The Green Season

Caring for God's Good Earth: Vital Churches are Green Churches!

Is your church green? As summer nears its end, the cool, green grass and the fields filled with crops preparing for harvest remind us of our dependence on the earth to feed a hungry world. But we, and our children, also need clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and energy for light and heat and transportation.

"Going green" is a spiritual practice that praises and thanks God our Creator for God's beautiful and good creation.  Caring for the earth is a year-round spiritual practice, but it's especially appropriate for vital churches to "think green" during the Green Season of Ordinary Time. What a good time for our leadership to issue a pastoral letter on the environment, "And Indeed It Is Very Good…A Pastoral Letter on Faith and Environment: Living in Community with God's Creation."

In this spirit, we've assembled a number of resources, ideas and stories to inspire your congregation and support your efforts to go green.  There are many things you can do to make your church home more energy-efficient and gentler on the earth. We're going to share the things we're learning, because we're working on going green here at the Church House in Cleveland!

Our centerpiece resource is an excellent film, Kilowatt Ours , about the urgency of reducing our energy use, and how we can do it. The film is engaging, informative, and full of hope.

Thanks to the ChurchBuilding and Loan Fund , every resource center of the United Church of Christ has a copy of the DVD, and we urge you to share it with your members and churches in your area.  It will inspire them to action! Please let us know if you schedule a showing in your area, and how those present plan to follow up!

As we learn how to save energy at church, let's do the same at home, and the effect will be multiplied many times over.  Our children will learn, too, that we care about their future and the home that has been entrusted to us.

For this Green Season, we provide resources and links for worship, stewardship, justice work, church building design and upgrades, and more.  Watch these pages for more and more ideas and helpful information.

Lots of churches are already good stewards of the earth.  Tell us your story, what worked (and what didn't), and what you learned.  Let's celebrate our progress together, and learn from one another. Send your stories to Kate Huey.

And we'll share our stories with you: our UCC national staff is conserving energy, reducing waste, and learning to recycle, recycle, recycle.  We've committed to this effort in partnership with our own local congregations and churches across the United Church of Christ. 

At the Church House, we're going green: 

The Pilgrim Press has already put in place the following green measures:

• Our books are printed on post-consumer recycled paper, varying from 5%

• We have focused our print sources to the region in order to reduce delivery to 30% based on price and availability miles to our warehouse

• We reuse all packing materials--cardboard boxes, air pillows, shredded paper, and packing peanuts

And we have a book slated for publication (Spring 2009) that offers a practical plan for becoming green.

Timothy Staveteig, Publisher, Pilgrim Press

 "Green" Worship Ways Resources

Making Church Buildings Green

Churches Go Green

National Council of Churches Eco-Justice Programs

United States Green Building Council

Andrew White, Executive Director, Church Building and Loans