Activities

Take on a church allotment.

Take your church through a green audit. Contact Eco-Congregation to see how they can help.

Hold a six-monthly second-hand sale and donate the money raised to the church or A Rocha.

Form a ‘green group’ in your church to develop the church’s environmental commitment. If at all possible, include your vicar or one of the church leaders in the group. For help with this, contact Eco-Congregation

As a small/cell group take an evening to work out your combined ecological footprint. The World Wildlife Fund has a good calculator, found on their ‘one planet future’ page.

Over a period of time work together to reduce your combined footprint. See how much you can reduce it by. Carbon Rationing Action Groups can be a very helpful resource for this.

Run a campaign in your church for everyone to bring their own mugs each week, cutting down on the need to wash up (whilst of course still keeping some mugs available for visitors or those who forget).

Conduct a survey of local pubs and/or shops on how much they recycle. Take the results to your local Council and discuss how the recycling rate could be improved.

Green up your church notice-board (with, eg., car sharing groups, local bus timetables, contact details of local environmental groups, other green initiatives…).

Hold a mission weekend with the theme, ‘Poverty, Wealth and the Environment’.

Consider environmental issues as one of the criteria for choosing the church’s missionary partners.

Have an annual visit to a local nature reserve.

Get the youth group to conduct a survey of their schools to see how green they are. Look at what they could do in response. Eco-Schools is an excellent initiative that many schools are doing.

Hold a ‘green fair’ for your community/town/city, opening up your building for people to set up stall (eg. local council recycling or composting initiatives, local energy efficiency advisory, local Agenda 21 representative, local food stalls, Friends of the Earth and/or A Rocha group etc).

Hold a mission week-end and tie that in with other organisations such as TearFund and Christian Aid.

Hold an annual 'Pedal to Praise' Sunday, when everyone who is able is encouraged to cycle (or walk/scooter etc!) to the service/meeting. Where there are those with mobility difficulties, organise a ‘pick up and take home’ service.

Make contact with existing green groups in your area (such as a Transition Town or a local conservation group) and ask them how the Church could help with the work that they're doing and how you could get involved.