Could St John’s become an Eco-church ?
As part of looking at the Mission of St John’s in a world which is feeling the impact of climate change, the Mission Group, who have met several times now, felt that we need to learn more and have a more planned approach to minimising our effect on the environment.
If we learn more about how people here and throughout the world, are suffering now from flooding and drought as a result of the climate changing, it will spur us on to take more action to reduce our carbon emissions and so help to slow down and hopefully reverse the increase in temperature.
Also, learning more about environmental changes we can make and carrying them out, will enable the plants and animals we live alongside, to thrive again, as well as making our green spaces around the church and in our own gardens, beautiful and full of life.
We have taken some steps in the past; one of which was changing our lights in the church to LED bulbs and more recently changing our energy supplier to Octopus, a company that derives its energy from renewable sources.
To go further we need to have some way of assessing where we are up to now and looking at the next steps.
A Rocha UK (ARUK) is a Christian charity working for the protection and restoration of the natural world and is committed to equipping Christians and churches in the UK to care for the environment.
They have put together a survey document for churches. St John’s has now been registered to use this and you can look at it under Church Groups/Eco church, on the St John’s website.
A small group is now in the process of gathering information to look at what we do or have done, and seeing what our next steps might be. We will report back on progress in the next newsletter.
Helen Trigg
Please click here to look at the Eco Church Survey questions:
Eco-Church-Survey-v2-January-2018
