Parish News

I am delighted to announce that, in February, St Mary’s Church achieved the Bronze Eco Church award. We have been working hard on environmental issues over the last 18 months, including collaborating on the Climate Change Action Day at St Thomas’ which had the aim of bringing the Community together to inspire action.

The Eco Church scheme is run by A Rocha, a global Christian environmental organisation. The scheme provides a framework to support practical action on caring for God’s earth.

There are 5 main aspects:

• Worship and teaching
• Buildings and energy
• Land and nature
• Community and global engagement
• Lifestyle

We have looked to incorporate environmental awareness into worship and teaching, holding several outdoor services and events such as a wellness session on Inner Breath Technique and wreath making. We also had a fantastic foraging walk which opened our eyes to the amazing plants in the local woodland, and a get together to tidy and enhance the churchyard.

Finding ways to reduce our energy use is a challenge but we have started by changing over to LED bulbs in St Mary’s and we now have a more efficient boiler. The new narthex has meant that we can focus the heat more efficiently on the areas required, rather than the whole space.

The land and nature aspect of the programme has meant a more concerted look at the way we plant and manage the churchyard to encourage insects, animals, bats and bird life. We endeavour to avoid the use of chemicals and use peat free compost. St Mary’s School Gardening Club has helped by installing bug hotels around the churchyard. To help the hedgehogs who live behind the church we have provided a hedgehog house.

Our community engagement has focused on making the church more accessible to the community – by opening the church daily to visitors and also putting on events such as concerts and the Pop-up Tea and Cake sessions. The recent building work, with the narthex, toilet and kitchen, means that we now have a space that can be rented for community meetings and events. A Food Bank collection point has been started; this links with the one in Barley Chapel. Looking further afield, being delighted to have a toilet in church we have donated to the charity called Toilet Twinning, this will help to develop facilities in a village in Zimbabwe and we also now give a regular donation to WaterAid.

Moving on to lifestyles we have encouraged people to consider their own impact by calculating their carbon footprint using the WWF footprint calculator tool (footprint.wwf.org.uk). We are trying to improve recycling at church and reduce the use of plastic. So far we have reduced the use of plastic cups and our flower displays no longer involve floral foam as even the more environmentally friendly versions are not fully biodegradable. Most of the foliage and some of the flowers that we use are grown locally. If flowers are bought we try to buy them with without plastic wrapping.

Going forward we are working on:

• Making the churchyard more environmentally friendly;
• Reducing our energy consumption – which is a real challenge. The age of the church building limits the options but we will continue to look for solutions that reduce our carbon footprint. In addition to extending the work we are already doing we will need to look in depth at our energy consumption and develop a plan for moving towards net zero. This is in line with the Church of England target of net zero by 2030;
• Collaborating with the work of the Parish Council providing helpful information about recycling and setting up collection points for recycling items such as blister packs, light bulbs and ink cartridges;
• Reviewing cleaning products to look at purchase of eco-friendly products and reduce packaging.

Of course we are delighted to achieve a Bronze Award but now we want to push on towards Silver. It will be a challenge but all the small steps on the way will be worthwhile.