Eco Church

Eco Church is a partnership between A Rocha, Christian Aid, The Church of England, The Methodist Church and Tearfund.

Register with Eco Church to take the questionnaire to assess your church against five key areas; and then work towards Bronze, Silver and Gold awards by using their resources.

A Rocha and Eco Church

As we face the challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss, the church should be both a prophetic voice and a beacon of hope. However, if we are to fulfil this calling, we need to be putting our own house in order and be seen to be doing so. Thankfully, we don’t have to start from scratch: A Rocha’s Eco Church scheme shows the way to go. A Rocha, originally founded as a Christian conservation charity, is now engaged with both of the above challenges. The first step is to register your church, then self-assess against an online questionnaire in five topics:

  • Worship and teaching

  • Buildings

  • Land

  • Community and global engagement

  • Lifestyle

Some of the questions may be easily answered; others will challenge churches and individuals to think more deeply and act more radically in areas of their life that they may not have realised contribute to their environmental footprint. The responses to the questions generate scores that may earn the church an award: Bronze, Silver or even Gold. A church has to meet criteria for all 5 categories to earn an award. More importantly, the questionnaire points the way to your achieving the next level of award. The Eco Church website also has lots of helpful resources to help you progress your Eco Church journey.

Over 4,500 churches in England & Wales have registered with the scheme.

Why become an Eco Church?

  • Caring for God’s earth is (or should be) part of our mission – our outreach to the individuals and communities around us.

  • Despite the coronavirus crisis, many people – especially young people – are talking about the environmental challenges we’re facing, giving us an open door to tell our eco story.

  • You’ll be part of a community of churches standing together and encouraging one another to demonstrate that the gospel is good news for God’s earth.

Want to know more? Contact us and we’ll put you in touch with your local A Rocha volunteer speaker.

You can sign-up to receive the regular Eco Church newsletter produced by A Rocha - Eco Church Newsletter.

St Paul’s journey to Silver Award

Quite a long time ago, back in the early 2000s a group of us at St Paul’s formed a Sustainability group and fretted a bit about our energy use. We changed quite a lot of the lightbulbs and we wrote articles encouraging environmental sustainability for our Church magazine. So, when the congregation made the decision to extend our Church buildings we became very involved in identifying sustainable options.

We suggested as many changes as we could in the design of the buildings; we also recommended that the construction processes use recycled materials for hard core and did not demolish existing buildings. We also included a variety of environmental initiatives, for example:

  • Where we could we used as much natural light as possible;

  • We installed solar panels on the hall and extension roofs;

  • We insulated all that we could particularly in the new build sections of the building and also in the original church building.

The building work was carried out during 2009-10. We applied to A Rocha for the Eco Church award soon after it was set up in 2016. We immediately scored highly on our church buildings but there was much more to do! The Eco Church award is a box-ticking process so we could see in which areas we needed to improve. Of the five areas covered, our score on Worship and Teaching was particularly low although we had all contributed prayers focussing on the environment. There was very little clergy input at the time so we organised a guest speaker from A Rocha and also a sermon by a local environmental enthusiast from another church.

  • We planted a wildflower garden and set up a composting system and continued to support A Rocha, Tearfund and Land for Life in Argentina (a Christian charity that fights deforestation).

  • We also published more articles on sustainable living to improve our score on Lifestyle. Eventually we achieved our Bronze award in 2017.

  • Having realised that our scores on the Eco Church award were edging towards Silver in most areas we made an effort to identify what we needed to change to bring the scores up to the Silver mark.

  • We invited more guest speakers to speak on sustainable living and we continued to pray for creation care. We’ve done two Eco/Sustainability services and also a Seminar on living sustainably.

  • We changed our energy supplier to a renewable option and we confirmed that our church used recycled toilet paper and environmentally friendly cleaning products.

  • We planted perennial insect friendly plants where our wildflower meadow had been as this had become an unsustainable option. We are still composting and we still support A Rocha, Tearfund and other environmental charities.

  • We’ve been involved in Sustainable St Albans along with many other faith groups and have organised several events during St Albans Sustainability Festivals in recent years.

  • We try to apply LOAF principles (Local, Organic, Animal friendly, Fairly traded) to our catering and to encourage our members to apply these principles in their own lives.

We could see that more action was needed in particular in the personal lifestyles of church members – a different type of change to achieve compared to changes to the buildings or use of our land. So, for example, we’ve encouraged church members to carry out their own carbon foot-printing and to use of Fairtrade products through a video shown during Fairtrade Fortnight.

Finally we edged past the score required for a Silver award, which we received in October 2021.

