Eco Church
1. Introduction to Eco Church
A Rocha UK’s Eco Church programme equips churches in England and Wales to
care for creation. Eco Church is a learning community of churches of all shapes
and sizes open to all denominations. It provides a framework to support your
church and its leadership to take practical action on caring for God’s earth, through
the Eco Church survey. The survey covers five key areas of church life:
Worship and teaching
Buildings and energy
Land and nature
Community and global engagement
Lifestyle
A Rocha UK is a Christian charity working to protect and restore the natural world
and committed to equipping Christians and churches in the UK to care for the
environment. We are a member of Churches Together in England (CTE) and accept
the CTE's Statement of Belief.
2. Our progress so far in 2025:
In Spring 2025 we had a sermon series on caring for our creation with guest
speakers from Medway Council, and The Net Zero Adviser from the Diocese.
- We have started sharing Eco-tips with the congregation on a regular basis, in
services and in the church newsletter.
- We have worked with Glyn, our treasure, to establish the current position
regarding care of creation in regard to our buildings and energy use, which has
been very positive.
- We have been improving the use of the land around the church, with the addition
of planters and the planting of bulbs.
- The church uses eco-friendly products where we can.
- We use fair trade coffee and tea and recycle in all our buildings, and at all our
events.
- We have encouraged the preschool to be involved in caring for the land at the
Old Vicarage, the pre-school now has a bug hotel and are looking at other
initiatives.
- We have continued our support for Tearfund’s Creation Care India project.
3. What we can do as individuals:
We worship a God who loves the earth he created and calls us to care for it. While
it’s important to take action together as a church, we also have an individual
responsibility to take action in our daily lives so that we tread lightly on the earth,
and use our voices to speak up for nature. Here are some ways that you could
support the church in caring for creation in your own lives:
Support Tearfund (one of our Mission Partners) in their creation care project.
Subscribe to their updates, join them in prayer, contribute financially, participate in
writing to our MP when asked.
Think about your own lifestyle and what small changes you could make to improve
your own care of creation. One way to do this is to look at ‘Count us in’. This
website recommends 16 manageable steps you can take to reduce your own
carbon footprint and to challenge world leaders. Each step shows the impact and
the effort required. As you pledge to join, your personal CO2 saving is aggregated
with others around the world. It is an inspiring global drive to reduce our collective
footprint: https://www.count-us-in.org/en-gb/
Join with the church in thinking about the food we eat - we only provide fair trade
tea and coffee. Fairtrade food is produced and purchased in a way that ensures
farmers in developing countries receive a fair price for their produce. Fairtrade food
is often also produced in a more sustainable manner. Look for the mark when you
are shopping: https://www.fairtrade.org.uk/What-is-Fairtrade
Think about how we travel - Travel feels as though it brings freedom. But be
warned, for travel can also enslave us. We seem to spend much of our time sitting
in traffic jams or waiting for delayed planes. As well as looking at ‘greener’
transport, perhaps we should think about travelling a little less. Reducing car use
improves the air quality, saves money and benefits the nation’s health. Think about
walking more often and using public transport where possible.
Think about the principles of reduce, re-use and recycle and what small things you
could do to reduce how much you consume, re-use whatever you can and ensure
you recycle as much as possible. For example think about donating unwanted
items to charity shops, re-using plastic bottles and reducing how much water you
use. For more more ideas look at other resources, such as this one:
https://www.storyofstuff.org/