same essay, he observed that “God does something to our hearts when we respond to his leading.”
Eastbrook Church was created in the fall of 1979, when small group leaders from Whitefish Bay, Shorewood, and Milwaukee’s East Side set out to build a church where “all ethnic groups” could come to meet Christ.
Today, the church describes itself as non-denominational and as “a vibrant, diverse, multiethnic church.” Lincoln Creek runs behind the building, which “winds its way through nine miles of the city’s north side before emptying into the Milwaukee River,” Fridenmaker explained. The stretch near Eastbrook is “short” and “polluted.” “Garbage piles up on its banks,” he wrote, and “residential areas and businesses upstream dump all manner of materials into it.”
Photo Courtesy Eastbrook Church
Between 1960 and 1997, people reported more than 4,000 flooding problems along the creek. Beginning in late 1998, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District restored the area by replacing the creek’s concrete lining with a naturally flowing, winding waterway. The district says the waterway has “improved water quality and habitat for fish, birds and other wildlife,” and that the work reduces flood risk for more than 2,000 homes and businesses. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources also dug out about 140,000 cubic yards of contaminated sediment from the creek and a nearby channel of the Milwaukee River, finishing the first phase of excavation in 2012. The banks were then replanted with native trees, shrubs, and grasses.
Eastbrook’s care for that water began with John Osborne, a church elder, hydrogeologist, and trout fisherman. “I love to get up in the mountains, go into pristine rivers, and fish for trout,” Osborne said in a video interview with A Rocha USA. Initially reluctant to spend time on Milwaukee’s polluted urban waterways, Osborne changed his perspective through his friendship with the director of Milwaukee Riverkeeper, the advocacy group dedicated to the Milwaukee, Menomonee, and Kinnickinnic river watersheds.
On Earth Day in 2025, Eastbrook organized its own volunteer site for Milwaukee Riverkeeper’s annual cleanup. Over the years, volunteers have hauled out a flat-screen television, tires, grocery carts, and bowling balls, along with the bottles, bags, wrappers, and cans that collect along the banks.
“I think it’s important for churches to wade in the muck and mire of this world, and to take responsibility for it,” Osborne said. “To show that they care, to be leaders in environmental protection.” The cleanups are open to the whole community. “Everybody who comes to these cleanups,” Osborne observed, “whether they’re Christian or not, they’re some of the most humble people I know.”
Photo Courtesy Eastbrook Church
One cleanup Fridenmaker led drew “a whopping five volunteers,” and only two of them were from Eastbrook. “In just three hours, we managed to pull 75 contractor bags’ worth of junk out of Lincoln Creek,” he wrote. “I stood amazed at what God could accomplish in such little time with a few willing people.” The effort has since grown “from a handful of volunteers to a group so large that we were forced to find new spaces that needed caring and cleaning,” and in 2026, the congregation spent the Sunday before Earth Day praying for creation.
In April 2025, at Eastbrook’s 13th river cleanup, Osborne handed leadership of the effort to Fridenmaker. A year later, Eastbrook’s annual cleanup set a world record. Milwaukee Riverkeeper’s 31st annual Spring Cleanup brought out more than 2,000 volunteers on April 25, 2026. Guinness World Records counted 2,082 participants and more than 100,000 pounds of waste removed, earning the event the title of “most participants in a river clean-up (multiple locations).”
Photo Courtesy Eastbrook Church
In 2023, three Eastbrook members, including the senior pastor, met Brittany Michalski, A Rocha USA’s Director of Conservation, at the Creation at the Crossroads conference. The church joined the 2024-25 virtual cohort of Churches of Restoration, an A Rocha USA program that included more than 20 congregations in its pilot year. Participating churches take on practical creation care projects and work to weave creation care into worship and discipleship over 18 months.
Katherine Riebe, a member of Eastbrook’s creation care team, credited the program with giving the church a “framework to be more intentional” about caring for creation. Eastbrook accordingly set two goals: weaving creation care into its high school curriculum and strengthening communication to increase volunteer turnout for the Lincoln Creek cleanups.
Eastbrook’s annual report for 2024-25 carries Jeremiah 17:7-8 on its cover, including the line “They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream” (NIV). Inside, Senior Pastor Matt Erickson writes that “the first work was God’s work of creation and redemption which we enjoy.” Fridenmaker notes that “the main discipleship venue for students at Eastbrook is, believe it or not, the wilderness!” In summer 2025, that meant trips to Colorado and the Boundary Waters, and he reflected on a kind of noticing that “taught us all to see God in others, His creation, and in our inner lives.”
That communal awareness extends directly to the riverbanks, where Fridenmaker has watched strangers bond over the work. “I’ve seen folks who didn’t previously know each other caring for one another,” he wrote. “It is a beautiful reminder of how God uses his creation to bring people together.” For a church whose missions ministry exists to “equip and mobilize our church family to proclaim and embody the love of Jesus Christ in our city and world,” a creek just out the back door has become one more place to do both.
Photo Courtesy Eastbrook Church
Copyright
2026
Root and Vine