We have been inspired by publications from A Rocha such as L is for Lifestyle and Saying Yes to Life by Ruth Valerio, and Bible studies by the John Ray Institute and Operation Noah which have been used by our small groups. We have a Creation Care emailing list with about 25 recipients whom we keep informed both about what we’re doing as a church and about wider issues.

Next up: we’ll see whether we can achieve the Gold award, which (at the time of writing) there are only 24 churches in England and Wales. It will be a challenge, especially as we have little land, but we’ll do as much as we possibly can to meet the criteria in all five areas. We are delighted that our new (job-sharing) vicars are very supportive of caring for God’s creation and know they’ll encourage us as we press on towards Gold.

St Paul’s Church, St Albans

Steps towards Net-Zero

Some important steps forward have been made in St Albans Diocese, which will affect all their churches and have an influence on future planning, when in October 2020, two important environmental motions were passed at the Diocesan synod:

Motion 1: “That the Synod of St Albans Deanery, following the motion passed by General Synod in February 2020, which recognises that the global climate emergency is a crisis for God’s creation and a fundamental injustice and which calls on all parts of the Church of England, including dioceses and parishes, to work towards net zero emissions, request the Diocese of St Albans to register with A Rocha UK for the Eco-Diocese Programme and to seek to achieve a bronze award by end of 2022 and to have regular updates to synod to report on progress towards that goal.”

Motion 2: “That this Synod request the General Synod to debate a motion in the following terms: ‘That this Synod, following the motion passed by this Synod in February 2020, which recognises that the global climate emergency is a crisis for God’s creation and a fundamental injustice and which calls on all parts of the Church of England, including dioceses and parishes, to work towards net zero emissions, request that every diocese register with A Rocha UK for the Eco-Diocese Programme.’ ”.

Rachel Johnston, St Albans Diocesan Environment Officer, reports this is a very welcome step forward for the Diocese.  By registering for the programme, the Diocese will commit to work towards Bronze Eco church award level across its own operations in the areas of buildings and land, and it will encourage and support parishes to begin working on the Eco Church scheme, with an increased range of resources to support them in becoming more sustainable.  The inclusion of the requirement for regular reporting and a deadline of 2022 is intended to ensure that work will begin immediately and be monitored so that progress will be made.

By requesting that General synod debate a motion requesting every diocese to register as an Eco Diocese, it is hoped that this will encourage other Dioceses to make the commitment to urgent action to meet the Church of England’s net zero target. 

The Eco church scheme, devised by the Christian charity A Rocha, and its extension, Eco Diocese is ideal as a mechanism for inspiring progress towards a more sustainable future that will incorporate a net zero target. It incorporates an evaluative process, partly to provide a measure of progress, but also to give encouragement, celebrating strengths as well as highlighting areas for action, building confidence and drawing churches and their communities together.

Over 3,000 churches nationally have now registered to work towards an Eco Church award, an online self-evaluation tool that allows church congregations to evaluate their current level of sustainability across the whole of their church life, and to devise future plans for improvement. 

This is an important element of their Christian witness to their local community.

As a first step, churches can register free of charge and start the process of completing the questionnaires covering five main areas: Worship and teaching, Management of Church Buildings, Management of Church Land, Community and Global Engagement and Lifestyle.  The questions provide a ready-made action plan, and the survey answers can be saved and revisited as the church community progresses towards an award. 

Next Steps

Reducing your church’s carbon footprint is an important part of working towards an Eco church award.  If you would like to know more, this short document ‘The practical path to net zero carbon for churches’ is essential reading. Download it here.

You can discover more about the ways in which other churches are working towards net zero from the recordings from the Eco Church conference held in St Albans Diocese in October 2020 (below).

Eco Church Conference

Two Eco Church Award holding churches from St Albans were invited to take part in the 2020 conference. 

St Luke’s Church, St Albans was invited to join a panel of award-winning Eco Churches in a workshop exploring the experience of working towards an award, and the ways in which each church community had found new opportunities to improve their sustainability and build on their strengths.  The sustainability team at St Luke’s developed the Hope in Action website as part of their community engagement.

St Paul’s Church, St Albans was one of the first churches to achieve a Bronze Award and since achieved Silver Award. As well as supporting the conference and produce a video of their beautiful biodiverse garden, two members of their sustainability team have produced this blog explaining their journey and created a leaflet to download here.

View all the conference recordings on the St Albans Diocesan website or on the Eco Church 2020 conference Facebook page.

Resources

Eco Church have built up an extensive set of resources covering each of the five topics, supporting churches as they work towards their awards.

If you teach, preach or lead worship, A Rocha has a dedicated service for you. ‘At Your Service’ has been designed for Christian groups who want to explore the biblical basis of caring for God’s earth. You’ll find sermon ideas, Bible studies, prayers, songs, children’s activities and much, much more.