The Principle
I attend our local church and for some time have been thinking about trying to make it more sustainable – stewardship of the earth and all that. Well, while searching the net on an unrelated theme I came across the GreenFaith website. It is interfaith and based in the US, they have a number of resources that you can use to help make your congregation more sustainable.
You have to register with the site but you then can get access to their two main documents, the first one being “Repairing Eden”, subtitled” Sustainable Healthy Food Opportunities for Religious Institutions”. It covers why we should be doing this with our churches and talks about the different opportunities or things to try for houses of worship, religious schools and property operations. In the back are a series of “success stories” all from the US and some definitions of sustainable related terms. The book also introduces the main guts of the program – the Good Food Toolkit
The Good Food Toolkit can also be downloaded from GreenFaith for free. The idea is basically around conducting an evaluation of the church practices based around four headings –
- Eating Well – this allows you to evaluate your churches’ sustainable practices with food including during worship, refreshments after worship, beverages, meals and special events and sustainable products.
- Donating Well – reviewing sustainable practices around food given to others.
- Teaching Well – which is about evaluating how well the church is teaching church members the principles, practices and values around sustainable food.
- Acting Well – sets up a process for evaluating how well the church uses its physical assets to promote sustainable food related activities eg having a veggie garden for the members in the church grounds.
I added a fifth “well”- Talking Well – which is around consulting the church community and keeping them up to date on how the process is going.
The Good Food Toolkit provides a robust process and checklists to identify how the church is performing at the moment and then to identify and progress the way forward.
The Practice
Having become quite excited about the possibilities for my own church I talked to our rector the next Sunday night. We was interested so I gave him a copy of “Repairing Eden” and after a couple of weeks when He had read it I gave him a copy of “The Good Food Toolkit” to read as well.
The next part in the plan was that we got together for lunch and spent a couple of hours going through what we could do to be more sustainable and how we might achieve that aim. He was pretty much on board with the why!
The upshot of that meeting was for me to put together a document which took the materials from GreenFaith and applied them to the situation at our church. As a part of this and under the “Acting Well” heading I wanted to do a permaculture design for the church and this was met with considerable enthusiasm by the rector.
We had to give the program a name, something to refer to it by and while my preference was for “Sustaining the Church”, since it was a sustainability initiative, the rector’s preference was for “The Generous Church” so that is what it became. I developed “The Generous Church: The St Clair and Erskine Park Anglican Church Sustainability Initiative” document in draft and submitted it to the rector for comment. We had another meeting and he suggested a few minor changes which were subsequently incorporated into the document.
The idea of the document was to send around to other people in the church to get their ideas and gain support, the start of the process being to submit it to the Parish Council, which is made up of the Treasurer, Wardens, the Rector and other interested church members.
As well as discussing the document, we walked around the church grounds and discussed the possibilities for food production which would be laid out in the permaculture design. I had some ideas and we went through all of those and they were accepted as a good basis for the plan, and I was able to commence work on the permaculture design immediately.
After doing the initial zone and sector analysis we had another walk around meeting where I discussed what I had found and the modifications required to be made to the plan as a result of the new information. These changes were also accepted and I continued to work on the plan.
Just prior to completion of the permaculture design there was a parish council meeting, the rector sent a copy of the document to all members of the council for review and it was agreed that I would address the council the following week. I was able to do that and much discussion followed my presentation of the approach. Unfortunately the general feeling of the meeting was that while it was definitely a worthwhile project, there was considerable concern about the resources required to achieve it being available at the moment. To summarise – It’s a good idea, but not now. Thus I have completed and submitted the permaculture design but everything has been put on hold indefinitely.
If anything changes there will be a “Part 2” to this article.
